nsm-approach.net

Wierzbicka, Anna (2011). Defining ‘the humanities’. Culture & Psychology, 17(1), 31-46. DOI: 10.1177/1354067X10388841

The division of knowledge into ‘science,’ ‘social science,’ and ‘the humanities’ is deeply entrenched in ways of thinking prevailing in the English-speaking world and is reflected in many institutional structures. The English word science, which excludes not only ‘the humanities’ but also logic and mathematics, does not have exact equivalents in other European languages. It is a conceptual artefact of modern English and is saturated, so to speak, with British empiricism. There is a pressure on speakers of English to regard ‘natural sciences’ as a paradigm of all knowledge, or at least all knowledge that modern
societies should value and pursue. The semantic changes that the English word science has undergone in the last two centuries or so make empirically-based knowledge of the external world seem central to all human knowledge. This paper shows why ‘the humanities’ constitute a field of inquiry that is fundamentally different from ‘science’ (and from ‘social sciences’ modelled on ‘science’) and yet essential to human knowledge and ‘human understanding.’ In doing so, the paper draws on the thought of the
18th-century Italian philosopher Giambatista Vico and on the methodology of linguistic semantics, and in particular on the ‘NSM’ theory of language and thought.

Wierzbicka, Anna (2012). Understanding others requires shared concepts. Pragmatics & Cognition, 20(2), 356-379. DOI: 10.1075/pc.20.2.09wie

“It is a noble task to try to understand others, and to have them understand you (…) but it is never an easy one”, says Everett. This paper argues that a basic prerequisite for understanding others (and also for having them understand you) is to have some shared concepts on which this understanding can build. If speakers of different languages didn’t share some concepts to begin with then cross-cultural understanding would not be possible even with the best of will on all sides.

Everett stresses the great value of each language as a unique perspective on the world and a “repository of the riches of highly specialized cultural experiences”, and I fully agree with this. But to access those riches hidden in the thousands of the world’s languages we need to understand the meanings encoded in each language (both in its words and its grammar). We could not understand those meanings if we didn’t have a stock of shared concepts (acknowledged even by Whorf) with which we could build conceptual bridges between other peoples’ conceptual worlds and our own. Unfortunately, Everett seems unable to see this point and in his eagerness to depict the Pirahã people as radically different from the rest of the humankind he goes far beyond the linguistic evidence (as presented in his own publications on the Pirahã language) — as one can clearly see if this evidence is subjected to careful semantic analysis based on a coherent methodology.

For example, Everett claims that Pirahã has no word for “mother”, no words for “before’ and “after”, no words for “one”, “two” and “all” and no words comparable to ‘think” and “want”. These claims are based, I believe, on faulty semantic analysis, and in particular, on a determination not to recognize polysemy under any circumstances. As I see it, at many points this stance makes nonsense of Everett’s own data and distorts the conceptual world of the Pirahã. Since he does not want to recognize the existence of any shared concepts, Everett is also not prepared to address the question of a culture-neutral metalanguage in which Pirahã and English conceptual categories could be compared. This often leads him to imposing cultural categories of English (such as “evidence”, “tolerance” and “parent”) on the conceptual world of the Pirahã. The result is a combination of exoticism and Anglocentrism which doesn’t do justice to Everett’s long and intimate engagement with the Pirahã people and their language. Sadly, it blinds him to what Franz Boas called “the psychic unity of mankind”, reflected in the common semantic features of human languages and fully compatible with the cultural shaping of their lexicons and grammars.

Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Moral absolutes and the multiplicity of languages. In Anna Kozlowska, & Agnieszka Swiatek (Eds.), Znaczenie, tekst, kultura (pp. 119-138). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynaka Stefana Wyszynskiego.