Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

420 Roman Jakobson
an isolationist bias, noxious as any parochialism, separatism, and apartheid, or
one takes the opposite path and compromises the sound principle of integration
by substituting a meddlesome jheteronomy (alias ‘colonialism’) for the indis-
pensable autonomy. In other words, equal attention must be paid to the specifics
in the structure and in the development of any given province of knowledge,
and furthermore to their common foundations and developmental lines as well
as to their mutual dependence.
Recently the interdisciplinary rally of the law-seeking (nomothetic) sciences
of man - whether labeled ‘social sciences’ or ‘humanities’ - has been brought
forward by the Panel of Consultants drawn together by the Department of So-
cial Sciences at UNESCO in connection with the preparation of the present vol-
ume, and the modalities of such a cooperation underwent a stimulating discus-
sion. The spontaneous and many-sided interest manifested by the Tenth Inter-
national Congress of Linguists (Bucharest, 1967) for the ties between the science
of language and the various adjacent disciplines is likewise significant. The prob-
lem of interrelations between the sciences of man appears to be centered up-
on linguistics. That fact is due primarily to the unusually regular and self-
contained patterning of language and to the basic role which it plays in the
framework of culture; and, on the other hand, linguistics is recognized both
by anthropologists and psychologists as the most progressive and precise among
the sciences of man and, hence, as a methodological model for the remainder
of those disciplines (zoz, pp. 37, 66; 73, p. 9). As Piaget states, ‘La linguistique
est sans doute la plus avanctk des sciences sociales, par sa structuration thko-
rique aussi bien que par la prkision de son devoir, et elle entretient avec d‘autres
disciplines des relations d’un grand int6ret’ (137, p. 25). Already at the threshold
of our century Peirce assigned to ‘the vast and splendidly developed science of
linguistics’ a privileged position among the ‘studies of mental performances and
products’ (136, I, 5271).
In contradistinction to all other sciences of man and to some natural sciences
of relatively recent, modern origin, the study of language belongs to the few
earliest branches of knowledge. A keen outline of Sumerian, the most archaic
among the extant grammatical writings, is separated from us by almost four
thousand years ; both linguistic theory and empirical research have displayed a
varied and continuous tradition from ancient India and Greece through the
momentous achievements of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the era of
rationalism and Enlightenment, and, finally, the manifold scholarly trends of
the last two centuries.
It is precisely the rich and many-sided scientific experience of linguistics
which impels us to raise the questions: what place does it occupy among the
sciences of man and what is the outlook for an interdisciplinary cooperation on
a strictly reciprocal basis and without violation of the intrinsic needs and prop-
erties of any domain involved? Some doubts arose as to whether the ‘admirable
interdisciplinary collaboration’ that ties together the natural sciences could
actually be matched by the sciences of man, in view of the fact that a firm,
logical filiation and a hierarchical order of underlying concepts in respect to
relative generality and complexity are manifestly present in the interconnection