Don't argue with an integrationist! (the radical Roy Harris)

In his book The Linguistics of History the linguist Roy Harris says the following (this will be my last post on Harris' book):

It takes a philosopher (or a historian?) to decontextualize 'truth' and treat it as an entirely person-neutral relationship between a sentence and a 'state of affairs'.  For an integrationist, that already removes any possibility of understanding the complexity of an important network of beliefs (about what is 'true') that enter into human communication in all kinds of ways, some of which have very little in common. 

By this time methinks I hear a clamour arising from enraged objectors stamping on the floor and complaining that the integrationist offers no definition at all of the term context, no explanation of where a context begins or ends, no formal identification of its 'parameters', no account of how we know whether something belongs inside the context or outside.  Quite right.  Well objected.

Alas, the reply will not satisfy the objectors, and may even fuel their fury.  The reply is that contextualization is what you are doing right now as you fulminate against such an unsatisfactory response, and the context is the framework in which you do it.  Whatever the context may be, you know more about it than I do.  But I do know that you have to be engaging in contextualization of some kind if you are to make any sense at all of what you are reading.  Otherwise your rage is inexplicable; or at least - dare I say - irrational?

Stop there, for a moment.  Has the integrationist already (self-defeatingly, some may claim in triumph) reified 'context', 'truth', 'idea', 'sentence', etc.?  If he appears to have done so, it is for purposes of engaging in discussion with those who deny they are guilty of any such misdemeanour.  Guilty or not, it does not stop me from going on to say that whether a government spokesman tells the truth about he current economic situation is not on a par with whether you tell the truth about who you were with last night, or whether a geometer tells the truth when claiming that the area of the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides.  And anyone who cannot see the differences deserves all the theoretical confusions that ensure (222, 223).

From this I am confirmed in my conclusion that arguing with integrationists is hard work - perhaps impossible!  Still, I do, because I know one.  : )

Linguist Roy Harris on history III: what should be expected of historians

Still am reading for duty right now more than pleasure….

Harris himself in his book, The Linguistics of History:

It is up to the historian to make clear at some point what kind of communicational authenticity the historia is presented as having in that particular case, which means explaining how its various components and materials are selected and integrated.  That is a considerable demand.  Historians are not accustomed to meeting it, because for generations they have coasted along on the built-up prestige that accrues to their discipline.  History is now prisoner to its own processes of historification. 

The demand I am voicing is not met by listing ‘sources’ in footnotes: that merely defers the accountability.  It requires the historian to come clean about, for example, what has been taken over unquestioned from earlier historians, what has been subjected to fresh research, what relationships have been reinterpreted through the perspective adopted, what has been ignored because deemed to be irrelevant, and what has been highlighted because it happens to have a bearing on contemporary concerns.  A historian may well protest that such a demand would require extensive expansions or annotations not just to every paragraph, but to every sentence, and perhaps to every other word.  So it might.  But if ‘truth’ is what is being claimed, a proliferation of caveats cluttering the text seems a small price to pay in the service of such a noble cause (223, 224).

I wonder if Harris is indeed asking too much.  And at the same time, it seems to me that many historians already take account of all of these things.  Then again, perhaps I don’t read enough history to really know. 

Linguist Roy Harris on history II: the inexactness of language

Still am reading for duty right now more than pleasure….

Another quotation in Roy Harris’ book, The Linguistics of History:

Only in the individual does language receive its ultimate determinacy.  Nobody means by a word precisely and exactly what his neighbor does, and the difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language.  Thus all understanding is always at the same time a not-understanding, all concurrence in thought and feeling at the same time a divergence  (Humboldt, On Language, Cambridge U. Press, 1988 [1836], 63)

Harris says of this quote: 

Here we see one of the most penetrating of post-Renaissance thinkers about language struggling against the traditional assumptions of the Western Language myth (NOTE: one would need to read Harris here to do justice to his understanding of this myth).  The passage I have quoted deserves in itself a chapter of explication and probably a whole book, to say nothing of the work from which it comes, which is the Introduction to Humboldt’s posthumously published Uber die Kawi-Spache auf der Insel Jawa....(185, 186)

Elsewhere in his book, Harris says that, “Do we know what we are talking about?”, a question of linguistic epistemology, is the fundamental question of philosophy (47) (this, he says, is what Plato saw and tried to answer with his doctrine of the forms, 48).  Undoubtedly related to this are his questions like the following, which are especially important for the historian: “How do I know that my words actually mean what I think I am saying?”, “How can I be sure that my words mean what someone else takes them to mean?”, and “How do I know that my words state what is really the case?”(8).  

It seems clear to me that Harris deserves credit here for making questions such as these explicit – it really would be good and salutary for more historians (and others) to reflect here!  But at the same time, for Harris, these questions are asked not with the intention of offering modern historians a minor course correction, but rather to help throw the supposedly venerable institution of which they are a part of into doubt.  In other words, these questions are meant to assist as show-stoppers en route to paving the way for Harris’ own intellectual program, i.e. integrational linguistics.

 What does this look like?  Here is a taste: 

 ...the question... arises for Humboldt as to whether history is the same for any two individuals whose understanding of the past is based on the readings of texts... An integrationist would go further.  The determinacy, if there is any, has to be sought at the level of the particular communication situation. (186)

Thoughts about this?

Linguist Roy Harris on history: “post-structuralist panic”

Am reading for duty right now more than pleasure…. (not that duty cannot be pleasurable)

Came across the following quotation in Roy Harris’ book, The Linguistics of History:

Narrative form in history, as in fiction, is an artifice, the product of individual imagination.  Yet at the same time it is accepted as claiming truth – that is, representing a real ensemble of interrelationships in past actuality.  Nor can we say that narrative form is like a hypothesis in science, which is the product of individual imagination but once suggested leads to research that can confirm or disconfirm it.  The crucial difference is that the narrative combination of relations is simply not subject to confirmation or disconfirmation, as any one of them taken separately might be.  So we have a second dilemma about historical narrative: as historical it claims to represent, through its form, part of the real complexity of the past, but as a narrative it is a product of imaginative construction, which cannot defend its claim to truth by an accepted procedure of argument or authentication.  (Mink, Historical Understanding, Cornell U. Press, 1987, 199)

(whatever you think of the above quote, isn’t this well put?)

This, Harris says, is “post-structuralist panic, with ensuing rush for the lifeboats” (162).  Harris says that “the problem [here] is generated by its location in a post-structuralist desert.  There the language-user is found wandering in a no-man’s land, where no one (male or female, historian or histopathologist) is quite sure about how words relate to anything at all”. (162)

What do you think of the problem that Mink identifies?  Is it a problem?  What about Harris’ diagnosis?