Inédit 1 (1964): Réflexions sur les possibilités d’une description de l’histoire de la linguistique

Abstract

AbstractThe Wenner-Gren Foundation symposium “Revolution vs. Continuity in the Study of Language” invites speakers to discuss the applicability of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 essay to linguistics. Kuhn does well to posit an autonomous epistemological plane, to take account of the sociology of knowledge, and to focus on the history of structures rather than of fleeting events. On the other hand, he presents each science as essentially stagnant throughout most of time, and offers an atemporal and harmonious view of how one “paradigm” replaces its predecessor; Kuhnian history emerges as a succession of synchronies. The portrayal ignores that if paradigms emerge at successive moments, old and new overlap and coexist in tension. Constructing each science as an independent system, it also neglects dynamics that cross or connect disciplines, including generalized systems of thought, and outlooks common to an entire society at a given era.Whereas sciences today are familiar with synchronic systems, effective models of those structures’ diachronic transformation are lacking. Rather than Kuhn’s or Hegel’s a priori and overly general schemas, inductive approaches based on the linguistic analysis of scholarship or researchers’ autobiographical testimonies could provide better results. In the interim, adopting Braudel’s concept of history as encompassing events belonging to three distinct chronological orders ranging from quotidian to multi-secular, we can see that a Kuhnian revolution alters views characteristic of a discipline during a given period, but only changes portions of the overall field as it has developed throughout time. This conception reconciles synchrony and diachrony. Rather than prolonged periods of inactivity, we observe a constant scientific praxis which transforms paradigms defined as open, their possibilities always exceeding their extant realizations. Such paradigmatic variations cannot account for exceptional scientific revolutions which exceed their scale, such as the invention of writing, and which represent instead breakthroughs in a model’s effectiveness, in its ability to transform reality and human experience. The contemporary project for a structural semantics aims to achieve a second linguistic revolution by constructing a new language which can serve as the science of humanity, an anthropology comparable to the mathematics used in the life sciences.