The Sokal affair was a minor incident in which physics professor Alan Sokal published a “hoax” (his term) paper in the cultural studies journal Social Text. Sokal’s intent was to demonstrate that reviewers and editors would approve of an article of utter nonsense so long as it obeyed certain preconceived notions, in this case that everything is a social construct. (It is, but that’s a story for another blog.)
The affair has been “read” many ways but it is generally understood to illustrate poor editorial standards at top humanities journals and/or the bankruptcy of the entire cultural studies enterprise. However, I don’t think we have any reason to suspect that either of these critiques are limited to cultural studies and adjacent fields.
I submit that the Pirahã recursion affair has many of the makings of a linguistic Sokal affair. But if anything, the outlook for linguistics is quite a bit worse than the Sokal story. By all accounts, Sokal’s hoax article was a minor scholarly event, and does not seem to have received much attention before it was revealed to be a hoax. In contrast, when Everett’s article first appeared in Current Anthropology in 2005, it received an enormous amount of attention from both scholars and the press, and ultimately led to to multiple books, including a sympathetic portrait of Everett and his work by none other than the late Tom Wolfe (bang! krrp!). Finally, nearly all of what Everett has written on the subject is manifest nonsense.
I believe many scholars in linguistics and adjacent fields found Everett’s claim compelling, and while I think linguists should have seen through the logical leaps and magical thinking in the Current Anthropology piece, it wasn’t until a few years later, after the exchange with Nevins et al. in Language, that the empirical issues (to put it mildly) with Everett’s claims came to light. But the key element which gave Everett’s work such influence is that, like Sokal intended his hoax to do, it played to the biases (anti-generativist, and particularly, anti-Noam Chomsky) of a wide swath of academics (and to a lesser degree, fans of US empire, like Tom Wolfe). In that regard, it scarcely matters whether Everett himself believes or believed what he wrote: we have all been hoaxed.
Thanks for this. Everett’s no recursivity claim has such appeal in good part because it fulfills a kind of prophecy that innatist views are doomed, doomed and about to collapse. I’ve been hearing that since I started in linguistics. It’s fairly common in sociolinguistics as you probably know, particularly though not exclusively with the more anthropologically adjacent parts. Here we get a conflation of species-wide innate endowment claims and evolutionary psychological ones that argue for hard wired cognitive differences within human populations based on biological sex or even more darkly on race. People in this camp generally folllow the slogan “love Chomsky’s politics, hate his linguistics.” My response in my last argument with one linguistic anthropologist was that racist policy has followed from both anti-innatist assumptions as well as innatist ones. I know you didn’t say that the opposition in linguistics had the same origins as Wolfe’s, but it’s important to point out that that leftists are quite vulnerable to motivated reasoning too.
I guess my snarky email on that tweet about Critical Theory must have prompted this 🙂
But I don’t think the comparison is a fair one. A *lot* of linguists—and not just the generativists, who would be expected to take offense—had issues with Everett’s claims. And not just linguists. My friend Steve Farmer, whose background was originally in comparative history, had lots of issues with Everett’s claims about the Pirahã lacking any kind of myth or religion.
Also, if nothing else, there are glaring inconsistencies in Everett’s own papers. A piece he did years ago in (I think) Current Anthropology, makes the claim that the Pirahã lacked a counting system, and lacked words for colors, but later on glosses an example as “two red airplanes”.
To be sure many of us initially found some of his claims interesting and even attractive. But that’s the way with many things: something has some appealing points at the beginning, but then you begin to drill down. After all, in the Science work that you reference in your other piece on “Language: The Cultural Tool”, I had reservations both with Rao’s work and with Atkins’ work from the start, but no clear basis for rejecting what they had done. It was only after drilling down that it became clear all of the things that were wrong with their work. In the case of Rao’s work, it has taken me a decade to fully understand all the ramifications, not just in terms of the errors and fallacies in their approach but, equally importantly, why their work seems so convincing to so many people. I go into some detail on this issue in a new book I am working on on symbol systems.
But no matter: the point is that in linguistics, usually, there is a standard of comparison against which one can evaluate work and see whether it measures up. What would that standard of comparison be in Critical Theory? If Sokal had not published his self-expose, would anyone have caught on?
See the thing is nobody even read Sokal’s paper before he revealed it was a hoax, except perhaps the reviewers and editors, who later said they deferred to him in part because of his reputation as a physicist. Whereas tens of thousands of people have read Everett’s work (and the critiques) and decided he’s right.
Have tens of thousands of qualified *linguists* read Everett and decided he’s right?
I think so, unfortunately. Certainly in “empiricist psycholinguistics” Everett is a hero, and some ling-anthro types also found the presentation compelling. I believe there exist actual departments of linguistics where it’s taught as a triumph. (As you mention, though, the critiques came not just from generavists: Enfield and Evans for instance were both highly critical off the bat. Good on them. But many others apparently found it compelling.)
I’m guessing your notion of ’empiricist psycholinguistics’ is US-centric (counting Tomasello as US)? And I don’t think what you say about linguistic anthropologists is right either. Note that Levinson (who could qualify as a nodal point in both these networks) is also among the original replies to the CurrAnth piece, and not quite as a supporter or believer. Everett’s work seems to have an outsized influence because of all the media attention. Once you actually read it (as you did) it is not all that compelling.
I would say Levinson should be counted as a major detractor on the basis of his reply to the CA piece.
Tomasello and Gibson are for me enormous names in psycholinguistics (one’s worked in Europe for decades, the other’s a Canadian) and both (cynically, I suspect but who knows) have loudly promoted Everett’s work.