Language, race, and history
The origin of the Whitney-Müller debate and the transformation of the human sciences
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4003402 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David A Valone (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 119-134 |
| Publication date | 1996-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-5061 • E-ISSN: 1520-6696 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/(sici)1520-6696(199604)32:2<119::aid-jhbs1>3.0.co;2-r |
| OpenAlex | W2078908574 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 13 |
Practitioners of disciplines often create a history of their field that justifies their own theoretical perspective. In the introduction to his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure constructed such a history for the study of language. In doing so, he gave a very different evaluation of two of his immediate predecessors, William Dwight Whitney and Friedrich Max Müller, praising Whitney while relegating Müller to the outmoded past. These two scholars, however, were nearly exact contemporaries; they were trained similarly, and were interested in a similar set of linguistic issues. Beginning around 1870, Whitney and Müller engaged in an epic scholarly debate that raged for more than twenty years. The origin of this conflict was a controversy over Darwinian evolution, but their disagreement had deeper roots in the long-standing connection between language study and discussions of racial history. By intellectually distancing Whitney and Müller and writing their debate out of his history, Saussure emphasized the independence and objectivity of his new “scientific” linguistics and excluded the racial controversies that had been central to comparative philology during the nineteenth century.
Epistemology · Feminism · History of linguistics · Human science · Linguistics · Objectivity (philosophy) · Philology · Race (biology) · Sociology · Classical Studies and Philology · Gender Studies · Gender Studies in Language · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy
The leopard's spots
Saussure
That Noble Dream
Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior
Victorian Anthropology
The Science of Language
Americans and German Scholarship, 1770-1870
History of linguistic thought and contemporary linguistics
The science of language and the evolution of mind
The Applicability of Kuhn's Paradigms to the History of Linguistics
The Re-Education of Friedrich Max Muller
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,22 |
| Citation span | 2008 - 2023 (16) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |