Margaret Macdonald on Philosophy and Art

 

Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations.’ This provocative remark comes from the paper ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’ (1953) by Margaret Macdonald. Macdonald was a figure at the institutional heart of British philosophy in the mid-20th century whose work, especially her views on the nature of philosophy itself, deserves to be better known.

Early proponents of the ‘analytic’ method in philosophy such as Bertrand Russell saw good philosophy as science-like and were dismissive of philosophy that was overly poetic or unscientific. Russell, for example, took issue with the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was something of a bête-noire for early analytic philosophers. Bergson’s theorising (Russell thought) did not depend on argument but rather on expressing ‘truths’, so-called, arrived at by introspection. As Russell wrote in ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’ (1912):

“His imaginative picture of the world, regarded as a poetic effort, is in the main not capable of either proof or disproof. Shakespeare says life’s but a walking shadow, Shelley says it is like a dome of many-colored glass, Bergson says it is a shell which burst into parts that are again shells. If you like Bergson’s image better, it is just as legitimate.”

Russell places Bergson alongside William Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley and worries that there is no objective measure of whose worldview is more accurate. There’s no way of proving which is a better account of things, it’s simply a matter of which ‘image’ you like best. In other words, there’s no attempt to provide empirical evidence – evidence based on publicly observable data – in support of these views. For Russell, this was enough to show that what Bergson was doing was not really philosophy, at least not good philosophy, any more than Shakespeare’s plays and Shelley’s poetry were.

Russell’s view of what counts as good philosophy was not one that Macdonald shared. In her 1953 paper, she embraces comparisons between philosophy and literature, poetry and art. For Macdonald, philosophical theories are very much like ‘pictures’ or ‘stories’ and, perhaps even more controversially, she suggests that philosophical debates often come down to ‘temperamental differences’. For example, whether you are willing to believe (in accordance with thinkers like René Descartes) that we have an immaterial soul will come down to more than just the philosophical arguments you are presented with. Your view on this matter, Macdonald thinks, will more likely be determined by your own personal values, life experiences, religion and so on. In this way, she thinks, temperamental differences account for many philosophical disagreements.

However, unlike Bergson, Macdonald was not working in a different philosophical tradition from Russell. She was, to all appearances at least, just as much a part of analytic philosophy as he was. In fact, institutionally, she was at the very centre of things. Macdonald studied at the University of London and her PhD was supervised by Susan Stebbing, the first woman in Britain to be appointed a full professor of philosophy. Along with Stebbing and others including Gilbert Ryle, Macdonald helped found Analysis – the academic journal of analytic philosophy – which she later edited after the Second World War. And throughout the 1930s and ’50s, she published many articles in venues like the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, the UK’s foremost philosophical society, and was an active member of Cambridge University’s Moral Sciences Club.

So what happened? How did Macdonald end up with such a different view about what good philosophy looks like from Russell’s? And, if Macdonald was right, what does that imply about the value of philosophy?

The story of Macdonald’s entry into philosophy is quite remarkable. She was born in 1903 into poverty to a single mother who later absconded to Australia, leaving her baby behind to be fostered. Macdonald was ill throughout her childhood and youth, suffering from tuberculosis (among other things), and supported by an organisation called the National Children’s Home and Orphanage that later helped pay for her undergraduate studies. As Michael Kremer notes, Macdonald’s upbringing stands in stark contrast with many of the canonical figures in 20th-century philosophy such as Russell, who was born into British aristocracy (his grandfather was an earl who was twice prime minister), Ludwig Wittgenstein, a member of what was, historically, an extremely wealthy family (his father Karl, an industrialist, was one of the richest men in Europe), or Ryle, who spent his entire adult life easily moving through the ranks at the University of Oxford.

Stebbing was an important figure in Macdonald’s life, both personally and professionally. Macdonald was one of a number of women who benefitted from Stebbing’s supervision, along with Ruth Lydia Saw and Elsie Whetnall, and would go on to teach at Bedford College (now part of Royal Holloway, University of London) where Stebbing was professor of philosophy.

It was not easy for women to establish themselves in philosophy at this time and many women’s careers were negatively impacted by sexism (Oxford didn’t bestow degrees to women until 1920, and at the University of Cambridge it even later: 1948). When she applied for G E Moore’s Chair in Cambridge in 1938, Stebbing, for example, was told by Ryle that ‘everyone thinks you are the right person to succeed Moore, except that you are a woman’. Blunt to say the least. Similarly, in a letter to a friend in 1939, Macdonald writes: ‘I have been hoping to get a permanent lectureship in philosophy … It is difficult in my subject, especially for a woman.’ Nonetheless, through a pipeline from Bedford College into academic philosophy (and often back to Bedford College), Stebbing was able to help several women establish themselves in the profession.

It is also likely that Stebbing had a hand in pushing Macdonald to focus on the relationship between philosophy and language. In Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), Stebbing emphasises the importance of distinguishing between different uses of language – eg, the difference between descriptive and emotive language – not only in philosophy, but in public discourse such as politics and journalism. After working with Stebbing, Macdonald went to Cambridge to work on a project on the influence of language on the concept of ‘matter’, a topic on which Stebbing herself once planned to write a book.

Soon after arriving in Cambridge in the 1930s, Macdonald met Wittgenstein, a towering figure in 20th-century philosophy. Along with Alice Ambrose, Macdonald attended many of his lectures – and the two women would go on to publish the so-called Blue and Brown Books, collated from notes they took between 1932-1935. It is no coincidence that, from the late 1930s onwards, Macdonald’s work often draws on what is known as ‘linguistic analysis’ – which is an approach to philosophy rather than a specific theory. Linguistic analysis was central to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (and important in Ambrose’s philosophy, too).

Linguistic analysis involves paying attention to and drawing conclusions from the language used in particular contexts, including philosophical debates, scientific theories, and ordinary (common-sense) language. In her essay ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’, Macdonald subjects philosophical enquiry itself to scrutiny, analysing the sorts of ways that philosophers talk and write – especially in comparison with scientists. This kind of linguistic analysis is a way of taking a step back and taking a look at the practice of philosophy itself. It involves answering questions like: What do philosophical disagreements involve and what do philosophical theories look like?

In a sense, then, Macdonald’s aims can be thought of as anthropological: she is interested in making observations about what a particular subsection of society – philosophers – are doing and providing a description of their activities. Macdonald takes philosophers of perception as her case study (hence the paper’s title) and, by paying attention to the language they use, offers an account of what philosophy of perception really amounts to. Although, as we will see, her findings stretch beyond just philosophy of perception, they include the nature of philosophy itself.

Putting the tools of linguistic analysis to work, Macdonald focuses her attention on the word ‘theory’. What do philosophers mean when they talk about philosophical ‘theories’? And is it the same thing that scientists mean when they use the word ‘theory’? Macdonald’s answer is a categorical ‘No’.

She claims that, when scientists put forward theories, they do so to explain empirical facts. Scientists put forward hypotheses (eg, ‘Earth is round’ or ‘physical objects are governed by laws of gravity’), which can then be verified (or falsified) by experiments and observations, leaving behind only plausible theories, and eliminating those that are refuted by factual evidence. Thus, Macdonald writes: ‘Confirmation and refutation by fact is an essential part of the meaning of “theory” in its empirical sense.’

If ‘confirmation and refutation by fact’ based on experiments is essential to the way that the word ‘theory’ is used by scientists, that provides a basis on which to examine whether philosophers use the word ‘theory’ in that way. And this is where Macdonald thinks philosophical theories differ from what scientists mean by the term:

“They cannot be tested. Every philosophical theory of perception is compatible with all perceptual facts.”

According to Macdonald, philosophical theories cannot be tested. Is that true? What might she mean by this? Once again, she uses the philosophy of perception as her example.

Two opposing positions in the philosophy of perception are direct realism and indirect realism (I’m going to oversimplify both here). Direct realism is the view that we directly perceive external objects in the world around us. When I look out of my window, I directly see a tree – and the nature of my perceptual experience informs me (directly) about the nature of the tree. Indirect realism, on the other hand, is the view that I only ever indirectly perceive objects like trees. What I directly perceive are mental representations – ie, ideas of trees – that are produced in my mind when my sense organs (eg, my eyes) are stimulated in the right way and send signals to my brain. I learn about the world around via these ideas (also known as ‘sense data’) in my mind. Direct realism might seem more common-sensical, but indirect realism might seem better equipped to deal with the existence of illusory or hallucinatory experiences, where I am seemingly not perceiving the world the way it really is. Given all this, isn’t it true to say that direct realists and indirect realists disagree on the facts?

In a sense, yes. But Macdonald’s point is that there is no disagreement on the phenomenological facts: facts about what it is like to have a perceptual experience. Both the direct realist and the indirect realist agree that, when I look out my window, I see a tree. What they disagree on is what it means to say that ‘I see a tree’ – they disagree on the mechanics of what is going on, or how best to explain the fact that I see a tree. Most importantly, for Macdonald, there’s no empirical test available to draw a line between the two theories. We can’t run an experiment to test for the truth of either theory because, on the level of experience, both parties agree that it’s true to say: ‘I see a tree.’

Thus, the first step in Macdonald’s meta-philosophical argument is to show that philosophical theories are not ‘theories’ in a scientific sense since they lack the essential criterion of being confirmed or refuted by fact. For this reason, she argues, philosophical theories, unlike scientific theories, are not in the business of discovering new facts.

So what is it that philosophical theories do? Macdonald’s answer is: ‘What they do suggest are new forms of expression for familiar facts.’

At this point, Macdonald’s analysis of the value of philosophy takes a turn that would have made Russell – who tried to move philosophy as far away from the arts as possible – very uncomfortable. Macdonald claims that philosophy’s value is much closer to that of art, literature or poetry than science. She explains that the arts inform us that ‘Language has many uses besides that of giving factual information or drawing deductive conclusions.’ A philosophical theory may not provide ‘information in a scientific sense’, she writes, ‘but, as poetry shows, it is far from worthless.’

By this point in her career, Macdonald had engaged extensively with the philosophy of art, the philosophy of art criticism, and the philosophy of fiction. Her meta-philosophical claims in ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’ indicate that her engagement with the arts gave her an acute sense of where their value lies. What’s more, she evidently came to believe that the value of philosophy is very similar.

A good work of poetry, art or literature, Macdonald explains, can ‘enlarge’ certain aspects of human life to help us see and think about them differently. For example, Shakespeare’s Othello encourages us to think about jealousy by making it the centrepiece of the play. Or consider the emphasis on humanity’s relationship with nature in Romantic poetry. In both cases, the artist has ‘zoomed in’ on, or ‘enlarged’, an aspect of life – in a way that it is not typically enlarged in real life – to encourage the audience to reflect on it.

Macdonald’s claim is that philosophical theories act in a similar way – different theories ‘enlarge’ certain aspects of experience. And this, in turn, means that the proponents of those theories end up telling competing stories. Some philosophers, like Plato, emphasise the degree to which our senses deceive us. Others, like Aristotle, emphasise the degree to which sense-experience is key to knowledge. Again, Plato and Aristotle did not disagree on the facts of experience – both agree that when I look out the window, I see a tree. But they disagree about the kind of story we ought to tell about those facts. In Plato’s story, the senses are the villains. In Aristotle’s, they are the heroes. Thus, Macdonald writes:

“Everyone, it is sometimes said, is born either a little platonist or a little aristotelian. Whatever be the truth of this aphorism has little to do with the truth and falsity of these doctrines. It refers rather to temperamental differences.”

What we find in Macdonald’s meta-philosophy, then, is a 180-degree turn away from the ‘scientistic’ account of good philosophy that Russell endorsed. Russell worried that choosing between Shakespeare, Shelley or Bergson might turn out to be simply a matter of individual preference, that there would be no criterion for showing that one was a better thinker than another. But Macdonald’s claim is that this is true of any philosophical theory – different stories will suit different temperaments.

At this point, one might think: enough is enough. It’s all very well to consider how philosophy overlaps with the arts, but surely Macdonald has gone too far when she suggests that philosophical theories are just ‘good stories’. More formally, one might worry that Macdonald’s account of philosophical debate generates a problem of relativism.

If philosophical debates come down to ‘temperamental differences’, then it looks like there’s no real right or wrong (or true or false) – any more than it’s right or wrong to prefer John Keats to Shelley, or Sally Rooney to James Joyce. Macdonald herself articulates the concern like so: ‘Ought not philosophy to be impersonal, unemotional and strictly rational?’

This leaves Macdonald with two options. The first is to bite the bullet and accept that, since artistic judgments are relativistic, and philosophy is like the arts, then philosophical preferences must be relativistic too. But there is another response available to Macdonald that does not involve accepting the charge of relativism. Note that the line of reasoning above depends upon a crucial assumption: that artistic judgments are relativistic.

Is this really true? Are judgments about art, literature and poetry purely a matter of subjective preferences? Some might be tempted to answer ‘Yes’. If I like my child’s hand painting more than a piece hanging in Tate Modern, I might be inclined to say that, for me, it is a better piece of art. Similarly, if I get more enjoyment reading Rooney’s novel Normal People than Joyce’s Ulysses, then who’s to say that Joyce is a better writer.

However, elsewhere in her writing – eg, her essay ‘Natural Rights’(1947) – Macdonald endorses the view that, while artistic judgments cannot be empirically tested – and thus ‘falsified’ or ‘verified’ like scientific hypotheses – they can be defended and justified. An art critic can justify their judgment that one piece of art is better than another. And they can persuade others to agree with them, and minds can be changed. In that sense, Macdonald suggests, a critic is like a barrister, pointing to certain evidence and telling a story intended to win over the jury to a particular point of view. In other words, artistic preferences are not entirely relativistic.

Consider a case in which you read a novel and find it underwhelming – it didn’t capture your imagination or engage you. But later you speak to a friend who explains how the novel alludes to certain literary tropes, or subverts the genre in some unique way, or satirises a political movement you were unaware of. You might find that your mind has changed. Your attention has been drawn to features of the novel and, to borrow Iris Murdoch’s words, you have been forced to ‘look again’.

In ‘Natural Rights’, Macdonald argues that ethical judgments (eg, ‘murder is wrong’ or ‘it is wrong to steal’), while they are not empirical in same way that scientific hypotheses are – they cannot be tested by experiment – are nonetheless meaningful. And, again, she draws on judgments about the arts as a model for what meaningful, but non-empirical, statements might look like. For Macdonald, the job of a moral philosopher is akin to that of an art critic: both are in the business of defending or justifying certain judgments or preferences. It’s not, as Russell says, as simple as liking one image more than another. There’s an onus on being able to justify or rationalise that preference.

The worry might persist that surely there’s the matter of truth to contend with. Philosophical theories might be like good stories, but surely only one of those stories can be true, or at least closer to the truth than another? Macdonald doesn’t address this question head-on so it isn’t obvious what her answer would be. I have attempted to show that her view is that even our individual preferences can be defended or justified, just like works of art, meaning that our philosophical views need not purely come down to mere gut intuitions. But I am tempted to suggest that Macdonald would not be overly concerned about truth – at least not in the way we usually think of it. Other scholars, like Cheryl Misak, have connected Macdonald to pragmatist philosophers like Frank Ramsey. Pragmatism, in a nutshell, is the view that what is true is what is useful. And different philosophical theories can be useful to different people for different reasons (such as, Macdonald might add, their temperament). While it is by no means explicit, the relativistic bent to Macdonald’s account of philosophical theories might signal that she was influenced by pragmatist ways of thinking about truth.

While Russell’s comparison between Bergson’s philosophy and the writings of Shakespeare or Shelley is intended as a form of criticism, Macdonald argues that an appreciation of the arts is key to understanding where the value of philosophical enquiry lies. In fact, Macdonald argues that philosophers ought to stop trying to make scientific philosophy a thing – because it is dangerous for philosophy. So long as philosophers like Russell keep up the pretence that philosophy ought to be like science, they are judging it by a standard that it cannot hope to meet – precisely because philosophical ‘theories’ aren’t empirically testable.

But Macdonald’s attempts to push philosophy away from science and towards the arts isn’t just a defensive manoeuvre. It’s also, she thinks, a way of making the value of philosophy clearer. For Macdonald, philosophy’s value lies not in providing us with new facts about the world, but rather in helping to see the familiar in a new light, in drawing attention to features of experience that might ordinarily pass us by, and by providing us with stories that can help make better sense of the world around us. Whether her story about what philosophy is is better than Russell’s story, or just a different story, well, that’s up to you to decide.

 

Philosophy is an art. By Peter West. Aeon, April 15, 2024. 

Abstract

In this paper, I show that, in a number of publications in the early 1950s, Margaret Macdonald argues that art does not admit of definition, that art is – in the sense associated with Wittgenstein – a family resemblance concept, and that definitions of art are best understood as confused or poorly expressed contributions to art criticism. This package of views is most typically associated with a famous paper by Morris Weitz from 1956. I demonstrate that Macdonald advanced that package prior to Weitz, indeed, prior to any other philosopher of art of the period. Despite this, Macdonald’s contribution is nowhere to be found in the subsequent literature on the definition of art. In closing, I raise the prospect that Macdonald was in fact the primary influence on the development of Weitz’s critique of the definitional project.

1. Introduction

I have four aims in what follows. The first is to show that Margaret Macdonald was an early critic of the project of defining art, that is, of attempting to capture the essence of art by specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s being a work of art. This anti-definitional or anti-essentialist outlook was widespread in the mid-twentieth century (see Gallie, “Function of Philosophical Aesthetics”; Ziff, “The Task of Defining”; Elton “Introduction”; Kennick “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest … ?”; Kemp “Generalization in Philosophy of Art”; Morgan “Art Pure and Simple”; Berleant “Note on the Problem”; Brunius “The Uses of Works”; Cohen “Aesthetic Essence”). Almost all of those who expressed it took their cue from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later remarks on language and philosophical method. For this reason, the outlook has been dubbed “Neo-Wittgensteinian” (Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 209) or “First Wave Wittgensteinianism” (Guyer, History of Modern Aesthetics, 449). That Macdonald shared this outlook is no doubt due in part to her having attended Wittgenstein’s lectures while holding a research fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge (1934–1937).
 
The name typically associated with anti-essentialism with respect to art is Morris Weitz. His article, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” (1956), is variously described as “groundbreaking” (Novitz, “Disputes About Art”, 154), “landmark” (Lopes, “Nobody Needs a Theory”, 115), and “seminal” (Levinson, “Philosophical Aesthetics”, 13; Neill and Ridley, “Relational Theories of Art”, 141). It is “the most frequently cited” (Carroll Philosophy of Art, 210), “most famous” (Davies, “Essential Distinctions”, 13), “most influential” (Kaufman, “Family Resemblance”, 282), “most well known and most reprinted” (Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, 70) challenge to the project of defining art, and its “impact […] cannot be overstated” (Feagin and Meskin, “Introduction”, 392). Indeed, theorizing about art has since been divided into pre- and post-Weitzian eras (Kamber, “Weitz Reconsidered”, 34; Lopes, Beyond Art, 38).

My second aim is to show that Macdonald was in fact the first Wittgenstein-influenced aesthetician – indeed, the first philosopher of any persuasion – to articulate in print all of what are taken to be the central ideas of Weitz’s paper. This is not to dispute the sociological remarks on the influence Weitz had on the subsequent literature, though I do deny that Weitz was the “first” Wittgensteinian critic of the definitional project (Kivy, Philosophies of Arts, 31).

Relatedly, I do not claim here that Macdonald was influential in the same way or to the same degree as Weitz or, for that matter, other anti-essentialists. On the contrary, my third aim is to show that, despite advocating for this position, Macdonald disappeared more or less immediately from the literature on definitions of art and has been overlooked ever since.

Many contributors to that literature do acknowledge predecessors to Weitz. In doing so, some have speculated as to the influence of Paul Ziff, in particular, on the development of Weitz’s position (Mothersill, Beauty Restored, 42; Guyer, History of Modern Aesthetics, 459). My fourth and most ambitious aim is to make the case that Macdonald was in fact the catalyst for and most proximal influence on Weitz’s turn to anti-essentialism.

My hope is that the paper, in meeting these aims, will go some way to restoring Macdonald’s place in histories of and contemporary contributions to debates in philosophy of art and aesthetics concerning the desirability and feasibility of defining art.

I should stress that it is not my aim here to contribute to those debates. Nor is it my aim to explain why Macdonald’s anti-essentialism has disappeared so completely from view, but I will note some salient considerations before proceeding to the main discussion. First, Macdonald’s critical comments on the definitional project are frequently to be found in reviews and critical notices, rather than articles or books, which one might expect to receive more attention. While comments of this sort do also occur in an article (“Art and Imagination”), they do so only as a brief preamble to a discussion the main focus of which lies elsewhere, specifically, on connections between the imagination and the creation and reception of art, and, via this, on the ontological status of artworks. Second, it is fair to say that Macdonald did not unpack or defend her anti-essentialist position in anything like the detail that Weitz and some others of the time did. Third, Macdonald’s career was cut tragically short – she died in the year Weitz’s “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” was published. Setting all of this aside, there is also the fact that Macdonald was a woman. The exclusion of women from the philosophical canon in general (O’Neill, “Disappearing Ink”; Hutton, “Women, Philosophy”) and from histories of the early analytic tradition in particular (Connell and Janssen-Lauret, “Lost Voices”) is well documented and the subject of ongoing study. No doubt the forces responsible for such exclusion were as operative in Macdonald’s case as in others.

2. Macdonald’s anti-essentialism

Aaron Meskin provides a helpful summary of the central ideas in Weitz’s “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”:

“(1) The concept of art is an open concept and, hence, is indefinable; (2) nevertheless there is an effective method for categorizing and classifying objects as art (a version of Ludwig Wittgenstein's family resemblance method); and (3) traditional aesthetic theories can be seen as a form of covert art criticism.” (“Weitz, Morris”, 2551; see also Davies, Definition of Art, 5–7)

Regarding (1), the idea is that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall under the concept of art or, at least, none that are non-trivial and that qualify as capturing the essential nature of art (see Weitz, “The Role of Theory”, 30). Regarding (2), the idea is that what unites the various things that fall under the concept of art is not some common property but, to use Wittgenstein’s words, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (Philosophical Investigations, §66; see Weitz, “The Role of Theory”, 31). Regarding (3), the idea is that remarks such as “Art is significant form” (Bell, Art), to give one well-known example, are best understood, not as definitions, but as attempts to highlight certain valuable but perhaps overlooked features of artworks of certain sorts for attention and praise. As Weitz puts it, they are “recommendations to concentrate on certain criteria of excellence in art” (“The Role of Theory”, 35).

I will now show that each of ideas (1–3) can be found in Macdonald’s work.

2.1. Indefinability

A natural starting-point is Macdonald’s 1951 review of Weitz’s book, A Philosophy of the Arts, published in 1950, prior to what I will later describe as his conversion to anti-essentialism. Weitz there proposes an “organicist” definition of art: “A work of art is an organic complex of expressive constituents, embodied in a sensuous medium” (51). Macdonald begins her review by complaining of the “primitive state” of philosophical aesthetics in general. The cause is its failure to learn the lessons of “linguistic methodologists”, and its symptom is its ongoing “search for definitions”. Turning to Weitz’s work, her “fundamental criticism of it […] is that its main object can serve no useful, philosophical purpose. For this object, alas, is to find yet another” definition of art, one which “expresses the common properties of all members of a class ‘works of art’” (“Review of Weitz”, 561–2).

Macdonald rejects Weitz’s definition – more on this shortly – and concludes by inviting us “to consider whether definitions and general theories are what is wanted in aesthetics”. The problem, she assures us, is not “lack of care and effort of which Professor Weitz may be completely acquitted. No one could have done more to deserve success”. Rather, Macdonald claims, it is a problem of principle: Works of art do not “constitute a class united by common properties” (“Review of Weitz”, 563–4). And that is just to say that artworks do not share an essence.
 
In a critical notice from 1955 of Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form, Macdonald repeats these points. Macdonald says there that the phrase ‘work of art’ “is used with a wide range of meanings for a great variety of works” (“Critical Notice”, 551). This might be taken to suggest that the phrase is ambiguous, but, as will be apparent in §1.2 below, that is not Macdonald’s considered view. Rather, the point of Macdonald’s remark is to raise doubts as to whether the arts – individually or collectively – are “really as tidy as” to admit of definition. According to Macdonald, privileging some feature that is distinctive of certain works of art as the “sole, essential characteristic of all such works is quite arbitrary and, ultimately, pointless, except to satisfy the aesthetic preference of a logician for conceptual order” (“Critical Notice”, 551).

Macdonald’s most sustained discussion of the topic is found in a contribution to the 1952–1953 proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. She objects there to “traditional theories in aesthetics” that “seek a completely general answer to the question ‘What is Art?’ or a simple definition of ‘Art’ which will apply to all works of art without exception”. Such definitions, Macdonald says, “fail to give a satisfactory account of the subject because their inventors ignore the complexities of discourse about art” (“Art and Imagination”, 205). Specifically, they overlook that the “collection” of objects to which the term ‘art’ applies is a “heterogeneous” one (206–7), which is to say, not one whose members are united by some common property or defining characteristic.

On what grounds does Macdonald reject the definitional project? Unlike Weitz (“The Role of Theory”, 32), she does not place any weight on the transgressive, dynamic, ever-changing character of art. Like Weitz (“The Role of Theory”, 31), Macdonald in places seems to suggest that if we just “look and see”, to borrow Wittgenstein’s familiar phrase (Philosophical Investigations, §66), we will find that there is no feature shared by all of the many different things to which the word ‘art’ applies. She writes, “The range of objects […] which may be called works of art is very wide and exceedingly various”. What is more, “any artefact whatever may, in certain circumstances, also be a work of art” (“Art and Imagination”, 206).

However, the injunction to “look and see” is not as explicit in Macdonald’s work as it is in Weitz’s. Instead, Macdonald’s recurring complaint about attempts to define art is that the results are either false or unintelligible or trivial (see “Review of Weitz”, 562; “Art and Imagination”, 205; “Critical Notice”, 553). To illustrate, consider Langer’s proposal that art is “the creation of forms symbolic of human feelings” (Feeling and Form, 40). This is false, Macdonald claims, since it excludes “pottery, textiles, carpets and buildings”, which are not (or need not be) symbols (“Critical Notice”, 553). A defender of Langer might try to extend the use of the word ‘symbolic’ from core cases like linguistic and pictorial representations to pottery and the like, but such items have “such different characteristics that its meaning evaporates”. Alternatively, the defender might stipulate a new meaning for ‘symbolic’ such that the definition comes out as true. But, Macdonald objects, this “verbal legislation” makes the definition an empty “tautology” (“Art and Imagination”, 205).

For another illustration, consider Weitz’s “organicist” definition. Taken literally, Macdonald says, it is false, since artworks are not organisms: “There is little resemblance between a symphony and a grasshopper”. Macdonald does note Weitz’s explanation of “an organic system as one whose parts are internally related”. So understood, Macdonald says, the definition is that an artwork is something whose parts are necessary to its being the artwork that it is, which is “true, but tautologous”. Absenting some other explanation of what ‘organic’ means as it occurs there, Weitz’s definition is of no use to the “anxious enquirer” in identifying works of art (“Review of Weitz”, 563).

Of course, if the many definitions that have been advanced in the long history of theorizing about art fail, as Macdonald claims, it does not immediately follow that art is indefinable. Perhaps Macdonald takes the unsuccessful track-record to support anti-essentialism by way of inductive inference or argument to the best explanation. Be that as it may, Macdonald’s principal objection to the definitional project is that it misconstrues “the logic of language”, which is to say that it overlooks the “linguistic function” of terms like ‘art’ (“Art and Imagination”, 205). How, then, does Macdonald think that such terms behave, if not in accordance with general rules or formulae specifying the conditions necessary and sufficient for their application? I turn to that now.

2.2. Family resemblance

In her review of Weitz, Macdonald stresses that, while the objects that fall under the concept of art do not do so in virtue of possessing some common property, they “are not an indiscriminate collection”. Instead, she suggests – in a cautious tone characteristic of the writings of many Wittgenstein-inspired philosophers of this period – that artworks “are, perhaps, more like a family having different branches” (“Review of Weitz”, 564).

Elsewhere, Macdonald elaborates on this suggestion:

“It [the class of artworks] forms an extensive sub-group of the total class of artefacts unified by an indefinite number of related and over-lapping characteristics […] It may be likened, in the current fashion, to a family having different branches than to a class united by common properties which can be expressed in a simple and comprehensive definition.” (“Art and Imagination”, 206–7)

The “current fashion” is, of course, the one inspired by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.

This quotation might suggest that Macdonald does in fact recognize a necessary condition on something’s being an artwork, namely, artifactuality. However, in an accompanying note, Macdonald suggests – again, with characteristic caution – that some “works of nature or natural objects” might qualify as artworks (“Art and Imagination”, 206n1). More fully, Macdonald suggests that the distinction between what is natural and what is artificial is “far from absolute”. As an example, she offers the “County of Surrey”, described (by the BBC, no less!) as a work of art, though it is not an artifact, at least, not in any clear-cut sense. Rather, it is a natural landscape, albeit one earlier transformed by “18th century landowners and gardeners like Capability Brown”. In querying the idea that artworks must be artifacts, Macdonald anticipates another point which Weitz is notorious for having made (see “The Role of Theory”, 32).

To return to the main thread, Macdonald advances the Wittgenstein-inspired view that ‘art’ functions as a family resemblance term, hence, that attempts to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of that term are misconceived. This point is not, for Macdonald, unique to the word ‘art’. Other words of interest in philosophical aesthetics have, according to Macdonald, the same character. In another book review from 1953, she writes, “It may be found that such words as ‘Imagination’, ‘Creation’ and the rest cover whole families of differing and resembling facts” (“Review of Brett”, 418).

2.3. Covert criticism

So far, I have shown that Macdonald maintains (1) that the term ‘art’ is indefinable and (because) (2) its uses track family resemblances among different works of art, not some property common to them all. What about (3) the claim that art theory is disguised or inadvertent art criticism? In her review of Weitz, Macdonald makes this point too with striking wit:

“For since Plato, their initiator, such formulae have been used almost exclusively by ardent partizans as the school badges, battle cries and brickbats of art discussion.” (562)

Macdonald spells this out more fully elsewhere:

“It is these selections [of qualities on the basis of which the word ‘art’ is applied] present in certain works and especially those favoured at a particular period which are generalized and exalted into absolute standards by aesthetic philosophers. They are enshrined in the slogans already mentioned.” (“Art and Imagination”, 207)

Here Macdonald offers a diagnosis of the sort of philosophical theorizing to which she objects, namely, that it reflects and seeks to promote the tastes of the time. In this respect, the definitions serve a normative, not merely descriptive, role. By way of illustration, Macdonald writes:
“Some works, e.g. excellently represent natural objects, scenes, emotions, situations. They are faithful to or imitate, life. So, for certain theorists, all works worthy to be called works of art must do likewise. Art is Imitation.” (“Art and Imagination”, 207)

In this way, “Art is Imitation” is best understood as a critical judgement concerning what art ought to be, or what good art is, rather than concerning what art essentially is.

3. Setting the record straight

Having established that Macdonald advanced all three of the commitments that are considered central to Weitz-style anti-essentialism, I will now show that Macdonald is in fact the first Wittgenstein-inspired philosopher to have done so.

That Weitz was not the original or the only opponent of the definitional project is recognized by many (though not all) aestheticians and philosophers of art. Here are some representative remarks:

“In the mid-1950s, several philosophers, inspired by Wittgenstein’s talk about concepts, began arguing that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for art.” (Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, 19)

“The thought that ‘art’ cannot be defined […] was the central claim of several aestheticians in the 1950s who drew in varying ways on Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance to support their case.” (Gaut, “‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept”, 25)

“In Anglo-American Aesthetics in the 1950s what might be called anti-essentialism concerning the definability of art was developed by philosophers under the influence of Wittgenstein.” (Diffey, “Wittgenstein, Anti-Essentialism”, 37)

“About the middle of the twentieth century, a number of philosophers suggested that there is no point in trying to define art.” (Davies, Philosophy of Art, 29)

Among articles belonging to this trend that pre-date or are contemporary with Weitz’s “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”, one or more of the following are often cited:  J. A. Passmore’s “The Dreariness of Aesthetics” (1951), Stuart Hampshire’s “Logic and Appreciation” (1952), William Elton’s “Introduction” to Aesthetics and Language (1954), William B. Gallie’s “The Function of Philosophical Aesthetics” (1948) and “Art as an Essentially Contested Concept” (1956), and Ziff’s “Art and the ‘Object of Art’” (1951) and “The Task of Defining a Work of Art” (1953). I will discuss them in turn.

While both oppose theorizing in aesthetics of a certain sort, neither Passmore (“Dreariness of Aesthetics”) nor Hampshire (“Logic and Appreciation”) target the definitional project. Rather, both are concerned to argue against the need for or possibility of general principles for the creation or criticism of items of aesthetic interest, as was Macdonald in her earlier “What Are the Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts?” from 1949.

Elton, in contrast, does express sympathy for those who “warn against the pitfalls of generality” and the associated “predisposition to essentialism”. The term ‘art’, he says, “no more than ‘aesthetics’, necessarily stands for any one thing” (“Introduction”, 3). In making these remarks, however, Elton is explicit that he is representing – while also endorsing – views to be found in the contributions to the volume that he is introducing.

One contributor to that volume – additional to those cited above – is Beryl Lake. In “A Study of the Irrefutability of Two Aesthetic Theories”, Lake gives voice to the idea that art theory is covert art criticism: “Many conclusions in aesthetics are fabricated a priori statements which originally arise from a desire to emphasize one fact about aesthetics to the firm exclusion of the rest” (112). However, first, this remark postdates Macdonald’s on the same point. Second, while Lake criticizes two attempts to define art – specifically, Clive Bell’s (Art) and Benedetto Croce’s (Aesthetic) – she does not express opposition to the definitional project as such or suggest that artworks are united only by criss-crossing similarities. So, unlike Macdonald, Lake does not advance claims (1) and (2) of the anti-essentialist package.

Gallie, in contrast, advances (1) and (2) but not (3) in his “The Function of Philosophical Aesthetics”. Gallie there rejects the “essentialist fallacy” of thinking “that whenever we are in a position to define a substance or activity we must know its essence or ultimate nature” (302). He goes on to say that “our use of an abstract word such as ‘Art’ does not necessarily imply something common to all the objects we apply it to”, and that instead those objects might share only “family resemblances” (303–4). So, Gallie has a claim to being the first to apply (in 1948) this Wittgensteinian notion in a critical fashion to attempts to define art.

It is tempting to think that Gallie also endorses the view of art theory as clandestine criticism when he speaks of the “educative value” of theorists’ claims. However, Gallie is not at this point targeting a definition of art in the operative sense but only two claims that belong to a package which Gallie associates with the “Idealist aesthetics” of philosophers such as Croce (Aesthetic) and R. G. Collingwood (Outline of Philosophy of Art).  Those claims are (a) that “there is one way of reading a particular poem, and this gives us that poem's individual meaning and value”; and (b) that “there is (or was) one act of Imagination which also makes (or made) that poem's individual meaning and value” (“Function of Philosophical Aesthetics”, 303). The only significance (a) and (b) have, according to Gallie, is that they serve as reminders that, “if we are to understand art at all, we must begin from what we see or read […] in different works of art and what seems to use to be said or done or intended by them” (313). Evidently, this platitude about how consumers are to go about evaluating and interpreting poems is not an attempt to promote certain works, styles, or genres of art in the way Macdonald, Lake, and Weitz have in mind.

In his later paper, “Art as an Essentially Contested Concept”, Gallie does endorse that diagnosis: “Each [definition of art] in its own highly abstract way gave expression to powerful and justifiable movements in the […] history of the Arts and Art-criticism” (122). However, this paper was published in 1956, after the relevant pieces by Macdonald. Moreover, by this time, Gallie no longer subscribed to the other elements of the anti-essentialist view. He writes:

“Until it is worked out in detail I cannot see that it [the family resemblance view of concepts] provides any grounds for rejecting the view that certain highly general features may in conjunction be found necessary to the heads of object or performance that are commonly regarded as works of art.” (101)

Indeed, Gallie goes on to consider the possibility that the various definitions of art advanced in the past might be combined “to give a single compendious definition of art” – or, at least, of successful art (112).

I turn finally to Ziff. His “Art and the ‘Object of Art’” does not contain a critique of the definitional project. It is primarily an attack on a proposal concerning the ontology of works of art, namely, that they are “imaginary” objects. In contrast, Ziff’s “The Task of Defining a Work of Art” from 1953 does present all the elements of the view commonly credited to Weitz.

According to Ziff, by taking as a starting-point a paradigm example of a specific form of art – for example, a painting – it is possible to specify conditions sufficient but not necessary for something’s being a work of art. Works that do not satisfy those conditions might nevertheless qualify as art, Ziff suggests, in virtue of their similarity to the paradigm case, although “no rule can be given to determine what is or is not a sufficient degree of similarity” (“The Task of Defining”, 65). Moreover, Ziff adds, the conditions sufficient for a painting to be art are not among those sufficient for a work of some other form – for example, a poem – to be art. Nevertheless, the phrase ‘work of art’ applies to both because “each set of characteristics is analogous in composition to every other set”. As a result, Ziff concludes, the label ‘art’ does not apply to all works “in the same sense” (66–7).

According to Ziff, then, a general definition of art is not possible, and what holds together the different uses of the term ‘art’ are analogies or similarities with certain paradigm examples. Ziff supplements this with a diagnosis of what the aesthetician is doing, or is best understood as doing, when they advance a definition:
 
“An aesthetician is describing one, perhaps new, use of the phrase ‘work of art’, which he either implicitly or explicitly claims to be the most reasonable use of the phrase in the light of the characteristic social consequences and implications of something's being considered a work of art, and on the basis of what the functions, purposes, and aims of a work of art are of ought to be in our society.” (“The Task of Defining”, 77)

So, Weitz’s (1–3) are to be found in earlier work by both Macdonald and Ziff. It is likely that they developed their views independently – Macdonald in Britain under the direct influence of Wittgenstein, Ziff in the US under the indirect influence of Wittgenstein via the direct influence of Max Black and Norman Malcolm at Cornell University (see Ziff, “The Task of Defining”, 64n1). In any event, Macdonald was the first to voice all three of the anti-essentialist commitments in her review of Weitz from 1951, which predates Ziff’s paper by two years.

4. Macdonald forgotten

Almost immediately following its appearance, Macdonald’s critique of the definitional project vanished from the subsequent and sprawling literature on the topic.

It is fair to say that many of the anti-essentialists of the period – discussed in §3 – were eclipsed by Weitz. Among both survey articles of debates concerning the definition of art and substantive contributions to it, it is commonplace to refer only to Weitz, though some acknowledge, without naming, others opposed to definitions in aesthetics and philosophy of art (see, in chronological order, Margolis, “Mr Weitz and Definition”; Berleant, “A Note”; Margolis, “Recent Work in Aesthetic”; Brown, “Definitions and Art Theory”; Davies, Definition of Art; Hanfling, “Problem of Definition”; Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, 70; Kivy, Philosophies of Arts, 31; Kamber, “Weitz Reconsidered”; Brand, “Glaring Omissions”; Stecker, “Is it Reasonable … ?”; Davies, “Essential Distinctions”; Davies, “Introduction”; McFee, “Art, Essences, and Wittgenstein”; Gaut, “Cluster Account Defended”; Feagin and Meskin, “Introduction”; Meskin, “From Defining Art”; Stock “Definition of ‘Art’”; Davies, “Definitions of Art”; Mag Uidhir, Art and Art-Attempts, 24; Adajian, “Definition of Art”). Of those who do refer to the works of other anti-essentialists prior to and following Weitz, none that I have managed to find include Macdonald in their lists (see, again in chronological order, Beardsley, “Definition of the Arts”; Morgan, “Art Pure and Simple”; Brunius, “The Uses of Works”; Wollheim, Art and its Objects, 172; Dickie, “Defining Art”; Tatarkiewicz, “What is Art?”; Tilghman, But is it Art?; Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, 19–21; Diffey, “The Idea of Art”; 1979; Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 57–60; Mothersill, Beauty Restored, chapter 2; Tilghman, But is it Art?; Davies, Definition of Art, chapter 1; Leddy, “The Socratic Quest”; Novitz, “Disputes about Art”; Stecker, Artworks, chapter 1; Carroll, Philosophy of Art, chapter 5; Carroll, “Introduction”; Gaut, “‘Art’ as Cluster Concept”; Dickie, Art and Value, 57; Stecker, “Definition of Art”; Diffey, “Wittgenstein, Anti-Essentialism”; Graham, Philosophy of the Arts, 224; Levinson, “Philosophical Aesthetics”, 13; Davies, Philosophy of Art, chapter 2; Lopes, “Nobody Needs a Theory”; Neill and Ridley, “Relational Theories of Art”; Lopes, Beyond Art, 46). As the dates of these publications attest, beginning 1958, Macdonald disappeared from view more or less immediately after expressing her concerns about the definitional project. From the late 1950s onward, her contributions to that debate were forgotten.
 
Among her contemporaries, Gallie (“Art as Essentially Contested”) refers to a paper by Macdonald, as Guyer (History of Modern Aesthetics, 455) notes. However, the paper Gallie discusses is Macdonald’s “What are the Distinctive Features … ?”, reprinted in Elton’s Aesthetics and Language, which does not concern attempts to define art. As mentioned in §3, its target is the attempt to formulate general principles of criticism. In Gallie’s words, Macdonald’s claim is “that art-criticism is never in the nature of proof or persuasion in the scientific sense” (“Art as Essentially Contested”, 99).

In his influential critique of the trend they represent, Mandelbaum also refers to the papers collected by Elton. In most of them, Mandelbaum says, we find the view “that it is a mistake to discuss what art […] essentially is” (“Family Resemblances and Generalization”, 219). But Mandelbaum does not explicitly refer to Macdonald or her paper, which anyway, and again, is not one in which her anti-essentialist arguments are to be found.

One contemporary aesthetician who does acknowledge Macdonald in relation to the definitional project is Meskin. Specifically, Meskin refers to Macdonald’s “devastating criticisms” of Weitz’s “organic theory”, as a result of which “Weitz relinquished the organic theory and began to explore the possibility that no real definition of art could be provided” (“Weitz, Morris”, 2551). But Meskin does not note that this possibility is one Macdonald herself took to obtain. Nor does he mention other respects in which Macdonald anticipates the position that Weitz would go on to develop.

In a similar fashion, in a survey of (then) recent work in aesthetics, Joseph Margolis mentions “Macdonald's criticism of Weitz's organismic theory of art (which he has acknowledged)” (“Recent Work in Aesthetics”, 187). But Margolis does not recognize Macdonald’s more general opposition to the definitional project, or her positive proposal that art is a family resemblance concept, or her reinterpretation of art theory as art criticism.

The ways in which Meskin and Margolis present Macdonald’s role in the debate surrounding the definition of art correspond closely to Weitz’s own presentation, to which I now turn.

5. Weitz’s conversion

It is instructive to situate Weitz’s “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” in relation to his work in the years immediately before. As noted in §2, prior to opposing the definitional project in philosophy of art, Weitz contributed to it. Consider this passage from 1950:

“Every work of art […] is an organic complex, presented in a sensuous medium, which complex is composed of elements, their expressive characteristics and the relations obtaining among them. I hold that this is a real definition of art, i.e. an enumeration of the basic properties of art.” (Philosophy of the Arts, 44)

In addition to advancing a specific definition, Weitz at this stage in his philosophical development holds more generally:

“Philosophy in the main is still the quest for real definitions. In philosophical aesthetics this means that at least one of its central problems remains the definition of the nature of art.” (Philosophy of the Arts, xi)

In an article from the same year, Weitz defended at length the “doctrine that philosophy, whatever else it may be, is analysis as real definition” (“Analysis and Real Definition”, 2; see also “Analysis and the Unity of Russell’s Philosophy”). Before this, in 1947, Weitz published a critique, cited with approval in his Philosophy of the Arts (n2), of what he took to be the “Wittgensteinian” views that “the entirety of philosophy is bad and is engendered completely by linguistic misbehavior”, and that, as he memorably puts it, “philosophy has but one task to perform, to undo all the harm it has created, and then quietly to commit suicide” (“Philosophy and Abuse of Language”, 536). This antipathy persists in a précis of Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind from 1951. Weitz approves there of Ryle’s “logical behaviourism”, while expressing relief that Ryle does not insist with the “neo-Wittgensteinian” on the “naive and false dogma that the whole of traditional philosophy is a mere abuse of the language of common sense” (“Professor Ryle”, 301).

By the time Weitz published “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”, his assessment had completely changed. He there describes Wittgenstein as the “model”:

“In his refutation of philosophical theorizing in the sense of constructing definitions of philosophical entities, has furnished contemporary aesthetics with a starting point for any future progress.” (30)

It has – to my knowledge – gone unnoticed that the first expression of Weitz’s Wittgenstein-influenced anti-essentialism appeared two years earlier in a 1954 critical notice of Langer’s Feeling and Form. Weitz objects there to Langer’s theory of art on the grounds that it rests on a conception of language that Wittgenstein had advanced in his early work and that had since “been refuted, and by no other more certainly than by the later Wittgenstein himself” (“Symbolism and Art”, 470). From the later Wittgenstein, Weitz takes the idea that “the meaning of an expression is the rules, regulations, and conventions governing its employment”, and that the manner of such employment is diverse. In this respect, Weitz continues, language is “like an enormous toolbox, full of the most diversified sorts of tools” (471). In view of this, Weitz asks, “Can we really define ‘tragedy’, ‘comedy’, ‘poetry’, yes, ‘art’ itself?” (479) The implied answer, of course, is no. As an alternative account of what unites uses of these terms, Weitz offers the following picture:

“We treat ‘tragedy’ as a name for a finite class of cases (say this and that play of the Greeks and the Elizabethans), and then go on to say, “Anything is a tragedy that resembles the members of this class in some one or number of respects”.” (479)

In addition to rejecting the project of definition, Weitz briefly floats the suggestion that “our definitions have been either honorific slogans or disguised persuasive ones” (479), that is, contributions to art criticism.

It seems, then, that Weitz’s conception of the central tasks in aesthetics and philosophy of art went through a dramatic transformation between 1951 and 1954 – from pro-essentialist and anti-Wittgensteinian to anti-essentialist and pro-Wittgensteinian. A plausible hypothesis is that the cause, or at least a major contributing factor, to this conversion was the publication of Macdonald’s review of Weitz’s book, which might in turn have prompted Weitz to read other work by Macdonald.
 
In support of this hypothesis, I will offer three considerations. The first concerns timing. Macdonald’s review was published in 1951, which is precisely the point at which Weitz’s defence of the definitional project ended along with his critical comments on the Wittgensteinian approach.

The second consideration is that it is a matter of autobiographical record that Weitz read and was influenced by Macdonald’s review. When criticizing his earlier definition on the grounds that the conditions it specifies are not sufficient for something to qualify as a work of art, Weitz refers in a footnote to Macdonald’s “brilliant discussion of this objection to the Organic theory” (“The Role of Theory”, 29n5). This remark only acknowledges one challenge Macdonald raises for one attempt to define art. But, and this is the third consideration in support of the hypothesis, all of the core components of Weitz’s anti-essentialism, if not all of the arguments for them, are present in the review that we know Weitz read, as shown in §2.

One might complain that the suggestion that Macdonald was largely responsible for Weitz’s change of mind overlooks the influence of “Oxford Philosophy”. Weitz spent a year at the University of Oxford in the early 1950s, and, in part to demonstrate that its philosophers were free from the influence of “logical positivism”, he published in 1953 a survey of their contributions (“Oxford Philosophy”). Weitz there notes, “All of these Oxford philosophers agree that Wittgenstein was the single greatest influence” (189). Moreover, Weitz’s survey refers to “the problem of definition and the quest for necessary and sufficient conditions” (198).

My claim, however, is not that Macdonald was the only influence on Weitz. No doubt his exposure to the work of Oxford philosophers of the time – among others – played a part. But it remains the case that Macdonald’s review came first chronologically, and that the substantive content of that review, not just its general philosophical orientation, maps directly on to the contents of Weitz’s later anti-essentialist publications.

I will add to this that the approach to definition that Weitz finds in the work of Oxford philosophers – specifically, in H. L. A. Hart’s “The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights” – is not quite that which Weitz goes on to defend. According to Hart, Weitz tells us, a legal concept such as that of a contract cannot be defined “by specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for its application, but only by listing the necessary conditions plus a list of exceptions or negative examples that show where the concept cannot be applied, or can be applied in a weaker form”. In this respect, Weitz reports, the conditions of application for the concept are “defeasible”. Moreover, the terms that pick out the defeating conditions – such as ‘exceptions’ – are not “names of elements” or “positive conditions”; they are instead “a way of covering the exclusion of a heterogeneous range of cases” (“Oxford Philosophy”, 202–4).

On this view, then, there is a property common to all the things to which a legal concept applies – in the example, the concept of a contract – albeit one that does not suffice for the application of that concept. Also, while the terms used to specify the defeaters are “heterogeneous”, the proposal is not that they function as family resemblance terms. The various cases in which they apply need not resemble one another in any respect but that they defeat the application of the relevant legal term (Weitz, “Oxford Philosophy”, 204). So, Hart’s account of legal concepts, as Weitz presents it, does not match the account of the concept of art that Weitz later defended, and that Macdonald anticipated.
 
As noted at the outset, some speculate as to whether Ziff’s “The Task of Defining a Work of Art” was influential in the development of Weitz’s anti-essentialism. After all, as explained in §3, it does contain all the elements of that view. However, Weitz does not cite Ziff’s paper in his “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” or, for that matter, anywhere else so far as I can tell. Moreover, Ziff’s 1953 paper appeared after Macdonald’s 1951 review of Weitz – which, again, Weitz does cite – and in the same year as Weitz’s “Oxford Philosophy”, where the shift to a Wittgensteinian approach is already apparent. So, without denying that Ziff was an influence on Weitz, there is reason to doubt that his influence was as significant as that of those already discussed.

6. Conclusion

In this paper, I have shown that Macdonald was the first philosopher to defend in full the constellation of views associated with the anti-essentialism of Weitz: that any definition of art is doomed to failure, that the items to which the concept of art applies do not share a common property but bear only criss-crossing resemblances, and that putative definitions are best interpreted as contributions to art criticism. I have also shown that Macdonald’s pioneering ideas were subsequently and entirely neglected. Even those who recognize and detail the anti-essentialist views of other aestheticians of the period than Weitz – such as Gallie and Ziff – overlook Macdonald’s. This is a serious omission since, I have argued, Macdonald’s critique of the definitional project not only preceded Weitz’s but was the primary inspiration for it. If this bold hypothesis does not convince, I can retreat to the more cautious and, I submit, overwhelmingly plausible claim that Macdonald was an important influence on Weitz. In view of these findings, it should be clear that Macdonald deserves a prominent place in the history of anti-essentialism and its assessment.

Margaret Macdonald on the definition of art. By Daniel Whiting. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, July 25, 2022

The Endangered Language Crisis

 

 

At the heart of linguistics is a radical premise: all languages are equal. This underlies everything we do at the Endangered Language Alliance, an eccentric extended family of linguists, language activists, polyglots and ordinary people, whose mission is to document endangered languages and support linguistic diversity, especially in the world’s hyperdiverse cities.

Language is a universal and democratic fact cutting across all human societies: no human group is without it, and no language is superior to any other. More than race or religion, language is a window on to the deepest levels of human diversity. The familiar map of the world’s 200 or so nation-states is superficial compared with the little-known map of its 7,000 languages. Some languages may specialise in talking about melancholy, seaweed or atomic structure; some grammars may glory in conjugating verbs while others bristle with syntactic invention. Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding and living that should form part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.

Users of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, English and the like have continually proclaimed their languages holier, more perfect or more adaptive than the unwritten, unstandardised “dialects” they look down on. But from a linguistic point of view, no language as used by a native speaker is in any way inferior, let alone broken. The vast majority have always been oral, with written language a derivative of comparatively recent vintage, confined to tiny elites in a small number of highly centralised societies. Writing is palpably a trained technology of conscious coding, in comparison with the natural and universal human behaviours of speaking and signing.

Perceptions of linguistic superiority or inferiority are not based on anything about the languages themselves, but on the power, class or status of the speakers. Every language signed or spoken natively is a fully equipped system for handling the core communicative demands of daily life, able to coin or borrow words as needed. “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey,” said the linguist and polyglot Roman Jakobson. In other words: it’s possible to say anything in any language, but each language’s grammar requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously. This is the essence of what makes linguistics fascinating and revealing.

All languages may be equal in the abstract, but much harder to bridge are the social and historical disparities among their speakers. At present, about half of all languages are spoken by communities of 10,000 or fewer, and hundreds have just 10 speakers or fewer. On every continent, the median number of speakers for a language is below 1,000, and in Australia this figure goes as low as 87.

Today, these numbers reflect serious endangerment, and even languages with hundreds of thousands or a few million speakers can be considered vulnerable. In the past, however, small language communities could be quite stable, especially hunter-gatherer groups, which typically comprised fewer than 1,000 people. Likewise, most older sign languages, now critically endangered, evolved in so-called deaf villages, where the incidence of hereditary deafness in the population was significantly higher than elsewhere, though still rarely more than about 2%. Many hearing people in these villages could also sign, but the core group of signers was typically several hundred at most.

 In general, sheer speaker or signer numbers have always mattered less than intergenerational transmission. A small language can apparently remain strong for centuries as long as parents, grandparents and other caregivers are using it with children. Take Gurr-Goni, an Aboriginal language from north-central Arnhem Land in Australia, which has had just several dozen speakers as far back as anyone can remember. Far from being an isolated group, Gurr-Goni speakers maintained their language in a context of multilingual equilibrium, where each “father tongue” was integrally connected with certain ancestral lands and natural resources. It’s this kind of equilibrium that has been vanishing fast as colonial and national languages take over.

But why does linguistic diversity matter in the first place? For a linguist, the answer is clear enough: little-documented, primarily oral languages are often the ones with the most to teach us about the nature and possibilities of human communication more generally. Without the Khoisan languages of southern Africa, we wouldn’t know how extensively and expressively clicks could be used. Without Warao, spoken in Guyana, Venezuela and Suriname, we wouldn’t know that object-subject-verb could be the routine way of ordering a sentence. Without the Hmong-Mien languages of south-east Asia, we wouldn’t know that a language could have a dozen tones.

But it’s also what the languages carry inside them: the poetry, literature, jokes, proverbs and turns of phrase. The oral histories, the local and environmental knowledge, the wisdom, and the lifeways. Only a fraction of this ever can or will be translated into other languages.

If this still sounds theoretical, consider even more immediate, practical consequences. A growing body of research shows that there is no substitute for mother-tongue education, and that language maintenance is an integral component of physical and mental well-being – perhaps especially so for long-marginalised Indigenous and minority peoples.

For this is the crux of it: languages are not “dying natural deaths”, but being hounded out of existence.

 

Like biodiversity, linguistic diversity remains strongest today in remote and rugged regions traditionally beyond the reach of empires and nation states: mountain ranges like the Himalayas and the Caucasus; archipelagoes like Indonesia and the Solomons; and what were once zones of refuge like the Amazon, southern Mexico, Papua New Guinea and parts of west and central Africa. But these too are now under tremendous pressure.

“Language has always been the companion of empire,” wrote Antonio de Nebrija in his 1492 Gramática Castellana, which aimed to raise vernacular Castilian Spanish to the level of Latin and other imperial languages, just in time for European conquests across the globe. Though languages have always changed and come and gone, the scope for linguistic imperialism has widened exponentially since Nebrija’s day. A comparatively small number of empires and nation states, now bristling with 24/7 communication and education systems, cover every inch of the Earth. Worldwide, centuries of imperialism, capitalism, urbanisation, environmental destruction and nation building are now coming to a head linguistically. With power behind them, a few hundred languages keep growing and getting all the resources, while the other 95% struggle.

 

Particularly dominant are just a few dozen languages of wider communication, less politely called “killer languages”. English, Spanish and Chinese are on the march, but so are Nepali and Brazilian Portuguese. These languages are spreading through political, economic and cultural conquest, and the consequences are seeping into everything. At the same time, only under extraordinary circumstances are a few new languages emerging, such as Light Warlpiri, which developed out of mixing English and the Aboriginal language Warlpiri in Australia’s Northern Territory.

In anglophone settler societies such as the US and Canada, genocide, expulsion, disease and every form of prejudice and pressure exerted on Native peoples have profoundly altered the linguistic landscape. About half of the 300 distinct languages once spoken north of the Rio Grande have already been silenced, and most of those remaining are no longer actively used, with under 10 native speakers. Only a few of the largest, including ᏣᎳᎩ (Cherokee), Diné Bizaad (Navajo) and Yup’ik can in any way be considered “safe”, though profoundly embattled, for the coming decades. Likewise, most of the hundreds of Aboriginal languages once spoken in Australia are either no longer spoken or else down to small clusters of elderly speakers, with just a few still heroically being transmitted.

Dominant-language speakers opine that everything would be easier and better (and peace on Earth!) if everyone would just speak their particular dominant language. But common languages don’t unify in and of themselves – look at many of the world’s civil wars, or the deep divisions in anglophone American society today. The imaginative challenge of big differences is quickly replaced with the narcissism of small ones: scrutinising other people’s accents, sociolects, word choice, tone of voice.

The spheres of use for smaller languages and nonstandard varieties are continually shrinking: they often emerge only in private, yielding as soon as a speaker steps outside. Now the shift is happening inside homes as well. Families around the world are hitching their fate to English and other dominant languages – abandoning not just words, but vast traditions of gesture, intonation, facial expression, conversational style and perhaps even the culture and character behind all these. Only in the face of intense political, economic, religious or social pressures do people stop passing on their mother tongues to children, but today these pressures are everywhere. The disruption of this basic natural process has come to feel almost normal.

Of course English in particular, supercharged by business, pop culture and the internet after centuries of colonial expansion, is the real empire of our time – far more fluid and influential than any political entity. Many English speakers go their entire lives without encountering anything significant they can’t do or get in their language. Whatever the power dynamics of any given conversation, English is pure linguistic privilege, the reserve currency of communication. The push to learn it is an event of planetary significance, swelling a linguistic community of going on half a billion native English speakers worldwide, plus another 1 or 2 billion who know it as a second language. These numbers are growing every day.

Many people think the world, or at least their corner of it, is growing ever more diverse, but monolinguals are increasingly in charge. The monolingual mindset, bone-deep in almost every anglophone American, blocks any real urgency about other languages. A multilingual childhood, only now widely recognised as an inestimable cognitive advantage, can add a whole dimension to someone’s understanding of the world, with a sense of linguistic and cultural perspective. But to do it right, especially for monolingual parents, can require serious effort and resources.

 

What should a monolingual person do? Every time someone speaks, they embody an inherited chain of choices. It can be profoundly useful to be a native speaker of the dominant dialect of a dominant language. Representing the associated “mainstream” culture with every sound means being able to talk to many and sound good to most. Rarely does a dominant-language monolingual need to speak anyone else’s language, and it counts as a charming attempt if they do, a mark of open-mindedness and sophistication or an advanced party trick. Since reading and writing usually hew close to the dominant dialect, book learning is that much easier. A person “without an accent” is by default considered to be smarter or better educated as soon as they open their mouth.

Yet people intensely aware of privilege based on gender, race, class or sexuality seldom consider their linguistic privilege. English or Spanish or Mandarin or Urdu may just seem like the air you breathe. The only cure for monolingualism is to learn other human languages, but it’s at least a start to learn about them, from those who speak them. Maybe there should be a special kind of therapy for monolinguals, where you have to sit listening to a language you can’t understand, without translation but with total patience.

For an academic linguist, this is an occupational hazard. On first meeting, a speaker knows you don’t know their language, but there is a useful ambiguity. If not learning languages, what exactly does a linguist do? Sound systems are entire ecosystems for the ear, but even on an initial listen you can try to make out the shapes of syllables, the qualities of vowels, the puff of aspiration, the bent tongue of a retroflex. There may be clues in the intonation patterns: variations in pitch, rhythm, loudness, voice quality or the length of sounds, which convey not only vibes, but essential information, like how rising pitch in English can signal a yes-no question. Under the rush of unfamiliar sound, flowing at hundreds of syllables a minute, you try to hold back from the scramble for meaning and suss out the structure.

From the glottis to the lips, the whole tract where spoken language happens is just five or six inches long. Across evolutionary eons, a space for eating and breathing gradually took on linguistic uses, not just anywhere but at certain places of articulation: the lips, the teeth, the alveolar ridge, the hard palate and the soft one behind it, the uvula that hangs like a little grape above the throat, the pharynx and the larynx. The tongue – that near-universal symbol of language – darts and bends to make contact wherever it can. For signers, it happens in the hands. (In what follows, I use terms such as speech and oral for the sake of simplicity, but virtually everything here also applies to sign languages.) There are also whistled languages, drum languages and many other ways of emulating speech across space.

To document and describe languages while there is still time ought to be the first task for a linguist. Yet a linguist’s moment of discovery is also almost always the moment of grasping a disappearance. For any outsider claiming to “discover” any human society or culture or language – that is, announcing the existence of some smaller group to the ruthlessly joined-up juggernaut sometimes known as “us” – is also arriving at, and bound up in, the moment of its destruction. The same forces that bring an outside linguist in are bringing everything else as well.

 

The organised movement to preserve the world’s languages is recent. In 1992, the linguist Michael Krauss warned that linguistics would “go down in history as the only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated”. This helped light the spark. Inspired by the new push for biodiversity and the growing movement for Indigenous rights, a cohort of linguists and language activists vowed to use new technologies to record and preserve as much as possible of the world’s vanishing linguistic heritage. Ideally, speakers record and document their own languages, and this is now increasingly common.

Language documentation may sound like an obvious priority for linguistics, but it flies in the face of what most linguists have been focusing on for the past 70 years: language, not languages. Following Noam Chomsky, most have been chasing theoretical and computational questions, seeing themselves as Martians trying to document an essentially uniform language called Earthling. Their evidence has come mostly from the largest languages, which happen to be the dominant ones they’re familiar with. Few meaningful universals have emerged from all the armchair theorising and laboratory testing. Theory has its place, of course, but it’s essential that languages be documented on their own terms. The real view from Mars, it turns out, is that linguistic diversity on Earth is far more profound and fundamental than previously imagined.

At the same time, there is an essential toolkit that every language should have: a substantial dictionary, a detailed grammatical description, and a representative corpus of recorded stories, oral histories and other texts showing the language in action, and at least partially transcribed, translated, analysed and archived. To the extent that speakers are willing, these materials should be maximally accessible and archived for posterity. Speakers of larger languages take for granted effectively limitless resources in and about their languages. Forget Siri, speech recognition, automatic translation, spellcheck and other nifty tools: imagine not having a dictionary, any established way of writing or any authority on the language at all, aside from an elder you have to find and ask in person.

It’s one thing to help build arks, or at least archives, but linguists don’t and can’t “save” languages. By definition, every language is limitless as long as speakers are still speaking it or signers are signing it. No language ends on the last page of a dictionary. From a finite number of sounds, words, rules and techniques, speakers form an infinite number of utterances. There is no single way that a community “really speaks”, nor any one authoritative type of data to preserve for all time. Language is too fluid.

Unfortunately, many linguists also dwell on damaging, defeatist abstractions about language “death” and “extinction” while Indigenous scholars state clearly that oppression is the threat, and that reclaiming Indigenous languages is about liberation and recovery from historical trauma. Linguistics, like anthropology, has skeletons in its disciplinary closet. Fighting for endangered languages can only mean fighting on the side of their speakers and signers, and ultimately it’s always up to communities whether and how to keep using their languages. Some have been struggling to do so for centuries; others are less concerned. Of course, there are not only pressures, but also always enticements to learn a dominant language, which may grant access, however limited, to the dominant culture’s resources.

 For some members, the breakdown of a traditional community may feel like emancipation; for others, a disaster. Whether it’s a matter of survival or a question of common sense, the logic of abandoning a smaller mother tongue for work, education, migration, marriage or any number of other reasons can seem unassailable. Once-valued or ingrained connections to ancestors, traditions, territories and knowledge systems can easily seem irrelevant, obscure or simply impossible to access under contemporary conditions.

It’s a powerful-sounding truism, but not quite true, that language and culture are inextricably linked, since group identities in some cases persist after the loss of a language. Nor should anyone feel forced to stay within any particular culture. What matters is that individuals and communities have meaningful options for how they relate to their linguistic pasts and construct their linguistic futures. Given the normal and natural human capacity for multilingualism, maintaining a less widely spoken language need not preclude learning a more widely spoken one.

There are now hundreds of language revitalisation movements around the world, most launched in just the past few decades, creating a wealth of experience for others to draw on. It can feel like nearly impossible work, where even a single new speaker of a highly endangered language counts as a serious triumph, requiring years of dedication. At the same time, scattered speakers are now finding one another in virtual spaces, where language learning options are multiplying and reality-augmenting and artificial intelligence possibilities are on the horizon.

If one critical ingredient has been missing from language revitalisation movements, it is real financial, political, and technical support from majority populations. Speakers of endangered languages almost never encounter outside interest in or knowledge about their languages, while persecution, mockery, and stigma are still common. To the extent that language policy or discussion is on the agenda at all, it relates to specific points of conflict in a few dominant languages, not the collapse of linguistic diversity itself.

For the revivers of endangered languages, a sense of radical futility may be waiting round the bend of every utterance. Where will I speak this? Who will understand me? Who can even tell me if I’m speaking correctly? Will I ever start thinking in the language? When almost no one else is doing it, matching a string of sounds to a meaning can seem downright arbitrary. And yet it is only after ingesting masses of often arbitrary-seeming words that people can process or produce them at speed, and only then that they can start feeling the indescribable sense of what it is to live in a particular language – just as an actor needs to get her lines down cold before even starting to get into character. To try to communicate with what is no longer a tool of communication – to resurrect a whole worldview that is almost over the horizon – is a wonderful madness.

 This is an edited extract from Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues, published by Grove Press UK on 7 March.

Disappearing tongues: the endangered language crisis. By Ross Perlin. The Guardian, February 22, 2024.

In “Language City,” the linguist Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis.

 “Up on the sixth floor of an old commercial building along the sunless canyon of 18th Street, there is a room where languages from all over the world converge.” It makes sense that the Endangered Language Alliance, the only organization in the world focused on “the linguistic diversity of cities,” lives here, in a donated office in the most linguistically diverse metropolis on earth. It is also here that Ross Perlin begins “Language City,” his gorgeous new narrative of New York, as told through the hundreds of languages spoken in its five boroughs.

On any given day, the E.L.A.’s cramped office bursts with people singing in Bishnupriya Manipuri (originally from Bangladesh), writing in Tsou (Taiwan) and recording in Ikota (Gabon). A caller from the Bronx, with a voice “full of longing,” seeks recordings of the language he left at the Mali-Burkina Faso border when he was 7.

Perlin, the co-director of the E.L.A. and an accomplished linguist himself, explains that up to half of the world’s 7,000 languages are likely to die over the next few centuries. But his book is less a lament for the deaths of endangered languages than an account of how, like their speakers, they have built new lives in a place where half the residents speak a language other than English at home.

Perlin retells the familiar story of the city through the lens of its exceptional linguistic history, beginning with Indigenous languages like Lenape (in which Manaháhtaan means “the place where we get bows”). Early settlers included the first 32 Walloon families to live permanently in New Amsterdam and enslaved Kikongo speakers from the Kingdom of the Kongo.

While Massachusetts and Virginia were “fanatically intolerant English-only colonies,” New Amsterdam did not seem to care; in 1643, a priest wrote of finding 18 languages among just a few hundred men. New Yorke soon boasted not just languages like English, Spanish, French and Russian, but also Basque and Breton, Catalan and Maltese. Some 200 years later, the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which ended longstanding national-origin immigration quotas, helped make Bengali and Urdu two of the city’s most widely spoken languages.

Throughout, Perlin never misses the chance to reinforce a key point: The history of New York’s lesser-known languages is also that of the traumas of many speakers. Some fled genocide (as in the cases of Western Armenian and Judeo-Greek), others mass deportation (languages of the North Caucuses), racial violence (Gullah, an English-based Creole) or starvation (Irish). Linguistic minorities “have been overrepresented in diaspora,” Perlin points out, because they are “hit hardest by conflict, catastrophe and privation and thus impelled to leave.”

Perlin’s excellent account of the present-day city chronicles six New Yorkers all working, in some way, to extend the lives of their languages. This includes Rasmina, who takes Perlin to “380,” a six-story apartment building in Flatbush that has housed over 100 of the world’s 700 speakers of Seke, a Tibetan-Burman language. Ibrahima runs a website in N’ko, a West African alphabet created in 1949, and Irwin writes poetry in Nahuatl, an Indigenous language he absorbed while listening in at his grandfather’s grocery store in Mexico.

 Husniya plans children’s books in Wakhi, a Pamiri language spoken where Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China meet. Dianne, probably the last native speaker of Lenape, tells Perlin wistfully, “Now there’s nowhere to hear the language outside the walls of my head.”

It’s hard to be hopeful. Intergenerational transfer of endangered languages is particularly difficult. Still, Perlin builds a compelling case for why preserving them matters not just for the speakers, but for humanity itself. It’s an argument he lives in his own life. (I invite you, too, to binge-watch Perlin’s fascinating YouTube dispatches from China — in Yiddish.) But change is inevitable. As Perlin says, “Someday English, too, will be down to its last speaker.”

About halfway through reading “Language City,” I reached for the Bible, looking for the story of the Tower of Babel. I knew the basics of the Genesis story: At a time when the world had “one language and a common speech,” the people of Babel decided to build a city, with a tower reaching to heaven. God disapproved and “confused” their language “so they would not understand each other.” Work on the city — and the tower — halted.

But I’d forgotten what happened next: God scattered the people of Babel over the face of the earth. “Language City” is a deft refutation of this parable’s moral. Far from scattering, people have instead converged on the city, bringing their words with them. And New York’s towers have never risen higher.

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York | By Ross Perlin | Atlantic Monthly Press | 415 pp. | $28.

 

How To Speak New York. By Deirdre Mask. The New York Times, February 19, 2024. 

Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic, the opposite of cosmopolitan. “You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,” the linguist Ross Perlin says, describing a typical view of how such languages are studied. But of the 700 or so speakers of Seke, most of whom can be found in a cluster of villages in Nepal, more than 150 have lived in or around two apartment buildings in Brooklyn. Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh and India, has become a minority language of Queens.

All told, there are more endangered languages in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else, says Perlin, who has spent 11 years trying to document them. And because most of the world’s languages are on a path to disappear within the next century, there will likely never be this many in any single place again.

Language loss has been a natural part of human history for centuries, but it was typically small in scale and relatively confined. The lost language could sometimes leave traces in the language that overtook it, what linguists have called a “grammatical merger” of intersecting societies.

About 30 years ago, though, the linguists Ken Hale and Michael Krauss warned of a new, more dire form of loss in which a dominant language would “simply overwhelm Indigenous, local languages and cultures.” Hundreds of languages were essentially gone, Krauss noted, and others were quickly fading. Several were spoken by as few as one or two people.

As Perlin writes in his new book — “Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York,” out this month — what stands to be lost is more than mere words. “Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding and living that should rightly form a major part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.”

With Daniel Kaufman, also a linguist, Perlin directs the Endangered Language Alliance, in Manhattan. When E.L.A. was founded, in 2010, Perlin lived in the Chinese Himalayas, where he studied Trung, a language with no standard writing system, dictionary or codified grammar. (His work helped establish all three.) He spent most of his time in the valley where the largest group of remaining speakers lived; the only road in or out was impassable in winter.

After three years, Perlin returned to New York City, where he had grown up. At that time, E.L.A. conducted language surveys on foot, canvassing neighborhoods and posting fliers seeking speakers of endangered languages. Most of the work was directed by the organization’s founders: two linguists, including Kaufman, and a poet.

In 2016, E.L.A. began to map the languages spoken in the city. A vast majority were not recognized by large businesses, schools or city government. Officially, Perlin said, they were simply not there. “None of the communities with whom we planned to partner were recorded as even existing in the census,” Kaufman and Perlin later wrote.

 Since their project began, Perlin and Kaufman have located speakers of more than 700 languages. Of those languages, at least 150 are listed as under significant threat in at least one of three major databases for the field. Perlin and Kaufman consider that figure to be conservative, and Perlin estimates that more than half of the languages they documented may be endangered.

A language’s endangerment is not simply a function of its size but also a measure of its relationship to the societies around it. Sheer numbers “have always mattered less than intergenerational transmission,” Perlin writes in “Language City.” Until recently, in many regions of the world, dozens of languages lived side by side, each with no more than a few thousand speakers. Gurr-goni, an Aboriginal Australian language, had long been stable with 70. A language survives, Perlin writes, by sharing life with those who speak it: “Only in the face of intense political, economic, religious or social pressures do people stop passing on their mother tongues to children.”

When Perlin visited Seke-speaking Nepali villages in 2019 and 2023, he found that many of the people he wanted to speak with had left to find work. “Whole age groups were missing,” he says. Kaufman points to Mixtec, a group of Indigenous languages spoken in south-central Mexico, with 500,000 speakers. The differences in how the language is spoken from village to village can be “bigger than you find between French and Italian,” he said. “And there are villages where there are essentially no young people.” Their children are now born elsewhere — Culiacán, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles. “500,000 speakers can disappear in a generation.”

Perlin studies languages for what they communicate both explicitly and indirectly. A language’s lexicon is not “just one word after another,” he writes in “Language City,” but a representation of the enduring preoccupations of a culture. Its rules of grammar are held together by invisible selections of what will be conveyed and what will be overlooked. It “requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously.”

When Perlin and Kaufman document a language, they work alongside native speakers to transcribe and translate video interviews that are recorded locally and during trips to a language’s home region. (Perlin and Kaufman have helped produce some of the first dictionaries and grammars of these languages.) To document Seke, for example, Perlin works with Rasmina Gurung, a 26-year-old nurse who happens to be one of the youngest Seke speakers in the world. Most Seke speakers, about 500 people, live across five neighboring villages in northern Nepal, near Tibet. Though the villages are within walking distance, each has developed its own Seke dialect. Like many of the smaller languages of “traditional face-to-face societies,” Perlin writes, Seke has no “formal, all-purpose hello,” because villagers live among the same groups of people and rarely encounter a Seke-speaking stranger. Instead, a question — Where are you going? What are you doing? — would be more common.

When E.L.A. researchers travel to interview speakers in their home regions, they may begin with a list of common questions, but the conversations are often more free-form. “Whatever the speakers want to talk about the most, we always encourage that,” Gurung says. “We always want to understand the language better, but we need to understand where it came from, how it came to be. Whatever’s close to home.”

 As E.L.A. produced its first language maps, the institute’s work caught the eye of Thelma Carrillo, a research scientist in the city’s Health Department. Carrillo, who is part Zapotec, was working on a Latino health initiative, but the city had what Perlin and Kaufman found to be “no basic demographic information” on New Yorkers from Indigenous communities in Latin America, even though they have been migrating here in large numbers since the 1990s.

“We found ourselves in this odd position of being a conduit between the Indigenous Latin Americans of the city and the city agencies, because other organizations that work with them see them as Mexican or Guatemalan,” Kaufman says. “We’re working with their languages, which becomes extremely important when you need to communicate something to them.”

By the start of the pandemic, the city had begun official outreach in nine Indigenous languages and recorded videos in several other endangered languages. By reaching these communities in their own languages, New York City offered what is almost certainly the first official recognition that they exist.

Still, Perlin and Kaufman are keenly aware that the corpus they are building — word by word and sometimes syllable by syllable — might someday turn out to be a kind of fossil record.

Outside of the office, Gurung mostly speaks Seke in voice notes to elders overseas or to tell her mother a secret she doesn’t want her sister to hear. On her first trip to Nepal with E.L.A., she ended every interview with the same question: “Do you think our language will survive?”

Methodology

The maps showing endangered languages in New York City are based on a map provided by the Endangered Language Alliance. We cross-referenced E.L.A.’s New York City language list with three independent databases that track the threat level of languages around the world: Ethnologue, which catalogs all known living languages in the world; UNESCO’s World Atlas of Languages, a survey of all the languages spoken in UNESCO member states; and the Endangered Languages Project, a site to which the public can contribute content, managed by the First Peoples’ Cultural Council and the Endangered Languages Catalogue (ELCat) project at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Each of these projects determines how threatened a language is in a slightly different way. Criteria include the number of global speakers and whether multiple generations speak the language and are passing it on to the next. Additional languages were added in consultation with E.L.A.

The audio clips are excerpts from audio provided by E.L.A., which also provided the translations. In one instance, small adjustments to the translation were made to provide context that would have been clear to the speaker. The translation for Ibrahima Traore's remarks comes from Coleman Donaldson.

The Endangered Languages of New York. By Alex Carp. The New York Times Magazine,  February 22, 2024. 

Once a month, on the sixth floor of an old Manhattan office building, about a dozen people gather to try to speak one of the island’s original languages. Our teacher is Karen Hunter, who learned Lenape as an adult on a tribal reserve in Ontario, in the company of the last native speakers and the first revivalists. For more than a decade, she has been driving up to ten hours to and from New York and other locales to share what she knows, without compensation, with indigenous people (Ramapo, Matinecock, Montaukett) and interested others. These sessions at the Endangered Language Alliance, the nonprofit I codirect, may represent the first time Lenape has been taught in the city since the eighteenth century, when almost all of its speakers were driven out.

Today, colonial settler cities such as New York, Sydney, and Vancouver are among the most multilingual in history. Walking through their streets, you’ll hear Spanish, Tagalog, and Hebrew, but you’ll never encounter autochthonous languages like Lenape (New York), Darug (Sydney), or Squamish (Vancouver). Our cities’ remarkable diversity was preceded by acts of expulsion and dispossession that destroyed long histories of earlier settlement along with the languages that made settlement possible. If patterns continue, nearly half of the world’s approximately six thousand languages could be silenced, the planetary cultural collapse mirroring the ongoing elimination of plant and animal species.1 Anglophone settler societies like the United States constitute the center of the emergency. As many as half of the three hundred languages once spoken by the indigenous peoples of North America are already effectively gone, and fewer than twenty of those remaining—major languages like Cherokee, Navajo, and Yup’ik—are predicted to survive the coming decades.2 Likewise, after centuries of systematic disenfranchisement, many First Nations languages in Canada and Aboriginal languages in Australia are now spoken only by small clusters of elderly people.

Karen’s Lenape sessions are part of an unprecedented, decentralized global effort at cultural reclamation, which crystallized when the United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages. Activists from hundreds of communities around the world, many of them very small in number, are intensifying the pioneering twentieth-century models of language renewal, such as those that swelled the population of speakers of Hebrew, Basque, Welsh, and Māori. Passing the language on to children at home is critical to any revitalization effort, but it can be crushingly difficult. Successful alternative approaches include the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program, developed in California in 1993 and now spreading to Canada and Australia, which pairs older speakers with younger learners for ten or more hours per week. All participants are paid and immersed in the language outside the classroom, ideally in hands-on, culturally relevant settings. The grassroots, activist-driven Hawaiian-language movement, another remarkable model, has built an entire education system from the ground up, offering everything from “language nests” for preschoolers to graduate studies in Hawaiian. The Welsh are using poetry and music to renew their language (still famously robust, given its geographic proximity to language-killing English).

Reawakening dormant languages requires extraordinary acts of coordination—administrative, social, and emotional—but it is possible. Take jessie “little doe” baird, a Wôpanâak woman who, when pregnant with her fifth child, Mae Alice, had a vision of reviving her ancestral language—the first tongue the Pilgrims encountered in coastal Massachusetts, which had been without speakers for more than a century. baird studied linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then spent the next twenty-six years leading a revival of Wôpanâak; Mae Alice is the first Wôpanâak-speaking child in generations. In Ohio, activist Daryl Baldwin has spearheaded the revival of Myaamia, dormant since the 1960s, first teaching it to himself, his wife, and their four children. Common to both community-led efforts was meticulous linguistic research that fed into the creation of immersion programs focused on fostering fluent new speakers.

Documentary records play a crucial role, especially when there are no living native speakers. In the early twentieth century, the American linguist J. P. Harrington collected approximately thirteen hundred recordings of ninety American Indian languages on fragile wax cylinders and aluminum discs. Harrington was a complex figure, but he was dedicated to languages, and he worked closely with native speakers for extended periods. For many American Indian language activists, the road to revival begins with Harrington’s archive, which is housed at the Smithsonian. Over the past twenty-five years, a new generation of linguists has followed in Harrington’s footsteps, creating the subdiscipline of language documentation and producing audio and video recordings, dictionaries, grammar manuals, and articles on an unprecedented scale, all of which feed the revitalization movement. Yet these initiatives are not without complications: Tensions between community goals and outsider or academic methods have moved many linguists to recalibrate, and much linguistic research on smaller communities is still undertaken by missionaries motivated by the dream of translating the Gospel. The gold standard is the native-speaker linguist from the community, but there are often tensions within communities, too.

Globally, language revitalization is both a product and a symbol of the half-century-old “demographic revolution” occurring in indigenous communities of the United States, Canada, Brazil, and elsewhere, from the Sámi of Scandinavia to the Mapuche of Chile and western Argentina. After centuries of decimation, indigenous groups are growing at a far greater pace than the general population, due not only to high birth rates but also to changing attitudes toward these cultures, which has led more people from mixed backgrounds to proudly acknowledge their indigenous roots. Official recognition of a language—whether it’s Tamazight (Berber) in Algeria or all twenty native languages of Alaska—can be useful for a community’s perceived strength, but rising incomes, political autonomy, and principled policies are also essential to any population’s tangible gains.

Urbanization is the linchpin of linguistic maintenance and revitalization. If smaller languages are to survive, they will have to do so in cities, where the majority of humanity now lives. An estimated 50 percent of indigenous people reside in urban areas—from the Mohawk steelworkers of Brooklyn to the residents of the Little Earth housing complex in Minneapolis to those living in the Toba barrio in Buenos Aires—where their families may have been settled for generations, or where they may have been forced to relocate. In some countries, such as Canada, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile, the ratio is reported to be even higher. These communities often remain invisible to outsiders, and in some places, such as “the Block” in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, they are threatened again by redevelopment. Even so, in both Canada and Australia, the urban indigenous population is increasing much faster than the general urban population. New York City is home not only to the largest concentration of American Indians in the United States (at a total of 111,749 members, according to the 2010 census) but also to tens of thousands of recently arrived indigenous Latin Americans from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and elsewhere, most of them uncounted by the census. Population density usually coincides with concentrated public and private resources, which can support crosscutting alliances, such as the nonprofit Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations’ Los Angeles committee, which includes individuals from at least eight different indigenous Mexican groups, as well as members who identify as mestizo. Cities also facilitate encounters with the worlds of media and the arts, where messages can be articulated in new keys.

But if cities are crucibles for the formation of new composite identities, they are also sieves, where all but the dominant few cultures can quickly drain away. Urban spaces that foster subcultures are often destabilizing to cultures historically anchored in language, family, and land. As scholars Naama Blatman-Thomas and Libby Porter put it, cities have been “sites for expressing and actualizing colonial power,” such that indigenous people have experienced “vast symbolic dispossession, which has left them essentialized as non-urban while imposing structural limitations on their ability to assert their sovereignty in urban contexts.”3

Still, even if urban conditions discourage landownership and intergenerational settlement, there remains power in language. Forward-thinking cities around the world are enhancing efforts to accommodate mother tongues and encouraging multilingualism in schools and other institutions. (“Language access,” the legal right to translation and interpretation, has greatly improved in New York since 2008, when the local government committed to providing basic services in the city’s six most widely spoken languages.) But when it comes to smaller indigenous languages and cultures with fewer resources, the changes have been primarily symbolic. In many places, an indigenous presence is newly visible in land acknowledgments, celebrations of Indigenous Peoples’ Day (replacing Columbus Day), memorial plaques, and other public events. In a few cases, city agencies—such as the New York City Department of Health, which had been developing a health initiative specifically for indigenous people—are beginning to recognize the importance of engaging with urban indigenous communities. Rare are more substantive initiatives, such as the controversial 2015 native title settlement between the Noongar Nation and the provincial government of Western Australia, which recognized traditional Noongar ownership of an area encompassing the major metropolitan region of Perth and calculated belated compensation accordingly.

The revival of a language is not only a triumph of creativity and continuity—it is also a significant step toward restitution and recovery after the five centuries of colonialism and nationalism that have led to the current linguistic extinction event. Individuals and communities should have meaningful options as to how they relate to their pasts and construct their linguistic futures. Though hundreds of the world’s endangered languages are still likely to disappear over the next century, the language revitalization movement is demonstrating that some may be able to survive, evolve, and coexist with more widely spoken languages. If one critical ingredient has been lacking in the efforts to revive indigenous cultures, languages, and communities, it is active financial and official support from majority populations. Through our institutions, foundations, schools, and governments, majority populations need to support the revitalizers, as a matter of justice.

Ross Perlin is codirector of the Endangered Language Alliance.

Talk of the Town : Ross Perlin on endangered languages. By Ross Perlin. Artforum, Vol. 58, Nr. 2, October 2019. 

Half of the world’s languages are endangered and more than a thousand are expected to be lost in coming decades. A team at UCL is using animation software to preserve these languages in an entirely new way.

It’s estimated that there are over 7,000 documented languages spoken across the world. Yet around half of these languages are endangered. Between 1950 and 2021, around 230 languages were wiped from human memory. About 1,500 endangered and rare languages are at a high risk of being lost in the next century.

The consequences of language loss – also known as linguicide - are felt around the world, affecting identity and well-being as well as culture and linguistic diversity.

In response to this growing trend, an anthropologist and architect at UCL have come together to present and preserve some of these languages in a truly unique way, using inspiration and technology from animation in the gaming industry.

Reimagining language

Language is often only imagined in the shape dictated by our writing system - as words on a page or as sound. But the ‘shape’ of humanity’s natural languages and their high-dimensional form mostly remain to be fully explored and modelled as visual material – similar to how we envision the double helix of DNA.

Rather than only listening to a recording, scientists have now made it possible to also handle a language excerpt physically, by building 3D printed models based on language patterns and grammar.

As part of a study published in Nature’s Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, scientists explored how the structure of language can be represented in 3D using software commonly used for game, film and video animation.

To create their 3D designs, they drew on the sounds of a language – the number of syllables in a line – as well as its grammar, focusing on a particular grammatical system called evidentials. They gave a numerical value to “evidential weight” – that is, the nature of the evidence being conveyed. In one of the languages they focused on - the Amazonian language Tariana - speakers are grammatically obliged to indicate the nature of the evidence they’re conveying at all times, unlike in English, where this isn’t required. Tariana contains a hierarchy of preferred evidentials, ranging from information obtained through direct visual observation to the repetition of information related by someone else.

They plotted points in three dimensions, with the numerical values derived from evidentials along the Z axis, the number of syllables along the Y axis and timeline on the X axis. The design software then turned these points into a 3D shape, virtually filling in the digital weave of warp and weft to appear as a smooth, woven undulating surface.

The researchers were then able to create four prototypes and digital 3D images from this, which they printed as 3D objects.

 The first of its kind in the world, the project and its outputs not only enable the visual demonstration of the architecture of language, but also enables its preservation in a permanent, solid form.

Crossing boundaries

The multi-disciplinary study brought together Dr Alex Pillen (UCL Anthropology) and PhD candidate Emma-Kate Matthews (Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL). Dr Pillen explains: “The seed of the idea for this work came from our initial conversations - with each of us coming at this from our own different disciplines.

“At the time, I was just finishing a book project, and I felt that I couldn't quite come up with a single image that would go on the cover.

“And I thought, well, what if I could create an image that roughly would be the architecture of the Kurdish language incurred through an abstract design that could be used as the cover?

“Then more people were saying, ‘Well, we should put in some comparative materials. It shouldn't just be about Kurdish.’

“We then contacted colleagues who are looking at Amazonian languages – and then I had a PhD student who worked on Akkadian, an ancient language, who agreed to code it. Then a colleague suggested we could add English as well, which we did.” 

Dr Pillen explains: “We've focused on one single grammatical system that is most prominent in Native American, Amazonian and Aboriginal languages - evidentials. Grammar is complex in these languages, and these are precisely the languages that are under threat.

The researchers say that visualising words and grammar in 3D offers a palpable new way to preserve languages that will not leave behind a written record, or whose complex patterns are often lost in translation - documenting endangered languages and enhancing grammatical understanding - and bringing to life ancient languages no longer spoken for future generations.

“We do, of course, have recordings of these languages to preserve the way they sound, while the vocabulary can be preserved in a dictionary. But what is more difficult to preserve is the grammar, because this is often presented in a very dry manner by linguists.

“You get transcripts, annotated with very technical terminology. But by producing the geometry of grammar in 3D, we allow people to have an immediate intuitive relationship to these languages that are under threat - or that might disappear.”

As well as its implications for recording language in an era of rapid loss of linguistic diversity, the scientists say that 3D printing words and phrases also enables them and their students to use spatial intuition to get to know the patterns of languages that we do or do not speak.

“In terms of spatial intuition, you can immediately see in terms of - for example, the Tariana example - if you hold it in your hand, there is an immediate sensation of its complexity, which I would say the kind of books written by linguists, with all the technical detail about grammar, don't achieve,” Dr Pillen adds.

 Dr Pillen also notes that it isn’t just languages under threat of extinction that are experiencing linguicide.

“This is not only about preservation of languages that are endangered - but also about linguistic loss,” she says.

“Some Amazonian language, Aboriginal languages, North American languages are facing extinction - but there are several other languages spoken by sizeable populations who have been faced with language loss, such as the Kurdish language.

“In Turkey and Syria, where language policies obstruct the standardisation of language, and schooling in the Kurdish mother tongue, communities suffer a loss of culture, and loss of linguistic heritage.

“It's for people like that that these models are also important as a solid object to reflect that predicament of loss. Our method allows for aspects of an intangible heritage to become tangible - a rare form of solidity for people who have often lost so much.”

The researchers say that there is more they’d like to do with the technology they’ve developed to further enhance learning and language preservation.

“At the moment, these are language excerpts that are frozen in time representing very short speech moments,” Dr Pillen adds. “Now, what would be amazing is to use larger datasets to create moving images of evolving shapes in natural language.”

 Feature: Preserving endangered languages as 3D shapes. University College Of London, January 25, 2023. 

Climate crisis could be ‘final nail in the coffin’ for half of all surviving languages, say linguists, as coastal communities are forced to migrate

Every 40 days a language dies. This “catastrophic” loss is being amplified by the climate crisis, according to linguists. If nothing is done, conservative estimates suggest that half of all the 7,000 languages currently spoken will be extinct by the end of the century.

Speakers of minority languages have experienced a long history of persecution, with the result that by the 1920s half of all Indigenous languages in Australia, the US, South Africa and Argentina were extinct. The climate crisis is now considered the “final nail in the coffin” for many Indigenous languages and with them, the knowledge they represent.

“Languages are already vulnerable and endangered,” says Anastasia Riehl, the director of the Strathy language unit at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Huge factors are globalisation and migration, as communities move to regions where their language is not spoken or valued, according to Riehl.

“It seems particularly cruel,” she says, that most of the world’s languages are in parts of the world that are growing inhospitable to people.

Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation measuring 12,189 sq km (4,706 sq miles), has 110 languages, one for each 111 sq km, the highest density of languages on the planet. It is also one of the countries most at risk from the climate crisis, she says.

 “Many small linguistic communities are on islands and coastlines vulnerable to hurricanes and sea level rise.” Others live on lands where rising temperature threaten traditional farming and fishing practices, prompting migration.

“When climate change comes in, it disrupts communities even more,” says Riehl. “It has a multiplier effect, the final nail in the coffin.”

Although the effects of global heating on language have not been well studied, it has caused increased instances of heatwaves, droughts, floods and sea level rise, which have already exposed millions of people to food insecurity, water shortages and driven them from their homes. Disasters, the majority of them weather related, accounted for 23.7m internal displacements in 2021, up from 18.8m in 2018. Over the past 10 years, Asia and the Pacific were the regions most affected by displacement worldwide, with the Pacific island states the worst by population size.

Yet, it is precisely here where many Indigenous languages have thrived. One in five of the world’s languages are from the Pacific, according to the New Zealand Māori language commission.

“The Pacific, including the Philippines, India and Indonesia, has a lot of linguistic diversity. Some languages only have a few hundred speakers,” says Anouschka Foltz, an associate professor in English Linguistics at the University of Graz, in Austria.

“If sea level rise or another climate impact hits, they have to leave. Communities scatter to places where their language is not valued.”

 A map of the world’s 577 critically endangered languages reveals clusters around equatorial Africa and in the Pacific and the Indian ocean region.

In response to the crisis, the UN launched the International Decade of Indigenous Languages in December. Preserving languages of Indigenous communities is “not only important for them, but for all humanity,” the UN general assembly president, Csaba Kőrösi, said, urging countries to allow access to education in Indigenous languages.

“With each Indigenous language that goes extinct, so too goes the thought, the culture, tradition and knowledge it bears,” said Kőrösi, echoing the sentiments of Ken Hale, the late US linguist and activist, who compared losing any language to “dropping a bomb on the Louvre”.

Dr Gregory Anderson is director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, a non profit based in the US that documents and records endangered languages.

“We are heading for a catastrophic language and cultural loss into the next century,” he says.

Anderson notes that the death of a language, when the last fluent speaker dies, is often the result of “some sort of assault” on Indigenous communities. It can be overt, such as when Indigenous children were forced into boarding schools and banned from speaking their native language in countries including the US, Canada, Australia and Scandinavian nations in the 1900s, or covert, where people with a strong accent are excluded from jobs.

Studies show that, while the suppression of Indigenous language is associated with mental health problems, the reverse can also be true. One study in Bangladesh showed that Indigenous youth capable of speaking their native language were less likely to consume alcohol or illicit substances in risky amounts, and were less exposed to violence.

 Books written in the Quechua Indigenous language sit behind a student during a class on medicinal plants, at a public primary school in Licapa, Peru, Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2021.

View image in fullscreen

Some efforts to save Indigenous languages have been successful, with the introduction of ‘immersion schools’ for young children being particularly effective. Photograph: Martín Mejía/AP

There are some bright spots, too: such as New Zealand and Hawaii, where Indigenous languages have been resurrected.

In the 1970s, only 2,000 native speakers of Hawaiian remained, most in their seventh decade of life, but advocates launched “immersion schools”, where children are taught in Hawaiian. Today, more than 18,700 people speak it. In New Zealand, only 5% of young Māori people spoke the language in the 1970s, but due largely to efforts by the Māori, backed by the government, more than 25% now speak it.

 Prof Rawinia Higgins, a member of the Global Taskforce for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032 and the New Zealand Māori language commissioner says: “Indigenous languages are an anchor to the past, as well as a compass to the future. Thirty-five years ago, people fought to save the Māori language with the government of the day boldly making it an official language protected by law. Once banned and seen by many as worthless, now more than eight in 10 of us see it as part of our identity as New Zealanders.”

The New Zealand broadcaster, journalist and Māori interpreter Oriini Kaipara was taught the language by her grandparents, in kōhanga reo, or “language nests” where only Māori is spoken.

 “My generation were fortunate enough to be raised in total immersion,” says Kaipara, who, as a primetime newsreader with a Māori chin marking, or moko kauae, has become an ambassador for Māori. “But language loss is still a huge threat to us. Those generations who were native speakers, held the customs, the understanding, the indigenous knowledge that was handed down by their parents. And that has gone.”

Māori have a “unique way” of connecting with their environment that is only accessible through their language, she says. The word matemateāone is almost untranslatable into English, she said, but expresses “a deep, emotional, spiritual, physical” longing for the Earth. “In essence, it means I belong,” she says. “My language is a gateway to my world.”

 This article was amended on 17 January 2023. An earlier version said the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages is based at the University of South Africa; it is actually a non-profit based in the US. An amendment on 26 April 2023, clarified that Anastasia Riehl described Vanuatu as being one of the countries most at risk from the climate crisis, not sea level rise, as we had previously said.

Lost for words: fears of ‘catastrophic’ language loss due to rising seas. By Karen McVeigh. The Guardian, January 16, 2023. 

 Endangered languages have sentimental value, it’s true, but are there good philosophical reasons to preserve them?

The year 2010 saw the death of Boa Senior, the last living speaker of Aka-Bo, a tribal language native to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. News coverage of Boa Senior’s death noted that she had survived the 2004 tsunami – an event that was reportedly foreseen by tribe elders – along with the Japanese occupation of 1942 and the barbaric policies of British colonisers. The linguist Anvita Abbi, who knew Boa Senior for many years, said: ‘After the death of her parents, Boa was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years. She was often very lonely and had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people.’

Tales of language extinction are invariably tragic. But why, exactly? Aka-Bo, like many other extinct languages, did not make a difference to the lives of the vast majority of people. Yet the sense that we lose something valuable when languages die is familiar. Just as familiar, though, is the view that preserving minority languages is a waste of time and resources. I want to attempt to make sense of these conflicting attitudes.

The simplest definition of a minority language is one that is spoken by less than half of some country or region. This makes Mandarin – the world’s most widely spoken language – a minority language in many countries. Usually, when we talk of minority languages, we mean languages that are minority languages even in the country in which they are most widely spoken. That will be our focus here. We’re concerned especially with minority languages that are endangered, or that would be endangered were it not for active efforts to support them.

The sorrow we feel about the death of a language is complicated. Boa Senior’s demise did not merely mark the extinction of a language. It also marked the loss of the culture of which she was once part; a culture that was of great interest to linguists and anthropologists, and whose extinction resulted from oppression and violence. There is, in addition, something melancholy about the very idea of a language’s last speaker; of a person who, like Boa Senior, suffered the loss of everyone to whom she was once able to chat in her mother tongue. All these things – the oppression until death of a once thriving culture, loneliness, and losing loved ones – are bad, regardless of whether they involve language death.

Part of our sadness when a language dies, then, has nothing to do with the language itself. Thriving majority languages do not come with tragic stories, and so they do not arouse our emotions in the same ways. Unsurprisingly, concern for minority languages is often dismissed as sentimental. Researchers on language policy have observed that majority languages tend to be valued for being useful and for facilitating progress, while minority languages are seen as barriers to progress, and the value placed on them is seen as mainly sentimental.

Sentimentality, we tend to think, is an exaggerated emotional attachment to something. It is exaggerated because it does not reflect the value of its object. The late philosopher G A Cohen describes a well-worn, 46-year-old eraser that he bought when he first became a lecturer, and that he would ‘hate to lose’. We all treasure such things – a decades-old rubber, our children’s drawings, a long-expired train ticket from a trip to see the one we love – that are worthless to other people. If the value of minority languages is mainly sentimental, it is comparable to the value that Cohen placed on his old eraser. It would be cruel to destroy it deliberately, yet it would be unreasonable for him to expect society to invest significant resources preserving it. The same might be true of minority languages: their value to some just doesn’t warrant the society-wide effort required to preserve them.

There are a couple of responses to this. First, the value of minority languages is not purely sentimental. Languages are scientifically interesting. There are whole fields of study devoted to them – to charting their history, relationships to other languages, relationships to the cultures in which they exist, and so on. Understanding languages even helps us to understand the way we think. Some believe that the language we speak influences the thoughts we have, or even that language is what makes thought possible. This claim is associated with the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which the linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker at Harvard has described as ‘wrong, all wrong’.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is certainly linked to a variety of dubious myths and legends, such as the pervasive but false belief that Eskimos have a mind-bogglingly large number of words for snow. But its core idea is not as wrong-headed as Pinker believes. While there is little evidence that thought would not be possible at all without language, there is plenty of evidence that language influences the way we think and experience the world. For example, depending on which language they are using, fluent German-English bilinguals categorise motion differently, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals represent the passage of time differently, and Dutch-Farsi bilinguals perceive musical pitch differently. Even Pinker apparently finds the link between thought and language compelling: he believes that thoughts are couched in their own language, which he calls ‘mentalese’. In any case, this debate can be settled only empirically, by studying as many different languages (and their speakers) as possible. Which leaves little doubt that languages are valuable for non-sentimental reasons.

Second, let’s take a closer look at sentimental value. Why do we call some ways of valuing ‘sentimental’? We often do this when someone values something to which they have a particular personal connection, as in the case of Cohen and his eraser. Cohen calls this sort of value personal value. Things that have personal value are valued much less by people who do not have the right sort of personal connection to them. Another way of being sentimental is valuing something that is connected to someone or something that we care about. This sort of value is behind the thriving market in celebrity autographs, and it is why parents around the world stick their children’s drawings to the fridge.

 The term ‘sentimental’ is gently pejorative: we view sentimentality as an inferior sort of value (compared with, say, practical usefulness), although we are often happy to indulge each other’s sentimental attachments when they don’t cause us inconvenience. Parents’ sentimentality about their kids’ drawings is not inconvenient to others, but sentimentality about minority languages often is, since they require effort and resources to support. This helps to explain why minority languages, to some people, are just not worth the bother.

However, sentimentality is not so easily set aside. Our culture is underpinned by values that, on close inspection, look very much like sentimentality. Consider the following comparison. We can all agree that it is sentimental of Cohen to insist (as he did) that he would decline an opportunity to upgrade his old eraser to a brand-new one. Yet were the Louvre to decline an offer from a skilled forger to exchange the Mona Lisa for an ‘improved’ copy that eliminated the damage suffered over the years by the original, we are unlikely to view this decision as sentimental. On the contrary, were the museum to accept the forger’s offer, we could expect to find this shocking story make headlines around the world. Our contrasting attitudes disguise the fact that the values involved in these two cases are very similar. In each case, an item with a certain history is valued over another, somewhat improved, item with a different history.

This sort of value is ubiquitous. We preserve such things as medieval castles, the Eiffel Tower and the Roman Colosseum not because they are useful but because of their historical and cultural significance. When ISIS fighters smashed 5,000-year-old museum exhibits after capturing Mosul in 2015, outraged journalists focused on the destroyed artefacts’ links with ancient and extinct cultures. Historical and cultural significance is part of why we value languages; indeed, the philosopher Neil Levy has argued that it is the main reason to value them. These ways of valuing things are labelled sentimental in some contexts. If minority languages are valuable partly for sentimental reasons then they are in good company.

While valuing minority languages is often viewed as sentimental, it is just as often admired. The documentary We Still Live Here (2010) tells the story of the revival of the Wampanoag language, a Native American language that was dead for more than a century. The film celebrates the language’s revival and the efforts of Jessie Little Doe Baird, who spearheaded its revival, whose ancestors were native speakers, and whose daughter became the revived language’s first native speaker. Baird received a MacArthur Fellowship to carry out her project, and her success attracted widespread media attention and honours, including a ‘Heroes Among Us’ award from the Boston Celtics basketball team.

Across the Atlantic, Katrina Esau, aged 84, is one of only three remaining speakers of N|uu, a South African ‘click’ language. For the past decade, she has run a school in her home, teaching N|uu to local children in an effort to preserve it. In 2014, she received the Order of the Baobab from the country’s president, Jacob Zuma. Both Baird and Esau have received global news coverage for their efforts, which are acclaimed as positive contributions to their community.

It is fortunate that sentimentality can be a respectable sort of attitude. Without it – that is, focusing solely on the scientific and academic value of languages – it is difficult to explain why it is better to preserve currently existing minority languages rather than revive long-dead languages that nobody living today cares about, or why it is better to support endangered natural languages such as the Lencan languages of Central America rather than artificial languages such as Volapük (constructed by a Roman Catholic priest in 19th-century Germany) and Klingon (the extra-terrestrial language in Star Trek), or why it is better to preserve endangered natural languages than to invent completely new languages.

Even people who are unsympathetic to efforts to support minority languages are, I imagine, less baffled by Esau’s desire to preserve N|uu than they would be by a campaign for the creation and proliferation of a completely new artificial language. No such campaign exists, of course, despite the fact that creating and promoting a new language would be scientifically interesting. The reason why it’s better to preserve currently existing natural languages than to create new ones is because of the historical and personal value of the former. These are exactly the sort of values associated with sentimentality.

Minority languages, then, are valuable. Does that mean that societies should invest in supporting them? Not necessarily. The value of minority languages might be outweighed by the value of not supporting them. Let’s look at two reasons why this might be the case: the burden that supporting minority languages places on people, and the benefits of reducing language diversity.

While we might value minority languages for similar reasons that we value medieval castles, there is an important difference in how we can go about preserving the two types of thing. Preserving a minority language places a greater burden on people than does preserving a castle. We can preserve a castle by paying people to maintain it. But we can’t preserve a minority language by paying people to carry out maintenance. Instead, we must get people to make the language a big part of their lives, which is necessary if they are to become competent speakers. Some people do this voluntarily, but if we want the language to grow beyond a pool of enthusiasts, we must impose lifestyle changes on people whether they like it or not. Often this involves legislation to ensure that children learn the minority language at school.

Such policies are controversial. Some parents think that it would be better for their children to learn a useful majority language rather than a less useful minority language. However, for native English speakers, the most commonly taught majority languages – French, German, Spanish, Italian – are not as useful as they first seem. A language is useful for a child to learn if it will increase the amount of people she can communicate with, increase the amount of places where she can make herself understood, and perhaps also if it is the language of a neighbouring country. Yet, because English is widely spoken in countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy, even an English-speaking monoglot can make himself understood pretty well when visiting these countries. If he decides to invest effort in learning one of these languages, he can expect relatively little return on his investment in terms of usefulness.

If people in English-speaking countries are concerned about teaching children useful languages, we should teach them languages whose native speakers less commonly understand English, such as Arabic and Mandarin – languages that are not commonly taught in schools in the UK and the US. There are, of course, some native English speakers who believe that learning any foreign language is pointless because English is so widely understood – think of the stereotypical British ex-pat living in Spain but not learning Spanish – but this view is clearly not held by parents who are supportive of their children learning some foreign language. So people who support English-speaking children learning French, German and Spanish, but who don’t support them learning a local minority language, will have difficulty defending their position in terms of usefulness. In that case, why is it so widely seen as a good thing for English-speaking children to learn majority languages such as French, German and Spanish? I think it is the same reason that many claim it’s a good thing to learn a minority language: to gain an insight into an unfamiliar culture, to be able to signal respect by speaking to people in the local language, to hone the cognitive skills one gains by learning a language, and so on.

There is also, I think, a special kind of enrichment that children – and people in general – get from learning a minority language connected to their community. They get a new insight into their community’s culture and history. They also gain the ability to participate in aspects of their culture that, without knowing the language, are closed off and even invisible; namely, events and opportunities conducted in the minority language. I write from experience here, having spent the past 18 months or so trying to learn Welsh. I was born and raised in Wales yet, until recently, my main contact with the language consisted mainly of ignoring it. Returning to Wales now, armed with my admittedly modest understanding of Welsh, I have a sense of this long-familiar country becoming visible to me in a new way. I feel pleased and interested when I encounter Welsh speakers. I am happy that my nephew learns Welsh at school. These strong conservative intuitions are – for a non-conservative like me – surprising and somewhat alien. But they are not unique: they centre on benefits that are frequently mentioned by campaigners for minority languages.

Finally, let’s consider a very different reason to resist the view that we should support minority languages. Language diversity is a barrier to successful communication. The Bible has a story about this: as a punishment for building the Tower of Babel, God ‘confused the language of all of the Earth’ by causing people to speak a multiplicity of languages where once they had all spoken the same one. It’s rare these days to encounter the view that our diversity of languages is a curse, but it’s notable that in other areas of communication – such as in the representation of numbers, length and volume – we favour standardisation. The advantages to adopting a single language are clear. It would enable us to travel anywhere in the world, confident that we could communicate with the people we met. We would save money on translation and interpretation. Scientific advances and other news could be shared faster and more thoroughly. By preserving a diversity of languages, we preserve the obstacles to communication. Wouldn’t it be better to allow as many languages as possible to die out, leaving us with just one universal lingua franca?

It would be difficult, however, to implement a lingua franca peacefully and justly. The very idea calls to mind oppressive past policies, such as the efforts of the Soviet Union to suppress local languages and to force all its citizens to communicate only in Russian. Extinct and endangered languages have not, on the whole, become extinct or endangered gently, by subsequent generations choosing freely to switch to a more dominant language. The history of language death is a violent one, as is reflected in the titles of books on the subject: David Crystal’s Language Death (2000), Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine’s Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (2000), and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas’s Linguistic Genocide in Education (2008).

It would, then, be difficult to embrace a lingua franca without harming speakers of other languages. In addition, if we were serious about acting justly, it would not be enough merely to abstain from harming communities of minority language speakers. Given the injustices that such communities have suffered in the past, it might be that they are owed compensation. This is a view commonly held by minority-language campaigners. It is debatable what form this compensation should take, but it seems clear that it should not include wiping out and replacing the local language.

Perhaps, if one were a god creating a world from scratch, it would be better to give the people in that world one language rather than many, like the pre-Babel civilisations described in the Bible. But now that we have a world with a rich diversity of languages, all of which are interwoven with distinct histories and cultures, and many of which have survived ill-treatment and ongoing persecution, yet which continue to be celebrated and defended by their communities and beyond – once we have all these things, there is no going back without sacrificing a great deal of what is important and valuable.

The death of languages. By Rebecca Roache. Aeon, October 12, 2017.