The descriptivists
Bloomfield linguistics is a branch of psychology known as “Behaviorism”. Behaviorism has a good side and a bad side. In its good aspect behaviorism is a principle of scientific method where the only things used to confirm or refute a theory are observable phenomena rather than people’s introspections (examining one’s thoughts and feelings) and intuitions.
Psychologists tend usually to proceed by introspection, but they started to acknowledge that behaviorism is the only way to give their discipline a scientific foundation.
Behaviorism manifested itself in slogans such as ‘accept everything a native speaker says in his language and nothing he says about it’.
Behaviorists observe the utterances and come up with the theories disregarding the people’s beliefs about their language.
On the other hand, we have to note that some questions can’t be answered from observational evidence only. People have plenty of beliefs about their language but a few are explicit. Behaviorists may come up with a description which had been worked out long before the linguist arrives on the scene. We now recognize that a scientific theory is not an abbreviation of a set of observation statements, but rather a guess which can’t be proved by mere observation.
Furthermore, the philosophers of science acknowledge that what is not scientific need not therefore be nonsense, like the ethics for example.
Some behaviorists believed that there is nothing that needs to be introspected because they don’t believe in the existence of minds and mental activity and this is very illogical.
What we can observe about human beings are the inputs to them (what they see, what they hear, the blows and the caresses they receive) and their outputs (what they do, what they say). Inputs to us will often affect our internal mental organization which will in turn determine many of our outputs. Since minds are complicated phenomena, there is no direct relationship between individual inputs and individual outputs. What I do may in a sense be a function of what is done to me not only in the last 5 minutes but throughout my whole life. If we observe only our inputs and our outputs, we will not be able to produce a theory which shows how inputs are related to outputs.
Since behaviorists disbelieve in minds, they feel that human inputs and outputs must be related in a straightforward fashion, like a tap below the knee is followed immediately by a jerk of the leg. This is what is called the behaviorists’ fallacy.
Take the speech for example, we find that it is a patterned category of observational output (from the speaker) and input (to the hearer). The behaviorists think that the interest of linguistics involves working out the nature of the patterns and for this it is unnecessary to appeal to hypothetical mental activity.
Where the fallacy becomes relevant is in connection with semantics, since to talk about the meanings of utterances is not to talk about patterns the utterances display but rather to talk about the effects they have on the minds of those who hear them.
For Bloomfield, to analyze meaning in a language is to show what stimuli evoke given utterances as responses, and what behavioral responses are evoked by given spoken stimuli.
There is a story about a girl Jill who saw an apple beyond a fence which made her utter the sentence “Please Jack, fetch me that apple” and the stimulus of hearing this utterance in turn causes Jack to climb the fence and bring the apple to Jill.
The problem with this story is obvious: “people very often utter a word like apple when no apple at all is present”. Bloomfield calls the latter situation displaced speech. But all of us know that displaced speech is the norm and cases like Jack-and-Jill story are exceptional. If we are in a sitting room round the fire, our chat may concern anything and if it restricts itself to the contents of the sitting room, it will be a dull conversation.
Bloomfield explains that the speaker respond to some obscure internal stimuli when he/she talks about an absent thing. This nomination is not but another to mental activity, in other words, because he didn’t observe any stimulus before the displaced speech, he talked about obscure internal stimuli.
In phonology, morphology and syntax, the “good” behaviorism of Bloomfield had a desirable influence in causing linguists to purge their analyses or appeals to intuition or inherited folk wisdom so that the analyses became genuinely scientific.
In semantics, Bloomfield’s reasoning held him to conclude that the analysis of meanings was in practice impossible which is true even that he was mistaken in supposing that obscure internal stimuli do exist.
There is a sense in which it is difficult to say a great deal about the descriptivists’ theories of language. A theory is by definition something which concentrates on the relatively constant factors in the range of phenomena with which it is concerned, while ignoring the many features that are peculiar to single individual instances.
Boas and his descriptivist successors emphasized the diversity found in human languages. Bloomfield and Joos talked about the limitless differences among languages. In other words, for the descriptivists the true theory of language was that there was no theory of language; which makes it difficult to write at length about their theory.
This unlimited diversity is a consequence of the diversity of men’s imaginings as Boas stated. At the same time, Bloomfield refused to admit that, so this led to confusions in Descriptivist thought. It is also contradictory that they wanted to study the techniques of the language regardless of its nature. All this made it difficult for them to recognize what had gone wrong when their analytical practice threw up refutations of their implicit assumptions.
Micheline Nader
