The
Semantics of Science
Roy Harris
London, New York: Continuum 2005, ISBN
0826478476
The
contributors to the Pantaneto Forum hardly ever refer to publications coming from
the domain of linguistics, so it may seem initially surprising that a book with
an apparently specialized linguistic title is being reviewed here. However, Roy
Harris (Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics at Oxford University) is not
an ordinary linguist and his treatment of the semantics of science bears no
resemblance to what is typically associated with linguists’ interests in the
language of science, such as for instance investigations of particular
word-formation patterns or characteristic sentence-structures. Rather, it
relates directly not only to the very fundament of the Forum, namely, the
thesis that communication by scientists and with scientists needs remedies, but
also to the controversies latent behind the texts published. (Although the
contributors ordinarily avoid head-on collisions, a careful reader will not
have overlooked a diversity of diagnosis concerning the character and sources
of the communicational difficulties and of suggestions on how to go about the
desired improvement.) Harris is interested in the basic assumptions made by
scientists and others about the language of science, and in its relation to the
language of everyday. His investigation leads him to conclusions radical enough
to be mistaken for a deeply anti-scientific position. So it must be stressed at
the outset that Harris has nothing to do with postmodernist anti-science
tendencies: the battles between modernism and postmodernism have been fought on
the common ground of such assumptions about language and communication which
Harris unequivocally rejects.
The
theoretical perspective from which the book’s subject matter is viewed is
integrationism, a philosophy of language and a linguistic theory created and
refined by Harris over the last 30 years. Integrationism constitutes a
formidable challenge to the linguistic orthodoxy, to various strands in the
philosophy of language and to a range of epistemological positions. The
challenge consists in rejecting two basic assumptions concerning languages and
communication, which Harris calls the language myth, and in the reversal of
certain ontological priorities. Thus, for an integrationist, languages are not codes which specify determinate
forms and meanings of linguistic signs, and communication is not utilization of such fixed codes to
transfer messages from the mind of one individual to the mind of another.
Integrationism sees communication as an integration of activities by means of
signs produced within the process: signs are not prerequisites of communication
but its products. And so communication does not presuppose language, quite the
reverse: language presupposes communication. While in the language myth codes
have to be inherently stable, the integrationist takes signs to be inherently
unstable: their apparent stability derives from the social utility of the
activities integrated. Hence the epistemological consequences: unlike many
thinkers for whom undisputed knowledge and change are incompatible, the
integrationist will assume that our knowledge is always of change. That is a
basic outline of the theoretical position from which Harris sets out to
investigate two main questions:
What does science require of language?
What does language require of science?
The Semantics of Science belongs to the group of Harris’s publications
which require from the reader no scholarly grounding in linguistics or
philosophy of language. However, given that to many people the twin assumptions
of the language myth may seem to be perfect common sense, such a radical
departure from it could likely have resulted with a book very difficult to
follow. Not just because the theory behind it is unfamiliar, but also because
it is in such a stark contrast with what many scientists and non-scientists
alike take for granted. But Harris is very well aware of this type of
communicational barrier and carefully designs his exposition to reduce the
difficulty. Nor is there any terminological barrier before the reader. Actually
Harris uses so few special terms that it is possible to structure around them an
account of the main argument.
Limiting his
consideration to the Western intellectual tradition, Harris approaches science
as one of supercategories, on a par with others, such as art, history or
religion. These are all master-concepts which allow for an integration of
otherwise separate activities and inquiries, and which organize society’s
intellectual life. Debates on whether linguistics is a science, or whether
photography is an art, or conflicts over how to distinguish between science and
non-science, are among the more conspicuous manifestations of supercategories,
without which such discussions would make no sense. A supercategory subsumes
diverse individual disciplines and requires a certain cross-disciplinary unity
and stability of terminology and practices of discourse. It has a
characteristic rhetoric often used by those who want to deploy supercategory’s
prestige to promote their own interests and convictions. It has its own
journalists, philosophers and historians.
A view of the
history of science by Harris is different than that offered by many historians
who, retrospectively applying a number of assumptions characteristic to the
modern supercategory of science, can reach back well beyond Classical Greece
and Pharaonic Egypt in their search for ancient scientists. From an
integrational perspective, science as a supercategory emerged as the concept of
a literate society from the seventeenth century onwards and went through
various stages, which Harris discusses on a number of examples: from Bacon and
Sprat, through the authors of the Encyclopédie,
to Einstein and Heisenberg. The crucial thesis in his exposition is that
setting science up as a supercategory required support of a particular
philosophy of language: a philosophy whose vital parts are the twin assumptions
of the language myth.
This
philosophy predates the emergence of the supercategory: Harris traces it back
to Aristotle. Its semantic component has it that words get their meaning by
standing for things in the real world. This is the reocentric version of the
language myth, which can be contrasted with the psychocentric version, the view
that words get their meanings by standing for ideas in the mind. If you define planet referring to the actual
properties of particular heavenly bodies, you give a reocentric definition; a
psychocentric one refers to beliefs about heavenly bodies. Scientists, from the
earliest stages of the development of the supercategory up to the present day,
have favoured reocentrism over psychocentrism.
In reocentric semantics,
the required stability of signs ultimately derives from the (also assumed)
natural stability of the real world. Thus it makes sense to expect from the
language of science the possibility of more and more accurate descriptions of
reality and to associate the advancement of science with actually offering such
ever more accurate descriptions (cf. e.g. the recent reorganization of the
Solar System).
Harris’s
detailed analyses identify various tensions within several formulations of
reocentrism, from Aristotle to Einstein and Kuhn. Many of them reveal the
problem of scope: reocentrism rapidly loses plausibility when it extends to the
regions covered by scientific inquiry which spread outside the area of tangible
objects. And it is when theorists tend to slide towards the psychocentric
model, which, in turn, results in all sorts of consistency problems, insofar as
that move deprives signs of the stable anchorage in the reality outside the
human mind. At this point, Harris raises the question whether a language fully
explicable on the basis of reocentric definitions is possible in principle, and
proceeds to argue that even those who have taken precisely such an
uncompromising view on the language of science have never been able to provide
a scientific justification, according to their own criteria, for taking this
view. Nevertheless the model survives as the basis of the language of science.
Recognizing
the role of calculations and measurements in the development of science, Harris
also examines the semantic foundations of mathematics to reveal the reocentric
basis of numerical signs. The unfailing belief in mathematics as the paragon of
semantic stability plays an important role in the emergence of the semantic
crisis of contemporary science. The crux of this crisis is a time-lag between
modern scientific thinking and a model for formulating scientific statements.
In other words, there is a disparity between discoveries of modern science and
the language available for reporting and explaining what science has
discovered.
How did this
disparity come about?
Reocentrism
was part of a theory designed to explain a language developed to cope with the
communicational needs at the level of everyday human experience of life on
Earth: at the anthropic level. Now, if science is seen in terms of integrating
this anthropic experience with an expanding knowledge of Nature, it becomes
visible that reocentrism can work for as long as it delivers assurance that it
is possible to talk in basically the same way about objects from sub-anthropic
and super-anthropic levels as one does about objects from the anthropic level
(trees, bricks, or chairs). For a long time mathematics unproblematically gave
that assurance. Still at the end of the nineteenth century, calculations and
measurements indicated that the invisible worked in the same way as the
visible. But when calculations and measurements suddenly delivered the message
which, in verbal signs, could only be formulated as saying that one could not
know both the momentum and a position of an atomic object, reocentrism
potentially lead to questioning the physical reality of these attributes of the
object. To keep the truth of such a statement one apparently would have to
redefine the terms ‘position’, ‘momentum’ and ‘physical object’. But how? After
all, these verbal signs functioned without a hitch at the anthropic level of
experience. The rescue-operation boiled down to a decision to trust in
mathematics’ unifying powers and to accept the growing verbal hiatus between
the anthropic on the one hand, and the sub- and super-anthropic on the other.
Science has been in a semantic crisis ever since.
But the
realisation that the talk of ‘superstrings’ or ‘ten-dimensional space’ defies
assumptions concerning the semantics of trees and bricks is only part of the
picture. The steadfast maintenance of the time lag can be seen as a
manifestation of a belief in an implausible metasemantic thesis in addition to
the already dubious semantic plausibility of reocentrism: namely, the thesis
that all parts of the universe are accountable to the same set of semantic
assumptions.
These
considerations lead Harris to a radical diagnosis of the language of science.
It is not just
that the language of science still relies on an outdated linguistic model; and it
is not just that the language of science can accommodate new discoveries and
conclusions that are incompatible with its fundamental semantic assumptions
only at the cost of becoming incomprehensible; and it is not just that these
assumptions, therefore, restrict the ways in which new discoveries can be
reported. Actually, the whole traditional picture of the universe, consisting
of discrete objects having discernible properties and positions in time and
space is an extrapolation from this linguistic model. Similarly, the
communicational practice of verbal description, not the structure of the
objects allegedly described, is the source of traditional distinctions between
possibility and impossibility, truth and falsehood, observer and observed.
The tenor of
Harris’s answers to the two main questions he formulates at the beginning of
his book is in part negative and in part positive.
What does
science require of language? It requires language to be semantically
perspicuous. Semantic perspicuity, understood in reocentric terms, means that
science needs a language capable of reflecting faithfully and objectively the
workings of Nature. But that is not a requirement language can meet, for while
science cannot go beyond the limits of language, language goes far beyond the
limits of science.
What does
language require of science? A scientific justification for the view that a
fully reocentric language is possible has never been provided and is unlikely
to be forthcoming. Instead, on a positive note, language requires of science a
rejection of reocentrism in favour of integrationism. Scientists stand to lose
nothing by doing that, except for some illusions. Such as, for instance, that
their working practice can lead them to some ultimate truth about the universe,
or that their language has a more reliable basis than the language of the
street.
At this point
a sceptic may ask: if reocentrism deserves rejection, then why has it not been
rejected yet? What gives it its staying power? Indeed, it would be only a
partial explanation to invoke in reply the self-supporting power of science as
a supercategory which is manifest, for example, in numerous suggestions by
Pantaneto Forum contributors that communicational difficulties could be reduced
by teaching both scientists and the lay public some lessons in history and
philosophy of science. This measure is bound to result in perpetuating the
supercategory’s inherent problems, given how deeply both these domains are
anchored in the language myth. A fuller explanation lies in the ubiquity of the
language myth, of which reocentrism is but one semantic version, also outside
science. Therefore, other books of Harris’s supercategory series: The Necessity of Artspeak (Continuum:
2003) and The Linguistics of History
(Edinburgh University Press: 2004), where the linguistic bases of art and
history are examined, are complementary to the considerations overviewed here.
Lest the sceptic should now become alarmed by suspiciously wide ‘applicability’
of integrationism, a final general remark might be in order.
Science, art,
history, religion are forms of language-making. How people utilize their
language-making capacity depends inter
alia on how and what they think about language. The reason why Harris
promotes the integrationist mode of thinking about language is not that it
promises some miraculously rapid expansion or improvement of our
language-making skills, but that it enables us to assess our communicational
experience to find out to what extent we are beneficiaries, and to what extent
victims, of the dominance of the language myth over the Western intellectual
tradition. The Semantics of Science,
like the other books in the supercategory series, is an invitation and
introduction to self-therapies that readers may, or may not, individually
undertake.
Jan K. Wawrzyniak
Poland