From: "Marshall Feldman" <marsh-AT-uri.edu>
Subject: BHA: RE: Language
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 09:53:24 -0500


I did want to make one other point about language. I was going to make it in
my own words, but then in class yesterday I found myself reading this
passage from Andrew Sayer's _Realism and Social Science_. Sayer makes my
point exactly and much more eloquently than I can:

	The "linguistic turn" in philosophy has been a mixed blessing. While it has
	alerted us to the constitutive role of language and textuality in
understanding
	it is strikingly ignorant of our ability to do things without language.
Thus
	deaf-mute people who have never learned a language, whether verbal or
signed, can
	still know a lot. It is therefore a mistake to restrict epistemology to the
	relationship between language and objects (Dews, 1984). Practice is
conspicuously
	absent from postmodernist critiques of reference and representation, such
as those
	of Strohmayer and Hannah (1992) or Hutcheon (1988). Knowledge is only
discussed in
	terms of speaking and writing, never doing.

I've often felt that much of the linguistic turn is due to the fact that it
originated with academics trained in the humanities. How anyone who's ever
struggled through a chemistry course involving experiments could ever equate
knowledge with language is beyond me. When I took courses like this, I --
along with many classmates -- failed more than one assignment because I
couldn't get the test tubes clean enough, because I measured reagents too
imprecisely, or because I held the test tube too close to the flame and
overcooked the stuff I was working with.

	Marsh Feldman




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