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Peter Burke, Roy Harris. The Linguistics of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 244. $89.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 111, Issue 3, June 2006, Page 784, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.111.3.784
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This polemical essay, written by a professor of linguistics, is concerned with the assumptions about language made by historians in the course of writing about the past. The term “writing” needs to be emphasized, since Harris argues that institutionalized history goes back to the “literate revolution” in ancient Greece and “embraced all the question-begging involved in reducing the oral to the written” (p. 67). Roy Harris claims that “throughout the Western tradition, the basic options in philosophy of history have been determined by the basic options in philosophy of language” (p. vii). He criticizes many historians for their “reocentrism”—in other words, for regarding the meanings of words “as deriving ultimately from things in the external world” (p. 3)—arguing that this assumption leads them to reify abstractions or, as R. G. Collingwood put it, to “freeze” the stream of historical thought. However, supporters of “psychocentric” and “contractual” views of language (according to which the meanings of words derive respectively from ideas in the mind or from social convention) do not escape whipping. Historians in general, more exactly “the majority of traditional historians from Herodotus onwards” (p. 19), are faulted for their uncritical acceptance of what Harris, as in earlier books, describes as “the language myth,” according to which the messages received by hearers or readers are essentially the same as the messages sent to them.
