STEPHEN G. ALTER. William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language. (Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, number 1) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 339. $49.95.

Abstract

Books have been written about Charles Darwin, about the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, about the Victorians, about nineteenth-century science and linguistics, but rarely has a book been written that gathers up and integrates all these strands in one biographical knot. This is exactly what Stephen G. Alter has done. His book provides both a much-needed biography of William Dwight Whitney, an expert on Sanskrit and oriental studies and one of the most seminal writers on general linguistics in the nineteenth century, and a window onto the social, cultural, political, philosophical, scientific, and religious background against which general linguistics emerged as a “science.” The book is topical in various respects, as it explores the relations among linguistics, science, and society. As in the nineteenth century, when Whitney was grappling with the notion of science, today “the definition of science itself” is again “in flux” (p. 4). As in the nineteenth century, linguistics faces “the same challenge as the human sciences as a whole in Whitney's days: the juggernaut biological, chemical, and other physically oriented disciplines threaten[s] to absorb the study of society and behavior, including speech behavior” (p. 4). The science of language that Whitney wanted to establish was founded on the axiom that language was a social product and not, as some of his contemporaries claimed, a “natural organism.” For him, studying language scientifically did not mean subordinating the science of language to the emerging natural sciences or treating language as if it was a “natural” object. Furthermore, the relation between science and religion on which Whitney pondered throughout his life seems not to have changed substantially. One should also note another concern that has recently emerged at the science/society interface: the public understanding of science, to which both Whitney and his arch-rival F. Max Müller contributed in their own ways with regard to the public understanding of linguistics (p. 63).