Geoffrey Marnell presents philosophical arguments favoring grammatical descriptivism over grammatical prescriptivism. I argue that his explanation and defence of descriptivism reveal that his descriptivism is itself prescriptivist

Karl, Pfeifer

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Pfeifer, Karl

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2017-03-21, 7:51 PMReview - Correct English - General TopicsPage 1 of 4http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=7828&cn=139RESOURCES email page    print pageAll Topic ReviewsHealth Care in AmericaThe Happiness of Burnout"Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People""How Come Boys Get to Keep TheirNoses?"17 Lies That Are Holding You Back20 Jazz Funk Greats50 Popular Beliefs That People Think AreTrueA Brief History of the SmileA Child of One's OwnA Citizen Legislature/A People's ParliamentA Clinician's Guide to Legal Issues inPsychotherapyA Colorful History of Popular DelusionsA Cultural History of Modern Science inChinaA Cursing Brain?A History of Intelligence and "IntellectualDisability"A History of MarriageA History of PsychiatryA Little F'd UpA Loving Approach to Dementia CareA Man's Guide to Healthy AgingA Mind ApartA Mind So RareA Natural History of RapeA Natural History of VisionA Red Heart of MemoriesA Short History of MedicineA Student's Guide to the History AndPhilosophy of YogaA Tear is an Intellectual ThingA Therapist's Guide to UnderstandingCommon Medical ProblemsA Universe of ConsciousnessA User's Guide to the BrainA World Full of GodsABC of Eating DisordersABCs to Positive LivingAbnormal Psychology in ContextAbout FaceAccessible Yoga for Every Body DVDActs of ConscienceAdvances in Culture and PsychologyAfter HarmAfter the Ecstasy, the LaundryAfter the Globe, Before the WorldAgainst the MachineRELATED PAGESGPSEA Invitation & RSVP FormRELATED TOPICSAddiction & AlcoholismAnxiety & PanicArt and PhotographyAudio BooksChildhood DisordersChildren and TeensClient ReviewsDepressionEthicsFictionGeneral TopicsGenetics and EvolutionGrief, Loss, Death & DyingMedications & PsychiatryMemoirs and BiographiesMental HealthMovies & DVDsPersonality DisordersGENERAL TOPICSReview - CorrectEnglishReality or Myth?by Geoffrey RobertMarnellBurdock Books, 2015Review by Karl Pfeifer,PhD,Mar 7th 2017 (Volume21, Issue 10)I came to Correct English: Reality orMyth? thinking of myself as a modestprescriptivist. Thanks to Geoffrey MarnellI have come to understand that I need todistinguish my concern over themechanics of the language as a tool forcommunication from the idea ofgrammatical rules per se, many of thetraditional ones of which I myself haveregarded as ill-informed and ill-advised.Marnell rightly regards the importantissues as being not whether traditionalrules are complied with, but whetherlanguage is used in accordance withprinciples of clarity and economy; and thecommon usage of our intended audienceshould be a guide as to what works inrespect of achieving that goal.          Marnell recapitulates many of thefamiliar examples of traditional rulesbased on prejudice and unfounded opinionand it is hard to disagree. Of course it isnot wrong to split infinitives and oftenthat is even the better option, inasmuchas it may contribute to clarity. But at thesame time, it is also hard to see how ashift from rules to principles is not still aspecies of prescriptivism, differing only inwhat is being prescribed. Clarity andeconomy rather than traditional ruleshave become the main virtues to bepursued.          "We do not need the putativevarieties of prescriptivism to write well(my italics)," he claims, "and good (myitalics) writing can be taught" (p. 12). Yetit seems an odd notion of descriptivismTweetHome  Browse Subjects  Search  New Reviews  About Us  Feedback  Select Topic Share Welcome to MHN's uniquebook review siteMetapsychology. Wefeature over 7700 in-depth reviews of a widerange of books and DVDswritten by our reviewersfrom many backgroundsand perspectives. Weupdate our front pageweekly and add morethan thirty new reviewseach month. Our editor isChristian Perring, PhD. Tocontact him, use one ofthe forms available here.Can't remember our URL?Access our reviewsdirectly via'metapsychology.net'Metapsychology Onlinereviewers normallyreceive gratis reviewcopies of the items theyreview. Metapsychology Onlinereceives a commissionfrom Amazon.com forpurchases through thissite, which helps us sendreview copies toreviewers. Pleasesupport us by makingyour Amazon.compurchases through ourAmazon links. We thankyou for your support!0Like2017-03-21, 7:51 PMReview - Correct English - General TopicsPage 2 of 4http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=7828&cn=139PhilosophyPsychoanalysisPsychologyPsychotherapyRelationshipsReligionSelf-HelpSexualityWellness and Complementary Medicinethat subsumes such notions as goodness,which is a prescriptive notion. Marnell isfocused on the terms "correct" and"incorrect", although he does allow"wrong" as a virtual equivalent of thelatter (pp. 51-52), and ignores the statusof the other terms that he employs andthat would ordinarily also be regarded asterms for prescribing: "well", "good","should", "ought", "better", etc. It is onething to say that good principles of writing or principles of good writing (or goodpractices) should be informed by descriptions of common usage; it is quite anotherto deny that this is just a new and better nuanced prescriptivism. When I attributegoodness I do not merely describe.          What is unusual about Marnell's explanation and defence of descriptivism isthat it is basically a piece of applied philosophy, employing vocabulary, drawingdistinctions, and referencing authors that would be familiar to many who have hada few introductory courses in philosophy: a priori vs. a posteriori, deductive vs.inductive reasoning, "justified true belief", categorical imperative, categorymistake; Ryle, Wittgenstein, Hare, Beardsley, Ayer, Rawls, Hume. Moreover, he laysout arguments explicitly with numbered premises. As an academic philosopher, Ilove this. But one might wonder, will the wider audience for whom the book isintended be equally loving or become impatient with the fine dialecticalmanoeuvres? Let's hope it will educate and win some converts to the philosophicalcause.          Through a series of tortuous arguments involving dictionary definitions,Marnell hopes to convince us that the use of "correct" and "incorrect" to describelanguage is a category mistake; he quotes Gilbert Ryle: "[A category mistakerepresents facts] as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range oftypes or categories), when they actually belong to another" (Marnell, p. 88).          Marnell believes that correctness belongs to the category of things we canknow, and he claims grammar cannot be placed in that category. It turns out thathis underlying reason for this is that sentences that purport to express grammaticalknowledge, viz. grammatical prescriptions, cannot be true or correct because theyare categorical imperatives (unconditional commands) and commands cannot betrue or false. Well, I agree he is correct (!) that commands cannot be true or false.However, they can still be appropriate or inappropriate: For two-way roads, "Driveon the right" is an appropriate command in Canada, but inappropriate in Australia."Pass the salt" is infelicitous if there is no salt. However, the problem for Marnell isthat rules or prescriptions don't have to be expressed as commands: "You oughtnot to do X", "You should not do X", "It is wrong to do X" are all declarative (orindicative) sentences. Moreover, the reductive thesis that value-judgements aredisguised commands is controversial and not widely accepted. Many people believethere is such a thing as moral truth, after all.          Indeed, it is odd to see a descriptivist arguing that it is a mistake (as in"incorrect"?) to call a rule in the declarative form "correct" (or even that it is amistake to regard any particular piece of language as correct or incorrect) giventhat it is such a common and well established usage.          Marnell approvingly quotes Hume's claim that an "ought"-statement cannotbe derived from an "is"-statement. He calls Hume's "ought"-statements "imperativestatements" but that is a bit of sleight of hand; imperatives don't make statements.Hume himself regarded "ought"-statements (his term is "propositions") as capableof expressing truths or falsehoods — he just didn't believe you could derive themwithout an "ought"-statement among the premises.          Marnell devotes a large chapter to what he calls "the myth of correctness".After reading Marnell, I want to add a myth of my own: the myth of prescriptivistsvs. descriptivists. As far as I can tell, it's all prescriptivism, with the differences justbeing a matter of degree. Marnell divides prescriptivists into two camps, strong andweak. At the very far end of the spectrum you would have his strong prescriptivists, Join our e-mail list!:Metapsychology NewReviewAnnouncements: Sentout monthly, theseannouncements listour recent reviews. Tosubscribe, click here.Interested in becominga book reviewer forMetapsychology?Currently, weespecially needthoughtful reviewersfor books in fiction,self-help and popularpsychology. To apply,write to our editor.MetapsychologyOnline ReviewsPromote yourPage tooMetapsychology OnlineReviews ISSN 1931-5716Follow @metapsych 2017-03-21, 7:51 PMReview - Correct English - General TopicsPage 3 of 4http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=7828&cn=139viz. those who believe in "inviolable laws of language use that should never bebroken" (p. 56), and next door you would have his weak prescriptivists, viz. thosewho believe that language can at best be governed by rules (conventions), notlaws, where the rules are regarded as a product of human intervention, but stillworth treating as inviolable. One might be suspicious of the strong/weak distinction,but perhaps a case can be made for laws of grammar being analogous to Aristotle'sLaws of Thought, thereby rationalizing a belief that grammar is not governed bymere convention. (I have encountered grammar Nazis but never one who actuallybelieved anything like that, and I suspect that upon closer examination anostensible strong prescriptivist would turn out to be just a vehement weakprescriptivist, but at least the stronger position is conceivable if nothing else.)          Nevertheless, even by Marnell's own lights there are no descriptivists who donot offer prescriptions for language use; their prescriptions are just more modestand limited in scope. Marnell's descriptivists are not mere practitioners oraficionados of descriptive linguistics. They make recommendations based oncommon usage and the goal of communication, and what they recommend isdeemed to be better. (What exactly is "common usage" anyway? The concept itselfis vague and at best based on extrapolations from limited data subjected, for betteror worse, to various selection criteria.)          Marnell, as a descriptivist, maintains that "communication is paramount and… in general the best way to achieve it is by adopting the conventions of one'saudience (whoever they might be)" (p. 175). Many of us have had the experienceof reading instructions for a product written by someone whose native language isobviously not English and whose prose is so incomprehensible that even educatedguesswork is of no help. Is the error of the instructions' writer simply that he hasn'ttaken the common usage of his particular audience into account? That's unlikely. Insuch cases it's virtually certain that an audience for which that would be commonusage does not exist. The instructions' writer knows what he means to say (onehopes) but cannot say it in idiomatic English. Is it really plausible to regard hisEnglish as neither correct nor incorrect?          As a university professor I have had students, whose first and only languageis English, write sentences that are gobbledygook; yet they cannot understand whatis wrong with the sentences or coherently explain what they mean. Such studentsare the victims of a school system that replaced literature, grammar, andcomposition with so-called "language arts", which seems to have consisted mostlyof rap sessions and movies. They were not taught grammar because it wascontended that as native speakers they already knew how to properly speak thelanguage. Not even having learned about parts of speech and the roles of thoseparts, they ended up producing sentences that couldn't be parsed (oh, for the daysof sentence diagrams). The common usage of a group may not be adequate to thedemands of communication in a technologically advanced society, and educatorsneed to step in, prescriptions in hand, to educate the intended audience. Theresources of pidgin aren't always up to the task.          I confess that part of my motivation for prescriptivism has always been thehope that it would slow down linguistic change. It saddens me that much of theEnglish canon is becoming less and less accessible because of change (but not onlybecause of change: many young people have not been taught how to understandsentences with embeddings and subordination). I don't deny that change isinevitable, but I don't want to embrace it as Marnell seems to and I wish he hadmore sympathy for such concerns.          Be that as it may, Correct English: Reality or Myth? is an important book. Asfar as I know, it is the first of its genre that can justifiably be regarded as beingsignificantly a work in applied philosophy. The issues it addresses, as well as thoseit hints at in passing (e.g. national policies for language), deserve further study andshould become part of a more broadly envisaged philosophy of language. © 2017 Karl Pfeifer         2017-03-21, 7:51 PMReview - Correct English - General TopicsPage 4 of 4http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=7828&cn=139Karl	Pfeifer,	PhD,	Adjunct	Senior	Research	Fellow	in	Philosophy,	Monash	University,	andProfessor	Emeritus,	University	of	SaskatchewanAbout Us | About CenterSite | Terms & PrivacyCopyright © CenterSite, LLC, 1995-2017

Review – Correct English: Reality or Myth?

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