Linguistic Science and other Intellectual Residues of Expiring Modernity 
Pen Conference Istambul 24 – 28 Oct 2004
Sven Öhman, Stockholm

The question I want to bring up here - and preferably also discuss with you - is this: Is language understanding - i. e. understanding what language really is - a Science or is it something else? If it is something else, what does that mean? And what is intended, if it is a Science? I want to prepare for this discussion by giving you some facts. 
In the contemporary academic field of research that carries the name of General Linguistics it is tacitly taken for granted that understanding what language really is can only be a Science, if it is at all to qualify as genuine understanding. Such understanding one moreover feels must manifest itself in an explicit scientific theory.
Gradually, during more than thirty years of teaching General Linguistics, as a professor of Phonetics and Linguistics at Uppsala University, I have however myself reached a different conclusion, and I should like to give a brief account of my thinking in this matter for you to consider.
What is today called General Linguistics has its roots not only in ancient Greek and Latin grammar, but also in medieval cultivation of chivalrous manners and in similar efforts of later periods.
This is not the proper place to attempt to write the social history of politeness, courteousness, and good manners. For such a task I lack in any case many qualifications that would be necessary.
But it is still my belief that courteousness has in general tended to originate in the upper classes of society from where it gradually streams through in more or less distorted and/or modified forms to the lower social layers. Fashions moving in the opposite direction are of course not completely excluded, although, however, less likely. This process may take a lot of time so that much of what appears today as self-evident rules of conduct may have their historical roots in a remote past. Particular rules of conduct are probably not innate. But something  to do with politeness and such in all likelihood is innate. It is of course generally accepted that Man is by nature a social creature.
The Latin word for manners in the sense of civility is mos  the plural of which is mores. This word was the origin of English morality. Moreover Latin mos, mores also translate what the Greeks called ethos, cf. Ethics.. Moral feelings are hurt by breaches of rules of conduct. In certain cases we say that it is our esthetic senses that are hurt.
It may be noted in this connection that in ancient times reason (Greek nous) was understood as man’s intuitive ability to distinguish between Right and Wrong, Good and Bad, Beautiful and Ugly. Accordingly immoral action was felt to be action-against-reason. A bad person was an unreasonably immoral person; a good one was a moral person, etc.
In the Renaissance, Rhetoric - one of the seven liberal arts - attracted special interest as a method of personality development, as witnessed by among others the courtier of the Italian city of Urbino Baldesare Castiglione’s notorious Il Corteggiano from 1516. In this book a kind of parlor game is played by a number of courtiers and court ladies in the duchess of Urbino’s premises. Under the auspices of the duchess they each night play different games.
Castiglione reports on the game selected one particular evening – to decide through entertaining and amusing arguments Pro and Con wherein consists  the excellence of the perfect corteggiano. Castiglione’s account, which in my view is a bit mannered, demands a great number of virtues of the perfect courtier such as courage, strength, intelligence, handsomeness and so on. His abilities as a speaker are moreover given a lot of attention. They are treated along with the desirable abilities to sing, to dance and to fence, a fact which suggests that one looked at the speech skills as a form of athletics!
This reminds me that my own  alma mater Uppsala University which was founded in 1577 still hires what in university Latin jargon is called a director musicaes and a directorate for the so-called excercitiae i. e. dancing, drawing, and fencing. Of the utmost importance according to Castiglione is the requirement that the courtier does whatever he is supposed to do including speak, with grace.
A character in Castiglione’s book, Count Ludovico, explains the meaning of grace, and in it he mentions sprezzatura. "It is an art which does not seem to be an art. One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.... obvious effort is the antithesis of grace." The most important aspect of sprezzatura is its two-layered nature: it involves a conscious effort, which is disguised by a concealing act. Things, which require effort, are to be performed casually. Count Ludovico seems to be saying that grace arises out of sprezzatura. I would personally rather say that sprezzatura arises out of grace.
A somewhat later example of renaissance interest in speech is the French courtier at the court of Louis XIV, and moreover a member of Richelieu’s Académie Francaise Claude Favre de Vaugelas. His Remarques sur la langue, non pour fixer, mais régler la langue francaise (1647) notable for its insistence on making spoken French and the best usage at the Royal Court its language model. Vaugelas was critical of the widespread fancy for the use of Latin in the speech of French court circles, and he wanted to put spoken French on the market.
Of course Latin had been the language of the educated in all of the western world since Roman times and continued to be so well into the eighteenth century, even into the nineteenth; and being in the 17th century a fundamentally written language Latin was picked up as a medium of speech through one’s learning to read and write by means of Latin grammar and texts. Historians of our contemporary General Linguistics tend to take Latin Grammar as the undisputed model of Linguistic Theory.
In any case we may assume that social life in the court of the Roi Soleil, though perhaps not as light-minded was by and large the same as that in Castiglione’s Urbino.
Castiglione’s deliberations bring to mind a distinction made by the marchioness Mme de Sévigné (1626-1696) in one of her numerous letters to her daughter, viz. the distinction between conversation and causerie. She says that conversation is proper for the galantéries des salons. Causerie on the other hand is parler de son coeur i. e. to speak intimately and sincerely - “from one’s heart”.
In the eighteenth, like in the previous two centuries the French nobility, gradually joined by the high bourgeoisie, liked to live in palaces located inside the city of Paris where the Salon became the play ground of the then court ladies and courtiers. Here as is well known a considerable amount of gallantry went on.
Being able to speak well with clear articulation has been of importance not only to courtiers and clergy, which by the way also figures in Castiglione’s account of the Urbino court.
Actors, commanding officers, opera singers and other kinds of singers as well, and school teachers, auctioneers, and politicians of all times are crucially dependent on controlling their speech voices.
Moreover, medical doctors need to be able to treat the well-known condition of patients’ “loosing their voice”. There is of course also the case when a patient is struck by aphasia owing to stroke. And there is congenital deafness which causes its victims never to develop speech. They become what is unfortunately called “deaf-and-dumb”. The sign speech of the deaf was “discovered” and studied by French clerics already in the streets of eighteenth century Paris.
There has accordingly always been good reasons for concern with our speaking abilities outside of the Salon as well. In the nineteenth century “orthoepy” i. e. correct speech became of interest all over Europe, especially perhaps in England.
There one started to refer to this topic as Phonetics, and you probably remember Professor Higgins, like myself Professor of Phonetics and my most famous former colleague and predecessor in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion - a drama later degraded by Americans to the musical show My Fair Lady. 
Higgins is utterly shocked when he overhears the rude speech of Eliza and makes a bet with his colleague the Sanskrit specialist Prof Pickering who has just returned from service in India, that he will be able in a month’s time to convert Eliza from her present vulgar condition into a lady with sprezzatura which at this point of history in England had come to mean a stiff upper lip!
I think Shaw was quite right in treating Professor Henry Higgins’ phonetics a kind of speech police. At Higgins’ time about 1880 – 1890 Grammar and Phonetics were seen as a matter of course to have prescriptive-normative purposes. One felt that they could not be argued against being definitions of proper speech and language use.
Elsewhere in Europe people started to doubt that anyone had any right to prescribe how people should behave, and together with the impressive advances of the Sciences of Nature the idea was advanced that Linguistics and Phonetics were Sciences on a par with Physics and Chemistry. Referring to the alleged exception-free so-called Laws of phonetic change of historical-comparative linguistics The German university professor Hermann Paul claimed around 1870 that Linguistics must be understood as a Prinzipienwissenschaft, i. e. a Principled Science working from Laws of Language not unlike the Laws of Nature of Physics. Similarly, in Germany and elsewhere other areas of human and social studies such as psychology and sociology also started to define themselves as Sciences.
By assuming that there were laws of language intrinsic to language itself one was able to avoid the criticism of arbitrarily stipulating, on the self-appropriated strength of university authority, how language and speech must be. Instead one could say that one discovered facts of language.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the Swiss linguist de Saussure set out to give General Linguistics a logical foundation as a Science in his Cours de linguistique générale published by his students in 1916 shortly after his death. The book which was treated as canonical by a new movement in European linguistics called Structuralism and said to have been founded by Saussure is notable for being the first to have appointed Linguistics to the rank of an autonomous science concerned with a unitary object of investigation – Language.
Regarded as an object Saussure’s Language was however radically different from objects in the ordinary sense. It was something purely mental viz. what the community of speakers and listeners, of which I am one, consider to be our language. Thus it is only in this first person plural perspective that Saussure’s object can be observed.
A great deal can be adduced against Saussure’s construction, and has been so adduced. I will however content myself at this point with emphasizing that Saussure laid the ground for taking Language - whatever might be meant by this term - as something that could be scientifically theorized about.
A lasting contribution to the study of language made by Saussure is his observation that the language of a community of speakers assumes an intrinsic order or structure which is the result of no individual or official design; and not necessarily captured by Grammar in its classical sense but which comes about spontaneously. 
I personally believe that Saussure had learned about this very fundamental fact, perhaps through indirect pathways from the 17th and 18th century Scottish social philosophers, Hume, Ferguson, Mandeville, and Smith among them.
The idea of Linguistics as an autonomous Science concerned with a unitary object that needed an explicit theory was enthusiastically taken over by later “structuralist” developments including so-called “Prague school linguistics” under N. S. Trubetzkoy and R. Jakobson of the 1920’s and –30’s as well as so-called Generative linguistics in USA under N. Chomsky and his collaborators in the 1950’s and thenceforth. In each of these cases the search for Universal Laws of Language was pursued with considerable diligence.
It is important to note that when these linguists spoke about linguistics as a Science, they meant science in the sense of Physics and Chemistry, sometimes Biology also.
Taken literally it is however extremely doubtful if linguistics can be said to be a Science, and this on several crucial counts.
First of all the methods of Modern Science are radically different from those ever employed in the Humanities. In Science theory is built on the basis of objective, empirical observations usually carried out by means of special instruments.
Moreover, the theories of Science are usually worked out in mathematical form so as to allow prediction of the outcome of experiments. And the theories are tested by means of such predictions. If the theory predicts correctly in the majority of the experimental tests, it is regains confidence among the expert scientists. This means that scientific theory is tested by its applicability in experiments performed in the run of scientific practice, but also in the exploitation of effects producible through scientific experiment in e. g. industrial processes.
The crucial dependence of natural science upon applications is something typically overlooked by people in the Humanities. It provides science with a truth criterion that the Humanities are without. By which I do not mean to say that  that the Humanities are without Truth!
But there is an even more fundamental difference that derives from the fact that Science uses the language of mathematics as its preferred medium of expression. This gives Science the possibility to work with mathematically defined concepts whose meaning is given only by the ways in with scientists work with them in performing experiments and calculations, but which are without meaning, sometimes downright incomprehensible to people who only master everyday language. Well-known examples are e. g. the relativistic concept of time according to which time advances more slowly near great masses, or the wave/particle duality which is said to imply that one and the same phenomenon may manifest itself as a wave in some experimental conditions and as a particle in others!
Read literally with everyday language eyes these claims are of course simply nonsense. Within the semantic universe of Modern Science they are far from nonsensical however.
While humanists may speak about their research results in everyday language without experiencing any essential language problems, the corresponding feat often verges on the impossible for a scientist.
In summary one may say that while Newton’s Philosophy of Nature, the early modern starting point of Contemporary Science, was still essentially comprehensible to anyone who could read prose, this is no longer so. Today several years of training in specialized university courses are required.
Simultaneously with this development Science in the sense intended by the 19th century Germans or by the 20th century generativists, gradually lost contact with ordinary common sense, i. e. with non-mathematical reason.
A further point of difference is that Science usually makes its observations in terms of quantifications by means of special purpose instruments which have been constructed in obedience to known laws of nature, i. e. to the current theories of Science.
This circumstance narrows the universe of observables down to what is in the scientific sense objective, i. e. independent of human value judgments. When the object under investigation is not Nature, but Social reality. e. g. language, which in itself is nothing but  value judgments the objective methods of Science force a way of regarding speech that is alien to its subject matter.
A question I ask myself is weather such a development of linguistics would further our understanding of what language really is?
I am afraid that understanding what language really is has little if anything to do with Science and that contemporary Linguistic Science rests on a fundamental misunderstanding.
We do need to understand what language really is, and such understanding can only come with a certain amount of experience and wisdom. Science cannot offer it however. This, in brief summary is at least the point I am in the process of thrashing out in my forthcoming book on Language.
I offer these points by way of introduction to a discussion of this language question with you.