A Critical Approach to Current Linguistic Theories Within Popperian Refutation Theory

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Originally, as practiced in the nineteenth century, linguistics was philology: the history of words. Philologists tried to understand how words had changed and by what principle. The basic dimensions of linguistic organization introduced by Saussure are still basic to many approaches to how the phenomenon of language can be approached, even though they have naturally been extended and refined over time. Saussure is of semiotics (language is semiotics). His concept of the sign, signifier, signified, forms the core of the field. Also the dimension of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis of linguistic description is important.

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist who taught for many years. He was concerned with distinguishing linguistics from philology by moving from the study of the history of individual words and comparisons of languages to the study of the main and necessary structures of language. Language is highly dualistic for Saussure. It can be studied synchronically, (as a complete system within a certain moment of time) or diachronically, (which is the examination of its historical development). It can be said that structuralists focused on the synchronic aspects of culture, while post-structuralists focused on the diachronic aspects of culture.

He examined the relationship between speech and the evolution of language, and investigated language as a structured system of signs. The word linguistics was first used by him. Saussure drew a distinction between language (langue), which is the system of signs and rules owned by a community, and the activity of speaking (parole), the individual acts of speech within the given community. He considered Speaking as an activity of the individual; language as the social manifestation of speech. Language is a system of signs that evolves from the activity of speech. For Saussure, the essential unit of any language is the word, or sign. He argues that languages have a relational conception of their elements: words and their meanings are defined by comparing and contrasting their meanings to one another. He views language as having an inner duality, which is manifested by the interaction of the synchronic and diachronic, the syntagmatic and associative, the signifier and signified.

According to Saussure, diachronic change originates in the social activity of speech. Changes occur in individual patterns of speaking before becoming more widely accepted as a part of language. Saussure says that nothing enters written language without having been tested in spoken language. He maintains that written language exists for the purpose of representing spoken language. A written word is an image of a vocal sign. Language is changed by the rearranging and reinterpreting of its units. Synchronic reality is found in the structure of language at a given point in time. Diachronic reality is found in changes of language over a period of time.

Relations between linguistic signs can be either: syntagmatic (linear, sequential, or successive), or associative, paradigmatic, (substitutive, or having indeterminate order). Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families belonging to a single category; these are associative relations. Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations. You cannot take words in isolation.

He divides the word into two inseparable parts: the signifier, which is the sound image, and the signified, which is the concept associated with the signifier. Saussure stressed the arbitrariness of this association, maintaining that any signifier can refer to any signified. Saussure had a theory of meaning. A word (sign) was a fusion of concept (signified) and sound-image (signifier) the two being somehow linked as meaning in the mind. A given sign gains meaning through its relationships with other signs.

Saussure’s approach was criticized for not being precise in giving a simple, adequate and consistent definition of the concept. It was also speculative while it should be realistic. It treats images in terms of sound-images but images will be different due to individual variations in mental images. Those variations depend on the person’s experience in life. Truth conditional semiotics adopted Saussure’s ideas that truth can be established if and only if when n something is true and does exist. Unfortunately this theory does not have a universal application.

Behaviorism emerged due to the bankruptcy of ideationalism. It is a theory of learning based on the idea that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning. Behaviorism is based on observable behaviors, so it is easier to collect data and information. It represents the American way of thinking and it is behind structuralism. It appeared as a reaction to Saussure’s theory of image theory. There was a bankruptcy of concept so behaviorists look at context of situation. Behaviorism started with Bloomfield’s ideas and is primarily associated with Pavlov (classical conditioning), Skinner in the United States (operant conditioning). There are two major types of conditioning: Classical conditioning and Operant conditioning.

Behaviorists abandoned the idea of the concept because it is abstract. They believed that a scientist must only accept what he sees or experience. Bloomfield, Pavlov, and Skinner, believed that we don’t think in terms of pictures or images. Everything depends on physics where every object must have a reflection of light on it to be seen. In their views, language functions in the same way. They presented the idea of response and stimuli in this way.. (a naturally occurring stimulus is connected or linked with a response. Next, a previously neutral stimulus is paired with the naturally occurring stimulus. Eventually, the previously neutral stimulus comes to evoke the response without the presence of the naturally occurring stimulus). This is called the Classical conditioning. If there is no response, there has to be some sort of reinforcement to the stimuli to get the response needed (Operant conditioning). Also, it must be noted that the language is situational between the speaker and the listener. There is a dynamic equivalence (there must be a balance between stimulation and response.

Bloomfield suggested two terms in analyzing the meaning of linguistic; the situation in which the speaker utters it (Speaker’s stimulus, Utterance, speaker’s response, and hearer’s stimulus) and the meaning given. Bloomfield suggested give the word a meaning in terms of the characteristics of the situation.

A lot of work was based on the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, who had studied animals’ responses to conditions. Pavlov believed that humans react to stimuli in the same way. It is a technique used in behavioral training in which a naturally occurring stimulus is connected or linked with a response. Next, a previously neutral stimulus is paired with the naturally occurring stimulus. Eventually, the previously neutral stimulus comes to evoke the response without the presence of the naturally occurring stimulus. The two elements are then known as the conditioned stimulus and the conditioned response.

Operant conditioning (sometimes referred to as instrumental conditioning) is a method of learning that occurs through rewards (positive) and punishments (negative) for behavior. In operant conditioning, an association is made between a behavior and a consequence for that behavior. When an organism does a behavior and the consequences of that behavior are reinforcing, it is more likely to do it again. Behaviorism is associated with B.F. Skinner. He argued that people respond to their environment but they also operate on the environment to produce some consequences. Skinner developed the theory of “operant conditioning,” the idea that we behave the way we do because this kind of behavior has had certain consequences in the past. Skinner believed that experience of reinforcements determines our behavior. When a particular Stimulus-Response (S-R) pattern is reinforced (rewarded), the individual is motivated to respond. Reinforcement is the key element in Skinner’s S-R theory. It could be verbal praise or a good grade. Behavior that is positively reinforced will reoccur.

Behaviorists can be characterized with many features. They believed in anti-mentalism and everything should not be abstract. They empirical reject everything that is built on imagination and intuition. They are pure scientists who want to break through their frameworks. Recording appears to be an important thing because language is equated with verbal behavior. It is very empirical and rejects anything that is speculative. It stresses the importance of learning in acquiring a language. People have to acquire language as a behavior not only verbal. For them, to acquire a language one must have two things: behavior and environment (culture).

Although behaviorists were hard to penetrate or criticize, there were some points taken against them. They took their ideas after testing them on animal and thus equating animals with humans. This was their biggest defect or flaw because we all know that human has mind whereas animals have instinct. They believed that we create language as response to instincts stimuli. It is a matter of physical reaction not the mind. They seem to stress the fact that what was applicable to animals would be applicable to humans. This is the first criticism because the reaction might not be single and the reactions as well as the experience are different from one person to the other. In animals, the single stimuli will result in producing the same response. This approach also failed to explain the development of language. It is wrong to say that we are all single-minded. Meanings are not stable. This approach also appears to be more applicable to Europeans more than the Middle East people. They relate to things that are observable only. It is clear though that the unpredictable response was not explained by that approach. Predisposition is the same for behaviorists. It can’t deal with a lot of vocabulary. Linguistics model should account for all regularities of language. Behaviorists also did not explain the non-observable responses.

After the failure of behaviorism to explain language, Contextualism emerged with the great ideas of Firth. J. R. Firth – English linguist who had views to linguistic semantics and was known for studying both sound and meaning in context. He was the founder of the London School of Linguistics. Firth Developed Malinowski‘s ideas further to lay the foundations for a linguistic school: British contextualism. He also believed that Context of situation determines linguistic expressions. Each function will be defined as the use of some language form or element in relation to some context.

The theory of the “context of the situation” became central to his approach to linguistics. He asserted that language must be studied as a response to the context of particular situations. Firth was one of the first linguists to deal with collocations and put forth a theory of meaning by collocation which suggested that the meaning of a word can only be conveyed when the other words with which it usually co-occurs are also considered. Firth emphasized the importance of “know[ing] a word by the company it keeps”.

The syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of lexical items can be schematically represented by two axes: a horizontal and a vertical one. The paradigmatic axis is the vertical axis and comprises sets of words that belong to the same class and can be substituted for one another in a specific grammatical and lexical context. The horizontal axis of language is the syntagmatic axis and refers to a word’s ability to combine with other words. Firth’s attempt to describe the meaning of a word on the collocational level was innovative in that it looked at the meaning relations between lexical items, not from the old perspective of paradigmatic relations (e.g. synonyms, antonyms) but from the level of syntagmatic relations. Syntagmatic relations between sentence constituents had been widely used by structural linguists.

Firth’s theory of meaning was found to be insufficient for the study of collocations

Ludwig Wittgenstein has been considered to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century. Being skeptical by nature, Wittgenstein affirmed that only that which can be expressed can be taken seriously as a set of philosophical propositions. Languages, Wittgenstein famously decided, are “games”; and playing the particular language game is to engage in a certain “form of life.” The rules of the language game are not determined by the nature of the world, but by the training provided by the corrections and example of other speakers. One cannot simply determine the truth for oneself, because it is not external reality, but the interaction with others that determines the correct statements. Meaning, indeed, is just usage, and there are no independent senses which are to be matched up with reality to determine truth or falsehood. The theory of language is just a kind of human “natural history,” describing one form of human behavior.

John Langshaw Austin is an important British thinker who followed the later Wittgenstein in pursuing philosophical analysis through detailed study of mundane language. He is best known in applied linguistics for “How to Do Things with Words”, a book based on his lecture notes for the William James lectures. He was most remembered for his work on the philosophy of language, particularly speech acts. According to Austin, daily language is actually more subtle and complex than formal logic, and hence better able to get at the most important critical issues. His approach helped to underscore the significance of language for philosophy. Austin is generally categorized as an ordinary language philosopher. Austin does not appear to have an established philosophical system. After formulating a problem, he searches for a way of solving it, starting with a careful analysis of the words initially used in the formulation of the problem and the words that suggest themselves as ways towards solving it.

Austin clearly felt that although people often did talk nonsense, the categorization of what was nonsense and what was meaningful was too restrictive. It led him to his initial categorization of meaningful utterances into constatives and performatives. It was called “speech acts”. Austin argues that the utterance is not a case of reporting a state of affairs, but actually performing an action. The performatives are eventually grouped under five provisional categories:

1. Verdictive Verbs (delivering a finding): acquit, hold, calculate, accuse, blame, congratulate, praise, condole, commend, compliment, grateful to, honor, charge, admonish, criticize, and scold.

2. Exercitive Verbs (giving a decision): order, command, direct

3. Commissive Verbs (committing to an action): promise, vow, pledge, oath, agree, ask, offer, refuse, swear, decline, threaten, pledge.

4. Behavitive Verbs (reacting to others’ behavior): apologize, deplore, and thank, congratulations, excuses.

5. Expositive Verbs (expounding a view): affirm, emphasize, illustrate.

Austin breaks down speech acts in order to consider their component parts. In fact, the more important triplet is that of the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. These are best illustrated in relation to one of Austin’s examples: Act (A) or Locution He said to me, ‘You can’t do that’; any speech act which is neutral. It can be positive or negative depending on the participants. Act (B) or Illocution He protested against my doing it. The illocution is the reaction or effect of the locutionary. According to Austin’s preliminary informal description, the idea of an “illocutionary act” can be captured by emphasizing that “by saying something, we do something”, as when someone issues an order to someone to go by saying “Go!” Act (C) or Perlocution He pulled me up, checked me. The perlocution is when the action is performed.

Critics have attacked him on the basis that he was either reflecting on his own sense of language use or coming to agreement with other professional philosophers. In this sense, the language was not ordinary at all, and reflected the language of only a small group of professionals. Austin appears to be skeptical that we really know what a concept is until we have carefully considered the meanings of the terms used in an initial philosophical question. Performative Utterances has the feel of a partial summary of How to Do Things with Words. However, he omits many of the key terms, such as “illocution” which have become part of the terminology of applied linguistics.

There was a better theory proposed by Ivor Armstrong Richards whose interest in language and meaning was awakened by Charles Kay Ogden. Together, they wrote the book “The Meaning of Meaning”. This theory’s main idea is that meanings don’t reside in words; they reside in people. Understanding that meaning comes from individual people can help to clear up confusion and prevent arguments when communicating with others. He felt that understanding is the main goal of communication and communication problems result from misunderstanding. Richards felt that information that was lost during a conversation was due to people’s language. He wanted to closely study people’s use of language.

Richards invented the Semantic Triangle to demonstrate the relationship between symbols and their referent. At the heart of Richards’ theory of meaning is a device called the “semantic triangle”. Each corner of the triangle corresponds to a component that is integrally involved in the process of meaning:

REFERENCE– indicates the realm of memory where recollections of past experiences and contexts occur.

REFERENT– are the objects that are perceived and that create the impression stored in the thought area.

SYMBOL– is the word that calls up the referent through the mental processes of the reference.

Ogden and Richards argued that a major problem in human communication is a speaker’s tendency to treat words as if they were things in reality. In other words, we tend to confuse “symbol” or “word” with the thing or object in reality. This led Richards, in his explanation of the “proper meaning superstition”, to refute the notion that words possess a single meaning. Richards says that the Proper Meaning Superstition is false because words mean different things to different people in different situations. Rather, the meanings of words are determined by the past (and current) experiences of speakers who encounter these words in specific literary contexts. Misunderstandings, therefore, result from speakers having different references for the same symbol.

Another option to understand what each other means is by using a metaphor. A metaphor can help to clarify what each person is saying. Richards argues that metaphors are highly effective in facilitating comprehension and therefore minimizing misunderstandings. Richards gives ways to solve the problem of ambiguity. One of them is to give a definition. Definitions are words used in place of another word to explain the thought in a person’s mind. Feed forward is also an important factor when trying to avoid misunderstanding. Feed forward is when the speaker thinks of how his audience will react to what he is about to say and adjusts his words accordingly. Another concept that Richards uses is the idea of signs and symbols in communication. A sign is something that we directly encounter, but at the same time it refers to something else (Smoke is a sign of a fire). Words are a different kind of sign called a symbol. Symbols have no natural connection with the things that they describe. There is nothing special about the word that says it must be connected to what it stands for.

All of these techniques may help but it might not solve the problem. There are other factors that affect what a person means. Nonverbal communication is not even brought up in Richard’s theory. Nonverbal actions have a lot to do with what a person really means. Another problem with this theory is that simply understanding meaning does not give the whole understanding of the word unless it is in context.

One of the most interesting ideas behind the Meaning of Meaning theory is the idea of Basic English. Basic English describes the idea that there are only 850 words taken from the English language that are needed to communicate. The Meaning of Meaning Theory has both scientific and humanistic perspectives. As far as being a scientific theory this theory is relatively simple. Richards puts the theory into words and concepts that are easy to understand. The theory also has practical application because it shows us ways to clear up misunderstandings that communication confusion may have created. It gives solutions for ways to fix the problem of misunderstanding. The theory has some humanistic characteristics also. Richards attempts to understand people are because he greatly acknowledges that individual people have differences in their past experiences and personal backgrounds. These factors affect how people think and Richards brings that fact into account when developing this theory. The theory clarifies values. It shows us how important people’s meaning is and not just the words that they say. The theory also warns us to think about how the other person is going to react before we speak.

Despite these criticisms, this theory makes a lot of sense. Everyone can apply it to their everyday life. There is probably nobody in the world who has not had a problem with word confusion in some conversation that they have had. This theory is also important because it shows us how important it is to define ambiguous words.

According to the Axiomatic functionalist philosophy of science, hypothetico-deductive but with a difference, a structural description of any set of data presupposes a theory as an instrument. Without such a theory a description would not even be meaningful, in formal sense. Axiomatic-deductive contains axioms and definitions which lead to theorems. The theory may also contain models. The task of definitions is to introduce notions of theory. From some of the definitions which do this, models can be derived. Models are notions of a particular kind. The expectation of realisability is part of the meta-hypothesis of adequacy that accompanies any launching of a statement or model in the theory. It is the meta-hypothesis of adequacy that via the adequacy of description links the theory to the phenomena within its scope and makes it deserve the ’empirical’, but in a quite different sense from the inductivist use of the term. These meta-hypotheses are proper hypotheses.

They have reference to observable data and they can in principle be refuted by counter-evidence. A description doesn’t contain axioms or definitions of the kind found in the theory. It primary contains hypotheses. According to Saussure, one should be extremely careful in proceeding from labeling to inter-linguistic generalizations. A hypothesis is refuted if it conflicts with the data or other statements about the data under the same theory (invalidated). Every descriptive statement carries with it the meta-hypothesis of its ‘consistency’, its ‘adequacy’, and the assumption of not violating the principle of ‘simplicity’. If any of the former two are refuted, the description as it stands is invalidated, and has to be revised.

Whenever more exact procedures are feasible and available, they ought to replace inductivist procedures. Laws or rules and language-universals alike, are or belong to the realms of descriptive statements (they are parts of descriptions). If one now relegates such a statement to the theory, as is done by Bloomfieldians, transformationalists and, in fact, most non-saussurean linguists, such a theory has become automatically invalidated for use as an instrument in the description of languages. It is the theory that allows us to ask meaningful questions about the data, and to formulate our observations of the data in a meaningful way.

Saussure talked about the theory and point of view which depends the intention of the class of potential data, the type of data possible and relevant under that theory. Language is the intension of the class of all possible data under a particular linguistic theory of this kind, and the entity ‘language’, therefore, emerges from the theory. One sees that under this philosophy of science, in an ideal descriptive and structuralist approach everything ultimately depends on the theory and point of view. One sees that the feasibility of the point of view itself depends on the possibility of satisfying all other requirements. The appropriateness of the theory fully depends on the possibility of an adequate coverage of the data.

The term ‘material adequacy’ means the consistency of descriptive statements with the data as observed. Inconsistency in this respect amounts to a refutation of the descriptive statement in question. As to the nature of the activity (and its result) called observation, we have to realize two things; a) it is by its very nature subjective and impressionistic; in linguistics, unlike in some natural sciences, we have no recourse even to methods of reducing this to a certain extent, and b) we actually observe the totality of an event rather than an aspect of this totality. In axiomatic functionalism it is the sign theory that has been established in order to deal with the ontological aspect of our quest for knowledge concerning communication by means of language. Of course there are wider and very interesting horizons beyond sign-theory, systemology, and semantics, as such, but those do not fall within what functionalists would consider core-linguistics.

According to Karl Popper, hypothetico-deductivist, the hypothesis must be falsifiable by recognized scientific methods but can never be fully confirmed, because refined research methods may disprove it at a later date. From the hypothesis, as those discussed in this paper, the researcher must generate some initial predictions, which can be proved, or disproved, by the experimental process. These predictions must be inherently testable for the hypothetico-deductive method to be a valid process. Boldness in conjectures on the one hand and austerity in refutations on the other: this is Popper’s recipe. Commitment is for Popper an outright crime. This paper points out the progress of linguistic theories and acknowledges the new theories which replaced old refuted ones. Saussure’s ideational theory was used until linguists found a flaw in it and after criticizing this approach, a new behaviorism emerged to fill in those gaps in the previous approach. After a time, there were a lot of linguistic things which was not explained by the new approach of behaviorism and thus emerged the theory of the context of situation and so on. Apparently, these approaches fall within the realm of Popper and Lakatos scientific framework in the sense that a theory will be proposed, observations are made and then by experiments it will be refuted or accepted.

By: Latifah Khalid AlHusain

Supervised by: Professor Alaeddin Hussain

References:

* BEHAVIORISM AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE; A HISTORICAL REASSESSMENT R.B. POWELL AND A.W. STILL

* BEHAVIORISM AS A THEORY OF PERSONALITY: A CRITICAL LOOK PAYAL NAIK ;; NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

* COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS BY: FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE

* SAUSSURE: SIGNS, SYSTEM, AND ARBITRARINESS BY: DAVID HOLDCROFT

* THE INFLUENCE OF J. L. AUSTIN INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

* JOHN LANGSHAW AUSTIN : THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHER JOHN LANGSHAW AUSTIN (1911-1960) TAUGHT A GENERATION OF OXFORD STUDENTS A RIGOROUS STYLE OF PHILOSOPHIZING BASED ON LANGUAGE ANALYSIS.

* RICHARDS’ MEANING OF MEANING THEORY BY JESSICA ERICKSTAD

* The Meaning of Meaning By Charles Kay Ogden and Ivor Armstrong Richards

* Griffen, E.M.(1997). A first look at communication theory. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.

* Ogden, C.K.(1923). The meaning of meaning. New York: Harcourt,Brace & World, Inc.