The linguistic thought of Ernest Gellner

Abstract

Theoretical questions concerning language and communication figure prominently throughout the work of the Czech-British social philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1925–1995). The article traces the development of Gellner’s linguistic thought from his early, controversial engagements with Ordinary Language Philosophy to his responses to Chomsky’s work in linguistics and his late-career (re)assessments of Wittgenstein and particularly Malinowski whose – subsequently repudiated – view of the fundamental difference between the alleged “primitive” and “scientific” functions of language turns out to play a central explanatory role in Gellner’s renowned theory of nationalism. The key to understanding Gellner’s thinking on language is to grasp both his adherence to a “telementational” model of communication and his scientism. This leads him to embrace the view that modern national cultures are predicated upon an industrial-scientific mode of cognition which both requires and entails a radically distinctive metaphysics of communication, namely one which allows for the conveyance of culture-transcending, “context-free” conceptual content. This, I claim, is a serious error which stems in large part from a misdiagnosis of the cognitive and communicative consequences of literacy and in particular a failure to correctly apprehend what linguist Roy Harris has termed the “autoglottic space” engendered by the availability of writing.

Keywords:

• Ernest Gellner
• Malinowski
• Chomsky
• Wittgenstein
• nationalism
• scientism

Notes

1. The back-cover blurb to Gellner’s final book (Gellner 1998) even mentions an, albeit unattributed, description of him as “one of the last great Central European polymath intellectuals”.

2. Gray (2011) also identifies Gellner’s scientism as a defining feature of his socio-philosophical thought.

3. A tautologous expression from Gellner’s perspective. For him, nations are by definition products of modernity. For an alternative account which emphasizes the continuity of many nations with elements of pre-modern ethno-cultural formations, see Smith (1987, 1998).

4. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this point.

5. For a highly critical discussion of Words & Things, see Uschanov (2002).

6. Gellner did also discuss the work of, amongst others, Malinowski, Garfinkel and Quine who, however, would generally be regarded as belonging to the fields of anthropology, ethnomethodology and the philosophy of language respectively. Not that these disciplinary distinctions count for much in the context of the present discussion.

7. For Chomsky, the essential purpose of language is to express or formulate individual thought. The socio-communicative function of language is held to be little more than a fortuitous epiphenomenon of this more basic function and, as a result, philosophically far less interesting. However, as Carr (1997) shows, the Chomskyan generative programme is in fact also logically committed to a version of the telementation thesis.

8. The English translation of Aristotle’s pathemata tes psyches.

9. Gellner (1975, 89) writes that Chomsky’s “negative, demolition work seems to be entirely conclusive”.

10. Faith in the explanatory force of structures of course also strongly informs Gellner’s sociology.

11. As Gellner (1998, 149) notes, “Wittgenstein invented his tribes while Malinowski studied them”. He goes on to attribute philosophers’ widespread ignorance of Malinowski’s ideas, which long preceded those of Wittgenstein, to the fact that whereas “Malinowski would have sent them into the field […] in post-war Oxford the study of context-bound active use of language could be carried out, far more cheaply and comfortably, on Saturday mornings”.

12. Neither, for that matter, if one accepts Roy Harris’s (1989) account, does writing restructure thought in quite the way Ong claims.