Wierzbicka, Anna (2011). Uniwersalia ugruntowane empirycznie [Empirically grounded universals]. Teksty Drugie, 2011(1/2), 13-30. PDF (open access)
Written in Polish.
One of the central debates in human sciences concerns the relation between human universals and human diversity. Some scholars – for example the cognitivist Stephen Pinker – emphasize the unity of human nature and treat the diversity as more or less superficial. Others – for example the anthropologist Clifford Geertz – emphasize the diversity and are sceptical of any proposed universals. The NSM theory of language, culture and cognition developed by linguists Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard rejects the “either-or” approaches to universality and diversity and explores cultural diversity with analytical techniques based on empirically grounded universals. Through decades of cross-linguistic investigations, NSM researchers have identified a set of universal human concepts, lexically embodied, as evidence suggests, in all languages, together with their inherent grammar. In hundreds of descriptive studies, they have applied this approach to the investigation of culturally-shaped systems of meaning, using as their common measure the set of “universal words”, that is, lexically embodied concepts found in the intersection of all sampled languages.
This article argues that the NSM approach can bring a resolution of the stalemate between universalists such as Pinker and relativists (or “anti-antirelativists”) such as Geertz: NSM provides a conceptual basis on which human sciences can build, without ethnocentrism, even in the era of a global domination of English and its use, in scholarship and in education, can facilitate genuine cross-cultural understanding.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
