“Whorf’s logical weakness”
“Avoiding abstract terms was one way, Whorf thought, to avoid verbal problems; stressing activities over states was another” (8).
“Whorf’s rejection of a ‘one-to-one correspondence’ between ‘objects’ and ‘logic’ remains an insubstantial gesture, for the idea of a one-to-one correspondence is precisely what is entailed in ‘segmentation and expression’. He thinks that by shifting from nouns to verbs, from ‘objects’ to flow and flux and flight—the famous neighborhood of FL—he has signaled a change in attitude or epistemology. But there had been no fundamental change” (8). ***This is interesting. I wonder how this squares with Latour’s ANT, which seems to do this thing (shifts from nouns to verbs)… I’d have to go back and reread Thinking with Bruno Latour… (or Latour) to investigate again the theory of language undergirding the thinking there. **But then the next passage… Berthoff quotes Whitehead…celebrates the “activity” of “substances”…
“…you will persist in thinking of the actual world as a collection of passive substances, [the difficulty of explaining how] one such substance can forma component in the make-up of another such substance is not relieved by calling each actual substance an event, or a pattern, or an occasion…” ***How does this square with ANT?? And does the notion of ‘ecology’ come closer (than ‘network’ to accomplishing a model for the relationships centering Berthoff’s philosophy?
“Ironically—since he rejected the terms correlatino and correspondence—Whorf’s fundamental notion of words as labels, of language as a substitute for reality, is supported by the correspondence theory of truth. Like Wittgenstein’s, his theory of language is a picture theory: we dissect reality along the lines laid down by our language, which depicts it accordingly” (8). ***Dyadic relationships… Language ‘represents’ reality
“The elevation of clarity oas the most valued characteristic of language is, in the absence of a sound conception of context, related to what Richards (1936:11) called the ‘Proper Meaning Superstition’, the idea that there is a ‘real’ meaning of a word” (9). ***”real” meaning “concrete” or “fixed” somewhere out-there… “Accompanying this attitude we often find—they constintute a sort of neighborhood, as it were—a distrust of abstraction, a reliance on metaphor to do the work of argument, and a disregard of a concept’s field of application—the unwarranted extension of definition” (9). ***This is CONTEXT…. “a concept’s field of application”… Interestingly put. What does this mean??? Important to think through, I think.
“Terms which were developed by Sapir for the naming of elements and relationships of linguistic patternment are used by Whorf as labels for logical and epistemological operations” (9). ***”relationships of linguistic patternment vs. “logical and epistemological operations”… “operations”….
At the end of page 9 Berthoff takes Whorf down… Strips his words of the confidence with which most receive them. Questions each word… “Just what is realtive to what is generally obscured in Whorf’s assertions about ‘lingustic relativity’….” She certainly isn’t very forgiving. She gives him no room to maneuver; his writing is proclamation, not working-out. This is, perhaps, true. He is not her student…
As above, Berthoff offers specific examples of sentences Whorf constructs that obscure meaning. “Reading through Whorf’s papers only strengthens the impression that linguistic relativity is an unstable concept which does nothing to illuminate the relationship of language and thought, of language and culture, or of language and reality, however that is conceived” (11).
I think if I’d been Ann’s student, I would have argued with her a lot. Just get the sense… She often seems to speak from a place (I recognize) where words have clear meanings, concepts are clearly understood. Her argument with Whorf, for instance, in which she identifies “agreement” as “by definition an explicit contract, the terms of which have been arrived at by mutual consent…” (11). And yet, we can have “unspoken agreements”… can’t we? “agreement” can be between two things (we can say these ideas “agree” with each other, or these two colors “agree”…). But of course she’s right… Whorf uses the word “terms”… suggesting agreement-as-in-contract…
Berthoff’s take-down of Whorf is rather stunning, unsurprising. She writes: “Sapir argued that we couldn’t talk at all except insofar as we adhered to the obligatory patterns of grammar; Whorf silently converts the concept of thenecessary conditions of speech into the idea of a necessary condition of reference, on one or another utterance. Sapir’s patterns are not of data but of ‘phonetic phenomena.’ Whorf expands the domain of the obligatory to include the conceptual” (11).
“Whorf’s principal logical weakness is that he does not see the inadequacies of incomplete definitions; of classifying without also differentiating” (11). **This is a fundamental move in Berthoff’s pedagogy (classifying and differentiating… likeness and difference)…
“…Whorf’s zealous positivism interferes with is pretensions to science, which can not, of course, function without a strong methodological understanding of the dialectic of particular instances and emergent generalizations. It is ironic that Whorf’s ‘principle of linguistic relativity’ depends on a positivist view of reality as the ‘physical situation qua physics’…” (12).*** This is the dialectic that yields meaning-making
“What Whorf did not understand is that physics is what transforms the physical situation into an object of knowledge. His correspondence theory—never acknowledged—posits a nondialectical paralleling of language and reality, which is simply identified with the measurable, calibratable world” (12). ***One of the clearest articulations of the consequences of an unarticulated theory of language… It’s like the default is this “correspondence theory,” dyadic, decontextualized, false. makes me think of my “learning objectives” or course objectives… hmmmm (not good)
“His [Whorf’s] conceptions of linguistic relativity never led him to consider language as a means of making meaning, for meanings are determined, he thought, by the way our mother tongue segments reality. Language remains for him a channel, a pattern book, a map, and when he says that language shapes, he means nothing more than what anyone subscribing to a two-valued sign would mean” (12).
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