Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

What has Linguistics done for Philosophy?

Author(s): Rulon Wells
Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 59, No. 23, American Philosophical Association
Eastern Division Symposium Papers To be Presented at the Fifty-Ninth Annual Meeting,
New York City, December 27-29, 1962 (Nov. 8, 1962), pp. 697-708
Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2023151
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VOLUME LIX, No. 23 NOvEMBER 8, 1962

THE JOuRNAL OF PHIL

WHAT HAS LINGUISTICS DONE FOR PHILOSOPHY?*

OF the various ways in which empirical linguistics might be

interesting to a philosopher, I shall concentrate on one: the
interest that we may call practical, or instrumental. Would the
study of various particular languages or of the principles of
linguistics in general tend to make one a better philosopher?
The hypothesis that differences in language cause differences in
outlook has become known as "the Whorfian hypothesis," because
of its most recent prominent advocate, but a more descriptive label
would be 'linguistic relativism'. If relativism says that there are
human beings A and B such that what seems good (or so) to A
does not seem good (or so) to B, then it is not itself a doctrine
about values, but a doctrine about facts. And one may attempt to
explain the differences between how things seem to A and how they
seem to B, for instance, by contrasting "nurture" (upbringing,
culture) with "nature." A hypothesis that such-and-such facts of
relativism can be empirically explained by differences in language
may be called "linguistic relativism."
The main finding of linguistics with regard to linguistic rela-
tivism is that it itself is not an empirical proposition, unless certain
deviations from the common understanding of it are made. Some
linguists have themselves been deceived by language; I consider
that this deception proved to be Whorf 's greatest single stumbling
block. Much clarification is needed concerning (1) what a lan-
guage is, and (2) how it can function as a cause.
Consider the simple proposition that different languages ex-
press different world views. What would count as empirical evi-
dence for it? Most of those who have put forward this proposi-
tion have construed it not as a synthetic, contingent, F-true
proposition, but as a stipulation. Not that they have been clear
about its status, but that their manner of defending it shows how
they construe it.
Whichever way the proposition has been construed-as a stipu-
lation or as an empirically testable hypothesis-it has often been
subjected to further elaboration. When Whorf spoke of Standard
* To be presented in a symposium on "The Relevance of Linguistics to
Philosophy" at the fifty-ninth annual meeting of the American Philosophical
Association, December 29, 1962.
? Copyright 1962 by Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
697

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698 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Average European, he meant to distinguish major from minor

language differences and to say that (for instance) the difference
between present-day English and Homeric Greek is minor compared
with the difference between either of them and present-day Hopi
or Nootka. No one has made any systematic attempt to develop
this distinction; but it is obvious that it must have profound effects
on the original proposition, for though it makes it more plausible,
it at the same time makes it much harder to test in any clear-cut
way.
Well, supposing that not all language differences are equally
important, which are the important ones? Whorf and others have
suggested an answer. A language may be thought of as made up of
features of lexicon and features of grammar; the lexical features
are more superficial, the grammatical features more fundamental.
Basically there are two reasons behind this suggestion: (1) it can
claim some support from common sense; (2) if the more superficial
be identified with the more easily changeable, then the suggestion
turns into the empirical proposition, fairly well confirmed, that-
broadly speaking-lexical features change more quickly and hence
more easily than grammatical features.
To recognize changeability is also to recognize persistence: if a
language can change, it must be the same language before and after
change. So if we allow ourselves to say that a language changes
in minor respects, but yet remains essentially the same, over some
period of time, then we commit ourselves to certain identity con-
ditions for languages. Far too little work has been done on giving
a precise account of these. In effect, both of the two conceptions
of language distinguished by Neil Wilson (The Concept of Lan-
guage) have been employed, and yet not clearly distinguished from
each other.

Having touched in a brief and preliminary way on identity

conditions, let us turn for a bit to the other topic: language as
involved in causal relations. No sooner do we go deeply into this
topic than an ambiguity comes to light, flushed from cover. I
would say that it is this ambiguity more than any other that is
responsible for the confusions of linguistic relativism. 'Grammar'
has been understood in two ways, which may be called the formal
and the material. Whorf knew this, but he wasn't aware that
equivocation between them was the chief source of the piquancy
of linguistic relativism.
Understood formally, the grammar of a language is abstradted
from the meanings of the expressions whose allowed combinations
make up the grammar. That this abstraction is possible and sci-

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 LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOP PY 699

entifically instructive-directly contrary to Hegel's disparagement

of "formalism"-has been duly appreciated only in the twentieth
century.
But if the soul or essence of a language is its grammar in this
sense, then it is patent that a language can have no great influence
on thought or on outlook or on the way things appear to a speaker
of that language. English grammar insists on a distinction be-
tween singular and plural; but, formally, it is no part of the
grammar that the so-called singular signifies (roughly) one thing
and the so-called plural more than one thing. It could be just
the reverse; or the "singular" could signify something quite differ-
ent, such as that the object denoted was material rather than im-
material, or that it was a personal possession of the speaker's. The
point is quite simple: since formal grammar is abstracted from
meaning, the same grammatical system can be given more than one
meaning, and therefore does not necessitate its users to confer any
one of these alternative meanings. Nor can it incline its speakers
without necessitating them, for all possible interpretations of it are
equally possible, possibility not admitting of degrees; and so if the
users have more of a liking for one interpretation than for an-
other, the cause of this preference must lie in the interpretation of
the grammar, and not in the grammar.
But grammar may also be understood in a material way, rather
like the material sense in which Wittgenstein and ordinary-lan-
guage philosophy speak of "logic." It is part of material grammar
that speakers of English are forced to distinguish between singular
situations and plural ones (grammatical number) or between situa-
tions which, described with reference to the time of speaking, are
past, present, or future (grammatical tense). But look at this force
more closely. Whereas with formal grammar causal influence was
out of the question, with material grammar it is never in question,
because it is assured by tautology. Who must distinguish singular
from plural? The speaker of English. And if he does not? Then
he is a speaker of English no longer. He may still be speaking
broken English or bad English, but not English; for these are
modifications of English, not varieties of it.
Although an English speaker is forced to distinguish singular
from plural, a man is not forced to be an English speaker. There
is no true and proper force where it is physically possible to dis-
obey, and the only "penalty" for disobeying is the disobedience
itself.
A rejoinder may be put forward. It may be argued that some
men are forced to be English speakers. Men are forced, or at least
there is pressure on them, to be speakers of some language or

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700 THIIE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

other; anid uinder the social conditions that prevail now and in all
of recorded history, most men have no option concerning which
particular language they will use, because they have none concern-
ing which language they will learn. Most men are monolinguals.
For those monolinguals whose language happens to be English, a
chain of pressures does force them to follow English grammar, there
being genuine penalties if they refuse.
A genuine insight in the above argument is spoiled by an
equivocation which prevents it from bearing on the question at
issue. This equivocation concerns identity conditions for lan-
guages.
It is a commonplace that languages change; I assumed this
above, without discussing what it is that makes a language the
same before and after the change. Doubtless every change is
describable, by describing the state of the language before the
change and the state of the same language after it. Next, in a
manner familiar to philosophers, we made describe every change in
state as a succession of states. In effect we are thereby replacing
a substance conception of language by an event conception. In
keeping with this conceptual shift we may propose a terminological
shift: let us apply the term 'language' to what would ordinarily
be called states of a language, and what would ordinarily be called
a language let us commence calling a 'language-group'.
The purpose of this terminological shift is to resolve a logical
contradiction in ordinary usage. Ordinary usage supplies for the
word 'language' a denotation and a connotation; and though each
of these is vague, yet each is precise enough-and in such a way-
as to be incompatible with the other. In ordinary usage, 'language'
would be used in such a way that, for example, Chaucer and I
speak the same language, namely English. But also, according to
ordinary usage, anyone who speaks the same language as A will
be understood by A; hence, if Chaucer speaks my language I will
understand him, and if I speak his he will understand me. My
testimony is one-sided, but I can testify for my own part that
in reading Chaucer I don't understand him, that is, not without
special study of the same sort as I must give to a foreign language;
and there is reason to think that my difficulties would be increased
if, instead of reading his written words, I were to hear his speech.
In short, though Chaucer speaks my language, viz. English, yet
when he speaks I don't understand him.
A logical conflict can be resolved in two ways. In the present
case we can either say that not both Chaucer and I speak English,
or else give up the entailment that speaking the same language en-
tails mutual understanding. Linguists have not squarely faced the

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 LINGUISTICS AND PIILOSOPIIY 701

dilemma; to distinguish Middle English from Modern or Recent

English evades the decision rather than makes it, for it does not
tell us whether Middle English is English, nor whether Recent
English is English. The most that it says, and vaguely, is that
Middle English is in a way the same as Recent English and in a
way different from it. My terminological proposal will enable us
to say, precisely, that Middle English is in the same language-group
as Recent English, but is not the same language. It retains the
ordinary connotation of 'language', and so gives up the ordinary
denotation. The demands of logic would be equally well met by the
opposite procedure. However, if we followed the opposite pro-
cedure, we should still have to find a convenient term that would
retain the ordinary connotation of 'language'. 'Language-state'
wouldn 't quite do, because it suggests a chronological ordering
from which the linguist wishes to be freed.
The fundamental fact here that needs to be properly appreci-
ated is the presence of a nontransitive relation. The language of A
and the language of B may be empirically indistinguishable, and
yet not the same; for sameness (identity) is a transitive relation,
and indistinguishability is not. The first important example of
such a nontransitive relation to some to scientific notice was per-
ceptual indistinguishability, which underlies the psychological phe-
nomenon of the just-noticeable difference; the second was the re-
semblance of offspring to parent, which in Darwinian theory was
distributed by random variation and subsequently acted on by
various selective processes. A third example, not intrinsically as
important as these two but important as a paradigm, was the
resemblance of copy to original in the field of weights and meas-
ures, noticed by Flinders Petrie in some Egyptian specimens and
incisively discussed by Peirce (1.209).
Now language being social, and being transmitted by teaching
and learning, and language learning being based on imitation of
the observed, the very nature of language leaves open the possi-
bility of observable change. It cannot be deduced from these con-
ditions that every language will change; it is logically possible
that successive unobservable changes will cancel each other out.
But there is no mechanism in these conditions that will prevent
changes from taking place, provided they are sufficiently spread
out in time so that no two successive generations are aware of
change.
Precisely parallel to change in time is synchronic diversity in
space. And besides indiscernibility there is another relation, in
fact a whole family of relations, likewise intransitive and likewise
ubiquitous in language, which we may collectively call "sufficient

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702 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

similarity." Understanding of speech is a matter of degree; A

may understanid B "perfectly" (i.e., B's language is not observably
different from A's), or fairly well, or with difficulty, and so on;
variations in degree of understanding may be used as an empirical
criterion of degree of similarity between A's language and B's. A
question to which linguistics is even now in a position to give a
partial answer is whether similarity of languages can be decomposed
into dimensions, or independent variables; but to go into this
would take us away from our set topic. What is important for the
topic at hand is that 'language' in its ordinary usage, even the
usage of linguists, denotes what I have proposed to call a language-
group; that a language-group is held together by a chain of simi-
larities; that if we impose the further condition that every member
language of a language-group have at least one speaker (in other
words, if merely possible languages be excluded), then the propo-
sition that all the actual languages of the world belong to one
single language-group has the weight of present-day evidence
against it; and (most relevant and central of all) that if linguistic
relativism be restated in terms of language-groups (a speaker 's
language-group is the cause, or an important contributory cause,
of his world view), then it is either untestable or false.
The reason why the consequence here is disjunctive is that the
hypothesis is still not clear enough. The term 'language' has been
cleared up somewhat, but the term 'cause' demands attention.
Some things have been said a propos of its synonyms 'force' and
'pressure', but more is needed.
If languages are to be grouped into language-groups, the like
might well be done for world views also. Now if the defining
property of a language-group is that the member languages have
such-and-such grammatical features and if grammar is understood
materially, then the correlation of a grammar and a world view is
a priori, and not empirical or factual, in character. Let us then
try to understand cause in some way that is not a correlation
guaranteed a priori. The result would be that, since the correlation
of language (taken materially) and world view remains guaranteed
a priori, it cannot be causal. Construed in such a way, linguistic
relativism would be false a priori.
It becomes clear that to get a proposition that is not true or
false a priori, we must retreat from the material to the formal
conception of grammar. It may be that, as a matter of contingent
fact, there is a correlation between speakers of languages with such-
and-such a formal grammar and people who view the world with
such-and-such a world view. In case this should be so-some
evidence has been cited to support it, but not very much-for a

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 LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY 703

group of speakers over some extended period of time, then the

conditions would be met for speaking of this world view as a
feature of the culture of these people; and for any given one of
these people, excepting the first generation, it would be as appropri-
ate to cite the culture in which he was brought up as the language
that he was taught, when offering a causal explanation of why he
held the world view that he did. Any sense in which language
could be called a cause of a world view would be so weak that it
would fail to distinguish language from other sets of non-innate
habits; and in any sense strong enough to (1) distinguish lanauage
from nonlinguistic culture, (2) characterize language formally, not
materially, and (3) ascribe the causation not to any one language
but to some language-group extended in time, it would be false to
call a language-group a cause of a world view or of a world-view-
group.
However, once again the falsity is a priori. A set of properties
has been assembled that suffers from logical incompatibility. The
incompatibility can be put in various ways, but to my mind one of
the clearest ways is this: It is logically impossible for a pattern
of behavior (for example, the giving of a certain interpretation to
a certain formal grammar) to be (a) non-innate, (b) present over
a number of generations, and (c) neither cultural nor a matter of
chance.
I conclude that linguistic relativism is an illusion. It looks like
an empirical proposition, but every attempt to be more precise
either throws it into a priori status or else deprives it of supporting
evidence. Such is, in effect, what linguistics has found.
This negative verdict is not my last word. But before going on
to a very important positive point, let me make a comment about
Whorf 's approach.
'Cause' is an old-fashioned word, and in one of his most careful
formulations' he retreats from claims of causation to 'relation',
'close integration', 'connection', 'concatenation'. This retreat in
claim is an advance in insight, because it gives up the commitment
-to wlich, e says in his opening paragraph, "there will probably
be general assent"-that "an accepted pattern of using words is
often prior to certain lines of thinking and forms of behavior."
If 'priority' here is meant temporally, this commitment would teach
that first there was language, then thinking and behavior. I am
deliberately pointing up the mythical, absurd character of the
commitment becauise it loudly strikes a note that is usually muffled

1 "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language," in

B. L. Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, edited by John B. Carroll
(Cambridge, Mass,; Technology Press of M.I.T., 1956).

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704 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

in, but never wholly absent from, Whorf's thought. Again and
again his account presupposes a missing first chapter, which tells
how things were "in the beginning." His old-fashioned notion of
cause is not clearly mythical, but neither is it clearly divested of
mythical features. And his retreat from cause to connection, etc.
is an advance in insight but scarcely in precision.
It is this same paper that introduces the concept of Standard
Average European, and which, thereby, invokes the distinction be-
tween major and minor features of languages. Judged by the
work it does, this is strikingly like Aristotle's distinction between
essential and accidental features of a substance, just as Whorf's
languages are like Aristotle's substances. The metaphor of a lan-
guage as an organism is taken seriously, in that it changes and
survives change-for the replacement of change in state by succes-
sion of states was my analysis, not Whorf 's. Also it is like an
organism in that it acts, it is a cause. On the other hand, a
language is like an organic species in that it is embodied in suc-
cessive generations. On the crucial question Whorf is silent. For
Aristotle, the offspring of an X is (at least for the most part) an
X; the specific identity of offspring with parent is transitive;
in other words species are fixed, and in the last analysis it is this
principle alone that justifies the essence-accident distinction. But
whether with respect to languages Whorf is an Aristotelian or a
Darwinian he does not say; so he adopts the essence-accident dis-
tinction without its rationale. Of course he knows that languages
change, but the question is whether they change in their essential
features. For Aristotle "change of essence" is the same thing,
though badly described, as simple perishing.
The upshot is that, in his underlying conception of languages,
Whorf, so far as he is out of the myths of Hesiod, is in the meta-
physic of Aristotle. And in one who hoped that linguistics would
liberate us from "a type of syntax . . . rigidified and intensified by
Aristotle," this gives me a sense of poignant irony. There is no
question that Wihorf has made a valuable contribution; it is only
a question of defining it. Perhaps he would bear comparison
with Francis Bacon, who contributed no truth or law to the stock
of knowledge, and yet somehow did something that for two and a
half centuries was acknowledged as a stimulus.
In one way Whorf stands above Bacon. I don't recall anything
in Bacon of which we would judge that there was something he
was trying to say but was unable to say it clearly. But that is
exactly my judgment of Whorf. In my opinion it was nothing
but a red herring for him to mention language as a cause of a world
view. What really matters to him is (1) that wQrld views differ;

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 LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY 705

(2) that certain of these differences are, in empirical fact, ex-

plained by differences in learning, including those learnings that
we call habits and especially those habits that we call traits of
culture; and (3) that the possibility of different world views cannot
be known by observation of any one world view and-for most
people-will not be known without actual acquaintance with other
world views. Then linguistics enters the picture with the propo-
sition (4) that one good way of learning other world views is to
learn other languages. Proposition 4 can be supported without any
commitment concerning the relation, internal or external, between
a language and a world view. So it was unwise to bring in the
commitment, unless for its own sake.
A program of research confronts the linguist, centering around
the concept of language-group. The question-type 'When are lan-
guage A and language B the same language?' would be split up
into two types, according as the identity is a priori necessary or
factual; the a priori part would remain without need of restate-
ment, but the factual part would be restated as 'When do language
A and language B belong to the same language-group?' In gen-
eral, excepting various special cases, the answers to questions of
this question-type would be empirical (F-true or F-false) propo-
sitions. The question about identity conditions of languages is
restated as a question about comembership in a language-group.
And no doubt it will prove heuristically fruitful to pursue the study
ol language-groups concomitantly with the study of world-view-
groups, in order that the two studies may yield classifications that
match each other as closely as possible. In these joint studies
linguistic relativism, defined as a causal hypothesis, will have
dropped out of sight, but the relativism proper will remain.
Something like this program of research has been envisioned,
more or less clearly, for a century and a half; Whorf's positive
contribution is to have given it new impetus by showing with care-
ful concrete examples how to do it. This contribution was made in
spite of, not with the help of, his conceptual framework. But, in
addition, he made a positive contribution to the conceptual frame-
work itself. In effect, he said something which (following the
fashion of the day) I may enunciate as a theorem:

Whorf 's Theorem. Every difference between languages, except-

ing differences in formal grammar, may be described as a difference
in selection.

This theorema provides a canonical form for description of lan-

guage differences. Selection is defined in terms of conflation, and
conflation is the concept that Whorf has contributed.

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 706 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

A conflation of two languages is like a photographic montage

got by superimposing one negative on another and printing the
composite product of both, or by printing a "double exposure."
Instead of regarding the double exposure as putting something in,
one can take the view that the single exposure leaves something out.
Let one exposure photograph a sheet with equally spaced vertical
lines, and other exposure a sheet of horizontal lines spaced the same
distance; the print of the double exposure will show a grid of
squares. One of the two ingredient single exposures left out the
horizontal lines and selected the verticals; the other did the op-
posite. The double exposure conflates the two selections.
To illustrate how a language selects, let us consider the follow-
ing extremely simple model. Language A has a vocabulary of
three simple predicates: 'reddish', 'yellowish', and 'bluish'; lan-
guage B has a vocabulary of two: 'red' and 'blue'. Each of these
five predicates is to mean approximately the same as the same-
sounding words in English, subject to the stipulation that in each
vocabulary the predicates denote properties that are mutually ex-
clusive, and jointly exhaustive of the reflected-light spectrum.
There is a language C, describable as the conflation of A and B,
which can be formed from A by adding the vocabulary of B or
from B by adding the vocabulary of A.
Let A, B, and their conflation C have conjunctive and disjunc-
tive predicates as well as simple ones. Consider those predicates in
C that are conjuncts of one simple predicate from A and one from
B. The meanings of the five simple predicates are to be such
that, of the six mechanically possible conjunctive predicates, two-
'red and bluish' and 'blue and reddish'-do not denote properties;
the other four are (1) 'red and reddish', (2) 'red and yellowish',
(3) 'blue and yellowish', and (4) 'blue and bluish'.
There are six binary disjunctions of (1) to (4). Three-(1-2),
(2-3), and (3-4)-are "continuous" (meaning that they denote
properties corresponding to continuous parts of the spectrum), and
the other three-(1-3), (1-4), and (2-4)-are discontinuous. Of
the ternary disjunctions, two-(1-2--3) and (2-3-4)-are continu-
ous and the other two discontinuous; and the one quaternary dis-
junction denotes the property corresponding to the entire spectrum.
A priori equivalent predicates will be said to denote the same
property. Hence red= (1-2); blue= (3-4); reddish= (1); yellow-
ish=(2-3); bluish= (4).
A language will be said to select a property if it denotes it by
a .simple predicate. So the language A selects the three properties
(1), (2-3), and (4); the language B selects (1-2) and (3-4). To
introduce another of Whorf 's metaphors, the two languages dissect

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 LINGUIST'ICS AND PHILOSOPHY 707

the same world differently. The color world, i.e., the property
(1-2-3-4), is dissected by A into a trichotomy and by B into a
dichotomy. Both languages, as it happens, select only continuous
properties.
The above example is of rudimentary simplicity. It deals only
with monadic predicates, and a very few of these, and under an
unrealistic assumption of sharp boundaries between all coordinate
predicates. And, more seriously, it is drawn from the realm of
lexicon, not of grammar; from the minor, therefore, not the major
kind of language difference.
Certainly the example does not prove the theorem. It does,
however, sketch a proof, by showing how to construct a conflation
of two given languages with the help of conjunction and disjunction.
Various obstacles still remain. If one of the languages doesn't
allow conjunction and disjunction, the construction will be blocked.
And the method works only on declarative sentences; other sentence
types would have to be reduced somehow. Conceivably the
theorem should be restricted so as to speak not of "every difference
between languages," but of "every describable difference." This
would then eliminate as counterinstances those differences which
are too tenuous or elusive to be described at all. As for the im-
plied complaint that the method works better on lexical than on
grammatical differences, only material grammar can be concerned,
since formal grammar is specifically excluded in the theorem; but
since material grammar is simply a coupling of a formal grammar
with a semantical interpretation, the question concerns this in-
terpretation only. But this would present no greater difficulties
than do all those lexical differences which are not obviously statable
in terms of declarative sentences containing monadic predicates.
Thus, on examination, the complaint loses its force.
The concept of selection prepares us to return to one of the two
main questions that I posed at the beginning of this paper: In
what ways do languages differ? So far as they differ in purely
formal grammar, they cannot be compared, for there is no basis
for comparison. More precisely, there is no basis for distinguish-
ing between two components of the difference, the formal gram-
matical component and the semantical component. The point may
be illustrated by a comparison within a single laniguage, namely
comparison of the two English words 'conjunction' and 'and'.
Everybody agrees that these differ in grammar; the differences
are labeled by ealliing the one word a noun and the other a con-
junction. The present question is: Do they differ only in gram-
mar? Aind there is no way of deciding this. Some have said yes,
the two words are different in grammar but the same in meaning,.

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708 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Others have said no, if they had the same meaning they would be
interchangeable, and so would have the same grammar. There is
no empirical issue here; there is only a difference of proposal, or
stipulation, as to how to relate identity conditions for grammar to
identity conditions for meaning. Likewise in comparing different
languages. Some take the view that a grammatical difference is no
evidence either for or against a semantical difference, grammar
being a variable, or dimension, independent of meaning. Others
view it as a sign or criterion of a semantical difference, a reflection
of it. These alternative views cannot be purely conventional, for
the range of arbitrary convention is curbed by some sort of limit:
no one defends the view that difference in grammar proves same-
ness of meaning, and no one holds that it makes a difference in
meaning probable. It is either a sure sign, or no sign at all.
But as to which of these two it is, each man is thrown back upon
his own opinion. Whichever answer he gives, his answer is a truth
by stipulation. The question that the philosopher put to the
linguist is returned by the linguist to the philosopher.
This is what Bloomfield was unclearly driving at in his well-
known attack on mentalism. What he was struggling to say would
be said much better in terms of verification criteria and the two
senses of 'truth'. Restated in those terms, his insight was that
propositions connecting a way of speaking with a way of thinking
are not empirical but a priori propositions, unless there is some
logically independent evidence for a given way of thinking other
than the way of talking itself. The whole matter becomes much
more complicated if, instead of treating propositions atomistically,
one by one, we treat them holistically as involved in a complete
"theory" or system. Some work along this line has been at-
tempted in recent years in the new science of psycholinguistics.
The chief stumbling block has been that, to predict anything more
than the most rudimentary results, a theory of overwhelming
elaborateness is needed.
The final lesson for the philosopher is clear. To progress ef-
fectively the linguist needs those skills of analysis and of theory
construction which are a specialty of the philosopher. Peirce 's
remark about experimental science should be extended to observa-
tional science in general: "Nothing is more foolish than carrying
a question into a laboratory until reflection has done all that it can
do towards clearing it up-at least, all that it can do for the time
being" (4.69).
RULON WELLS
YALE UNIVERSITY

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