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Paul Jerome Croce, William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 1, June 2006, Page 226, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486132
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Language has become a centerpiece of critical theory and a setting for understanding webs of significance. Stephen G. Alter has produced two fine studies of the nineteenth-century origins of linguistic thinking: Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1999), and now this biography of William Dwight Whitney, an American founder of modern language study, or philology. Alter's study emphasizes Whitney's working life and theoretical contributions rather than his early years or personal life.
Whitney (1827–1894) drew on commonsense realism for his view of linguistic development. He emphasized language conventions rather than any timeless essence. He proposed that languages therefore emerge and change naturally, with usage governing the character of any language, and with words gradually becoming conventionally accepted parts of the language.
These philosophical commitments put Whitney in conflict with the mainstream religion of his time and his place, Yale University, where he taught. Many mid-nineteenth-century religious believers looked to the idealistic philosophy of mind, with its power of human will, for its potential to endorse Christian doctrines. From this perspective, realism, despite its own support of religion, looked akin to more starkly materialistic scientific naturalism. Whitney was not opposed to supernaturalism, but rather to its idealist supporters, and his strongest commitments were to the growing intellectual and cultural authority of science.
