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Inductivism and the emergence of modern descriptive linguistics
Michael Silverstein
The University of Chicago
For nearly 50 years within linguistics, analytic and pedagogic inductivism, have been rejected out of hand, because confused with certain doctrines of behaviorism and operationalism. Yet the two faces of induction – as a faculty of the rational mind and as a moment in the dialectic of scientific methodology – were central in the institutionally twin enterprises of the applied and the pure in emerging discplinary linguistics from the late 19th century through the post WWII era. For this span of our discipline’s history, we can compare the theory and materials of “inductive” language pedagogy with the field methods by which the creation of essentially philological materials constituted the basis of linguistic analysis and theorization. We can see the specific emergence of the institutions of our science before its “deductive” turn.
From the third quarter of the nineteenth century, there was no question among the linguistically sophisticated but that “inductive” language teaching was the innovative method, to be preferred to memorization of grammatical rules (from which answers to lexically specific exercises could be “deduced”). There was as well no question but that comparative philology – linguistics to the more terminologically aspiring – ranked in the vanguard of the human sciences because it was, in fact, an “inductive science” just like botany and geology. And there was no question but that the human mental faculty of induction, or inductive conceptual reasoning, allowed us both to learn languages and to make useful and thus pragmatically valid scientific generalizations about linguistic phenomena. Induction had three effective faces or avatars, a pedagogical, an epistemological, and an ontological. My aim here is to recuperate some specific moments in the intertwining of these several faces of induction. I would also propose that this is, in fact, the fascinating main conceptual plotline of what became disciplinary linguistics in America (and elsewhere) “B.C.” – before Chomsky – and is emerging again in various new intellectual trends.
Jan Blommaert, then of Ghent University, now of University of London, posed a question to me on the very morning, in Winter, 2003, that he arrived in Chicago as a Visiting Professor: what can we glean about underlying scientific outlooks from the form of fieldnotes taken by our anthropological linguistic predecessors in their research? I have no experience on the Africanist side of things, and leave that to Blommaert and to my Michigan colleague Judith Irvine and others who are exploring the intellectual and professional histories of scholarly work there. My research has sought to contextualize the scholarly text artifacts that link professional work on American Native Languages – as Franz Boas termed them – to the late nineteenth-century emergence of professionalized disciplinary linguistics itself, an intellectual context which by then had already been maturing over more than a hundred years. My claim here is that there is causal continuity in the transfer of inductivisms across both geographical and conceptual space: from the eastern to western shores of the Atlantic; from Indo-European, Semitic, Finno-Ugric, etc. to Algonquian, Wakashan, Uto-Aztecan, etc.; from theorizing at first driven by linguistic comparison and history to the theoretical priority of structural or descriptive approaches; from found text artifacts in ancient scripts to fieldnote inscriptions capturing spoken textualities.
The story to be told is, as one might guess, very complex, interweaving large numbers of scholars and the institutional fields in which they moved for training, research, teaching, and publication. I approach the problem as one of applied linguistic anthropology – perhaps even of philology as earlier conceived – opening out such documents as fieldnotes to the “natives’ ” cultural contextualizations that they seem to us to index. What I thus wish to sketch today is a kind of historical ethnography of inductivism in linguistics, attempting to discern the cultural system of practitioners in the field and to connect the dots among the practitioners.
Now cultural systems are, like languages (langages) themselves, sociohistorical objects observable only in human groups and they are inexorably “drifting,” as Sapir noted; the sociohistorical fact of scientific or scholarly disciplinarity, organized by scholarly culture, is no exception. What is significant about the history of inductivism is the fact that at many different phases of its ascendancy in linguistics its institutional site shifts as to the location of what we might term peak, influential expression of the cultural system. Yet in all of these contexts, the very term “inductive” or its semantic relata are positively valued ones; it is used again and again as a term of triumphant, empirical modernity, describing a sound, normal-scientific outlook of someone from within the confraternity of practitioners. It is a deictic term of value-conferral. It is a term that goes into a complimentary evaluation of someone’s philological work by associating it with the “other” inductive sciences, like botany, geology, etc. Linguistics – and linguists – aspired thus to be Baconians.
As a concept explicitly invoked in theoretical discourse, though, the inductive attitude shifts its associability as a metapragmatic, a regimenter of practice, with now one, now another area of linguists’ practices in their engagement with languages and with language, sometimes being substituted by another term in a local controversy (thus: exceptionlessness as an ontological commitment of Neogrammarianism, grounding epistemological inductivism in philological study with a theoretical program). These shifts or substitutions, always the condition of culture and revealing to the analyst of it, have perhaps been somewhat invisible to the tendency of historians of linguistics, who have tended rather to work with a unifying focus in intellectual biography, organizational history, or emergent functional institutionality (e.g., “schools,” “invisible colleges” [Merton]). That is why, perhaps, this story has never before been told. But the newer history of science qua history of ideas, with which I associate any reflexive historical ethnography of our field, cuts across these foci to study the cultural dynamics immanent in the way the self-licensing ideas and methods of people “doing science” exist in complex social fields of interest, power, aspiration, etc.
Let me contextualize this by turning to some fascinating materials to hand, exhibits of text artifacts from which – inductively – we can, I hope, discern the storyline of a generalizing cultural theme central to linguistics.
The founding president of my university, William Rainey Harper (1856-1906), made a scholarly name for himself as scholar of Biblical Hebrew. But perhaps more importantly he was an entrepreneur who had earlier invented “The Hebrew Correspondence School” (among many ventures that comprised his American Institute of Hebrew) while serving as professor at the Baptist Union’s Theological School in Morgan Park, just south of the then Chicago city limits. [Image 1]. Each fortnight or so the paying students received a booklet that comprised the lesson [Image 2], which was essentially a set of word-by-word glossing notes to a verse of the Old Testament [Image 3], together with further “Observations” referenced to a grammar, and followed by a set of reading-recitation and back-and-forth translation exercises based cumulatively on the material thus far [Image 4]. Harper – familiar to the Chautauqua circuit of quick tent-sales as well as Baptist Revivalism – also, of course, sold to the Correspondence School students the Manual on which the lessons were based [Image 5], viz., a book of the Bible done up as texts in facing-page Hebrew and word-by-word English translation [Image 6], as well as his own reference grammars, Elements of Hebrew by an Inductive Method (1881 et seq.) and later Elements of Hebrew Syntax by an Inductive Method (1888 et seq.), to the paragraphs of which are keyed the explanatory remarks in each of his lessons.
As you can see, the whole “inductive method” here is text-centered, with the pupils encountering and at least parroting and trying to use “real Biblical Hebrew” from day one – appropriately, of course, the day of The Creation! They thus learn any rules or generalizations about Hebrew in the order in which the language is illustrated by the particulars of usage in the text. Each such usage encountered is paradigmatically embedded, in the referenced paragraphs of the Elements, in its declensional or conjugational frame, as well as its frame of syntagmatic particulars. There is no langue learned, we might say, outside of its proper context of parole; here, that context is the text of Genesis. This feature is pervasive. Even Harper’s Hebrew Syntax itself [Image 7], though organized as a systematic discussion of the syntax of various kinds of phrasal heads, from major to minor – note sections 14 on “pronominal expressions” and 15 on the syntax of numerals [Image 8] – is essentially a set of actual textual examples keyed back to the book—chapter—verse loci of the Old Testament, with cautionary remarks and then a whole set of further textual “references for study,” so as to clinch the generalization by relying on the inductive capacity of the student.
You can see immediately that this is essentially a lexicogrammatical concordance to the text. Theoretically, at least, if we collected all of the exhaustive textual references we should be able painstakingly to reconstruct the text of the Bible. The text has been segmented into chunks of form according as, collected in one place, whole sets of such chunks of text consist of exemplifications of a single grammatical fact about the language, which thus, stated in the grammatical treatise, indexes (points to) its multiple occurrences in the original text. We might say in the register of philosophy of scientific language, that the intensional [with-an-ess] statement of the generalization is extensionalizable as – realizable as – the set of textual exemplifications, locatable numerically, which are theoretically exhaustive in a finite – even if inspired – corpus such as the Bible was believed to be in the 1880s (especially by religious folk).
The concept is exactly the same for Hermann Grassmann’s Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda, originally published in 1873 [Image 9], though Grassmann is based on intensionalization by word-root, rather than by construction-type. I recall my humbling sense of unbounded admiration when, as a student in second-year Sanskrit, I encountered this incredible work all done by hand in which, note [Image 10], every declensional or conjugational form of every root in its different senses – including, vacuously, indeclinables – is classified, grouped, and keyed to the place in the standard numbering of Rigvedic hymns and the poetic line or śloka in that hymn where the form occurs. From the data in this work, too, one can reconstruct the entire Rigvedic corpus up to but not determining the exact order of words in each śloka (for which one would have to use the guidance of metrics).
So the concordance, that indispensable product of and tool for the philology of all the ancient languages, is an intermediate shuffling of the data of textual occurrences according to some generalizations – the forms of what we now call the grammar – that permit identification of specific instantiations “in nature,” as it were. It is a meeting point of both Mr Harper’s “inductive method” of language teaching and of Herr Dr Grassmann’s textual philology – and that of all our other great predecessors of the time. The pedagogical “inductivism” of Harper’s Hebrew course is anchored in practice in precisely the same kind of text artifacts as the epistemological “inductivism” of high-water Neogrammarianism, the crowning achievement of the previous hundred years of linguistics. For the ancient languages in particular, then, the procedures by which text, translation, lexicogrammatical concordance, and teaching lessons are used by students inculcates them into the inductive world of philology, just as this world produced them as the product of scholarly induction.
Harper, indeed, produced not only his famous Hebrew curriculum, but, collaboratively with others, one for Greek and one for Latin as well, both published in 1888. Note the Latin one [Image 11], which is based on Caesar’s Gallic War. Caesar’s opening sentence is at length completed in Lesson III [Image 12], with specifically keyed notes and further observations. Interestingly [Image 13], a little lexicon of occurring words – the “A” set – is supplemented – the “B” set – by denotationally related words, allowing wider, paradigmatically contrastive translation exercises. Finally, since Latin grammar is supposed to illuminate one’s language arts, there are questions that point up the typological contrasts of English and Latin.
Now it seems clear that Harper must have been exposed to the paraphernalia at the heart of the philological program for ancient languages when he did his Ph.D. work at Yale (1873-1875) principally under William Dwight Whitney, the great Yankee apostle of the inductive science of language. “It was Whitney,” recollected Harper’s colleague, the Latinist Charles Chandler (quoted in Goodspeed 1928:39), “who had pointed out to him that the Semitic languages were a very promising field for exploitation by an enterprising man, both text-books and methods here and abroad being antiquated, unscientific, and in America notoriously futile.” Antiquated and unscientific meant non-inductive, of course. And indeed, what Whitney had done philologically for Vedic and later Sanskrit – producing definitive editions of texts, creating critical translations, producing exhaustive concordanced lexicogrammatical databanks, collaborating on dictionaries, writing a definitive grammar based on these – Harper undertook as the foundation for his inductive language courses in Hebrew. The genius here is the reshuffling, the reorganization of all the philological material around the text itself as a stimulus to learning the language as a recapitulative process of philological induction. This was exactly what Harper had been doing in Whitney’s introductory and Vedic Sanskrit classes, of course (at the time Whitney’s exemplary Sanskrit Grammar was still to be even commissioned of him on a visit to Leipzig in June, 1875). As Harper wrote in one of his early (1880) circulars from The American Institute of Hebrew’s correspondence school (U of C Spec. Coll., Amer.Inst.Sacr.Lit., Records, Box 2, fold.1):
The method of instruction employed in the lessons is largely the inductive – a method which experience has shown to be the simplest and most attractive, as well as the most thorough and efficient. The facts of the language are first mastered, and then the principles which these facts teach.
Facts first, principles later. But of course Whitney, too, had been doing this not only for Sanskrit but for modern languages as well. He was an instructor for some 20-plus years in French and German in the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, and later (1883) a founder of the Modern Language Association. He published teaching grammars and philologically treated, graded texts in both languages, as well as a teaching grammar of English keyed, as we might expect, to a collection of examples such as we see in the lemmata of the OED – attested “usage” as the extended proof of intensional rules or generalizations. As Whitney says in his preface to his Compendious German grammar (1869; 61888:iv),
[T]here is a large and increasing class of students whose philological training has to be won chiefly or altogether in the study of the modern languages, instead of the classical – and who must win it by methods somewhat akin with those so long and so successfully followed in classical study.
He means, of course, text-centered philological induction that he got in the direct line of Franz Bopp via the mediation of his own two principal masters during his student days in Germany, Albrecht Weber and especially Rudolph von Roth, with the latter of whom Whitney had produced the editio princeps of the Atharvaveda in 1855-56.
I will return to the epistemology of philological induction later, but wish now to point out that there was, in fact, a second strand of inductivism leading to Harper’s lessons. It is the whole tradition of pedagogical inductivism that is, like the scientific, ultimately sprung from the great Baconian instauration. As a pedagogical theory, it was vigorously and influentially advocated by Comenius (Jan Komenský [1592-1670]) and taken up as a practical program with extraordinary effect during thelate 18th – early 19th century by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), the Swiss educator. Pestalozzi ran several of what we would today call demonstration, or “laboratory” schools for young children in which subjects like natural philosophy, mathematics, and language were induced as knowledge in the young through a kind of step-by-step, prioritized exposure crafted developmentally. Pestalozzi’s ideas influenced generations of reformers as well as designers of curriculum, in which the adjective Pestalozzian became synonymous with inductive. Among his followers were, in the United States, the great educational reformer Horace Mann, who created the idea of the normal school – that is, teacher-training college – to create a corps of Pestalozzians, and in Europe such figures as Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel (1782-1852), who was central to Prussian elementary educational reform. (We will pick up this story below, when Franz Boas’s mother Sophie Meyer Boas [1828- ] starts a Fröbel Kindergarten in Minden, Westphalia, in 1860.)
After Pestalozzi, “inductive” courses for elementary phases of subjects were all the rage. Warren Colburn’s (1793-1833) 1833 An introduction to algebra: upon the inductive method of instruction, characterizes “the best mode” of instruction this way (1833:3):
[T]o give examples so simple as to require little or no explanation, and let the learner reason for himself, taking care to make them more difficult as he proceeds. This method, besides giving the learner confidence, by making him rely on his own powers, is much more interesting to him, because he seems to himself to be constantly making new discoveries. Indeed, an apt scholar will frequently make original explanations much more simple than would have been given by the author.
The pedagogy of discovery allied a subject taught with the most prestigious of post-Romantic ideas of pedagogy for the epistemological growth of the student; indeed, the “inductive sciences” – what we today call the empirical natural sciences – were at the center of 19th century philosophizing about and consideration of the history of science. Note the preface to this end-of-century Introduction to qualitative chemical analysis by the inductive method by one Delos Fall, a professor of chemistry at Albion College in Michigan (1891:4):
On entering the laboratory, whether physical, biological, or chemical, the student should thoroughly appreciate the changed relations and different surroundings in which he finds himself. He has studied literature, history, mathematics, language, or philosophy in the privacy and quiet of his own room; he has studied from books, but, on taking up the study of the natural sciences his books have been taken from him and in their place he has been given specimens and objects of natural history. He is led to look at these objects, observe as many points as possible, make notes, arrange and classify the facts and truths thus obtained, draw his own conclusions, and discover underlying principles and laws.