Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109

www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci

Orthodox unorthodoxy
John E. Joseph
Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, Adam Ferguson Building,
Edinburgh EH8 9LL, UK
Accepted 22 March 2001

Roy Harris, Introduction to Integrational Linguistics (Language and Communication

Library, 17), Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1998. Pp. ix, 168
Keywords: Integrational linguistics

Up to the mid-1990s the received wisdom on Roy Harris and integrational lin-
guistics was that its whole thrust was merely negative, and relentlessly so, criticising
virtually everything ever written about language without offering a coherent alter-
native vision or programme of work for linguists to carry out. It therefore, in the
opinion of most linguists, did not merit more than passing attention. But the pub-
lication in 1996 of arguably his most important book to date, Signs, Language and
Communication (Harris, 1996), went a long way toward turning ‘integrationism’
from a slogan into an explicit account of how linguistic behaviour works, and it
ought to have undone the standard rationale for ignoring Harris.
By then, however, the received wisdom was entrenched enough that considerably
fewer people attended to the 1996 book than to its predecessors of the 1980s, and
most of those who did saw it as an extension of integrationism to semiology rather
than as a fleshing out of Harris’s earlier programmatic calls. While the onset of this
new phase thus went largely unnoticed, Harris pushed on, using the occasion of a
series of lectures in the spring of 1997 to students at the University of Adelaide to
consolidate the integrationist vision. This book, a revised version of those lectures,
marks another milestone in the development of the line of thought Harris has been
pursuing since his 1980 book The Language-Makers (Harris, 1980).
Before this Introduction appeared some among us doubted it could be written.
Particularly before 1996, integrationism had seemed to denote a not very well inte-
grated lot of critiques and insights scattered across Harris’s quite voluminous writings.
The only people who appeared to have a real grasp of it had been Harris’s students
at Oxford in the 1980s. It was a much milder form of the difficulty one has in getting

E-mail address: John.Joseph@ed.ac.uk (J.E. Joseph).

0388-0001/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S0388-0001(01)00024-9
100 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109

to grips with the linguistic thought of J. R. Firth, which comes through only
sketchily in his published works. One really has to spend many hours in
conversation with his surviving students to get a deep sense of it.
But Harris has confuted the doubters by producing a true rarity, an effective
introduction to a specialised line of academic thought written by the founder of the line
rather than an acolyte. The language has all of Harris’s usual lucidity, elegance, icono-
clasm and wit, the ideas follow one another in a smooth and logical succession, and in a
grand bow to textbook convention, ‘Questions for discussion’ follow each of the six
chapters. No longer can anyone blame Harris for not laying out the manifold parts of
the integrationist programme in a systematic and orderly way. The essential success of
the undertaking should be borne in mind when reading those parts of this review that
dwell, as it is in the nature of academic reviews to do, on qualifications to that success.
Most readers of this journal likely have a basic knowledge of what integrational
linguistics is about, but for those who do not, here is a minimalist summary (for a
fuller picture see Joseph et al., 2001, chapter 14). Harris criticises ‘orthodox linguis-
tics’ for taking as theoretical givens such things as the autonomy of language, the
existence of homogeneous linguistic communities, the greater reality of spoken than
of written language (phonocentrism), a sender–receiver model of communication,
the systematicity of language, a rule-based conception of language, the reification of
language from a second-level abstraction to a primary reality, special status for lin-
guists (as opposed to ‘lay’ people, an interesting analogy), and the objective, scien-
tific nature of linguistics. Not all the linguists Harris labels as ‘orthodox’ agree on all
these doctrinal points, though it is fair to say that all subscribe to some subset of
them. These doctrines all fall out, in Harris’s view, from the ‘language myth’, the
master misconception of language that is embedded within European thought.1 In
contrast, Harris’s integrationism stands for the non-autonomy of language, the het-
erogeneous nature of linguistic communities (if that term has any meaning at all), the
equal status of all manifestations of language, an all-encompassing model of commu-
nication, the non-systematicity of language, the non-rule-based nature of language, the
fact that languages are myths, that fact that everybody is a linguist although not
everybody is right about language, and the fact that linguistics cannot be a science.
In an ideal world, everyone who does or has done linguistics or cognitive science
for more than 2 years would be obliged to read this book and even to answer the
discussion questions. Then if they chose to go on talking about, for example, lin-
guistic ‘biodiversity’ as though languages really were species of living things, or
‘mental grammars’ as actual physical endowments rather than as analyses linguists
project on to their conception of the mind or brain, one could feel more secure that
they were in control of their metaphors rather than the other way round. For despite
the post-1996 positive turn in integrationism, its value still lies principally in the
critical thinking it requires linguists to undertake about every concept and term they

1
Harris repeatedly describes the language myth as specifically ‘Western’, without ever dealing with the
fact that the idea of ‘languages’, for example, is in no way exclusively or even particularly Western. He
simply asserts that ethnocentricity is endemic in the orthodox position (p. 57), unfortunately without any
evidence to back it up or consideration of alternative possibilities.
 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109 101

work with. Although integrationism offers, and appears to demand, a complete shift
in the way linguistics conceives of and approaches language, the fact is that quite a
number of people have profited by grafting some measure of its critical perspective
on to an essentially mainstream line of enquiry.
It is not at all clear that Harris approves of anything less than total adherence to
his programme. The book is filled with remarks about how ‘an integrationist’ or
indeed ‘the integrationist’ would reply to this or that statement by an ‘orthodox’
linguist. It is hard to say which of the two is the more problematic character, the
straw-man representative of a linguistic ‘orthodoxy’ that is far more diverse than
Harris would have his reader believe, or the idealised integrationist clone. Most of
us who work in the world of linguistics face up on a daily basis to the differences
that separate, say, generativists from applied sociolinguists, but for Harris they are
all segregationists, none of them any less stained by the original sin of the ‘language
myth’ than the rest. In reality, Harris’s own integrationist ‘school’ is nowhere near so
monolithic as this book would suggest; the best of his former students have gone on to
tread their own individual paths forward from the master. A number of them are cited
here, though never in any context where they question a position Harris has taken.
This is particularly striking because of the absence here of any mention of Taylor
(1992) and (1997), books by one of Harris’s most eminent and successful students,
his co-author on Landmarks in Linguistic Thought 1 (Harris and Taylor, 1997) and
for many years now his co-editor on the journal Language and Communication. In
the 1992 book Taylor focuses on ‘communicational scepticism’, the tenet that we
cannot know whether two people understand each other, the modern version of
which he claims originated with Locke and continues to be propounded from var-
ious quarters, including integrationism. Taylor puts this tenet into the mouth of ‘the
sceptic’, a fictional character who, intentionally or not, comes off at times as a thinly
disguised version of Harris. Taylor makes an intricate and rather compelling argu-
ment that communicational scepticism ultimately rests upon the same set of rhetor-
ical manoeuvres as does the communicational optimism it throws into question. No
less significantly, he answers Harris’s long-standing calls for a ‘lay-oriented’ linguis-
tics by examining the ways in which both linguists and non-linguists derive our
notions of how language and communication operate from our everyday way of
talking about them, including remarks such as ‘‘What’s that called?’’, ‘‘What does
mammal mean?’’, and ‘‘I don’t know what you mean’’, which all of us begin to use in
our early interaction with our caretakers. To me, and I expect to others outside the
integrationist huis clos, the appearance of Taylor’s book looked like a serious
coming-of-age for the movement, a step forward from within that would have
advanced and strengthened Harris’s position had he embraced it as such.2 In the

2
Even if he considered Taylor’s critique misguided, he ought to have welcomed the opportunity to
enter into a dialogue and formulate his views more precisely; the fact that the critique came from one of
his closest followers meant that it could not be dismissed as an outsider’s facile misunderstanding. But
dismiss it Harris did, e.g. in his 1996 book, where, in the course of arguing away the critique (1996: 234–
237) he contrasts Taylor’s approach to the issue with ‘‘the integrationist’s’’ and notes that ‘‘Only a segre-
gationist is likely to rise to the sceptic’s bait’’ (p. 237), as Taylor has done. After this, the tossed bone of a
footnote (p. 237n.) calling the rejected analysis ‘‘both shrewd and informative’’ is cold comfort.
102 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109

Introduction, the only (unacknowledged) memento of Taylor’s two books is the

interest Harris has suddenly developed in ‘reflexivity’, which gets two whole sections
in Chapter One and many repetitions thereafter. The term does not figure in the
indexes of Harris’s earlier works, and to my knowledge was introduced into inte-
grationism by Taylor (1992; in the context of utterances like ‘‘What does mammal
mean?’’ that reflect back on language itself) and elaborated considerably in the
articles reprinted in Taylor (1997). Harris ends the present book with a call to satisfy
‘‘the urgent need for research into the way lay metalanguage articulates the second-
order macrosocial abstractions that are called ‘languages’ (p. 147). Since this is
exactly what Taylor’s two books have done, it is startling to find them airbrushed
out of existence.
Harris’s desire to take control of the meaning of integrationism is understandable,
even to those of us who will never know what it is like to start a movement and have
some of our followers take it beyond our original intent. But whereas 10 years ear-
lier such an attempt to limit integrationism to strictly Harrisian thought might have
been a sensible, stabilising move, by 1998, with Harris in retirement and his former
students in their prime, it robs this introduction of the richness of these new direc-
tions. Granted, the whole point of a book like this is to establish an orthodoxy of
sorts, and only the degree of narrowness is up for discussion. But the literary device
of ‘the integrationist’ suggests a fundamentalism that one would have thought deeply
foreign to the integrationist doctrine, holding as it does for indeterminacy of meaning.
There is a contradiction as well with the tenet that meaning is constantly created anew
in the ever-changing context of communication, rather than being determined by a
fixed code and transmitted ‘telementationally’ from one mind to another.
What precisely is meant by ‘communication’ in the integrationist context, though,
is hard to pin down. Its centrality to the whole endeavour cannot be overstated:

The point of departure, in an integrationist perspective, is not the existence of

complex cultural objects called ‘languages’ but, simply, the attempts by human
beings to integrate whatever they are capable of doing into the various activity
patterns we call ‘communication’. [. . .]

For the integrationist, we are starting from the wrong end if we suppose that
linguistic communication presupposes languages. The right theoretical priority
is exactly the reverse: languages presuppose communication (pp. 4–5).

This last point is especially crucial because of the integrationist doctrine that lan-
guages do not exist. They are mythical. So our hope for understanding what it really
is that people think they are talking about when they talk about language(s) has to
be grounded in the primordial reality of communication. We are told at length what
communication is not, and it is clearly not what either non-linguists or
(segregationist) linguists take it to be.

Communication, for the integrationist, is a much more complex matter than

can be dealt with by saying that it requires the successful transmission of some
 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109 103

message (M) from one individual to another. For this merely sets up another
theoretical entity with dubious credentials (namely, ‘the message’) and endows
it with the property of transmissibility (p. 5).

The closest we get to a clarification comes a few pages further on:

The primary manifestation of language is in that gamut of human abilities that

are brought into play in the processes of verbal communication. There is no
autonomy for linguistics, because we cannot in practice segregate linguistic
knowledge from extra-linguistic knowledge. [. . .]

The integrationist therefore rejects the idea that verbal communication involves
the kind of activity which allows the linguistic components to be distinguished
from the non-linguistic and analysed systematically without reference to the
latter (p. 10).

It seems then that ‘communication’ is to be understood as everything people do

(‘activity’), know (‘knowledge’) and are capable of (‘abilities’) in their verbal inter-
actions with each other, where ‘verbal’ is not confined to the linguistic realm, nor to
face-to-face interaction, since written language has equal status with spoken. Near
the end of the book (p. 144) Harris introduces the concept of ‘integrational profi-
ciency’, claiming that the value of the sign is ultimately a function of it. One wishes
he had provided more insight into the status of this proficiency. Is it the sum total of
the ‘knowledge’ and ‘abilities’ that make possible the ‘activity’ (see citations from p.
10, earlier) that constitutes communication? If so, one wonders how it differs from
Dell Hymes’s ‘communicative competence’, except in refusing to be analysed into
component parts. After giving Hymes’s (1974, pp. 53–66) list of 16 contextual com-
ponents of speech acts, Harris comments that ‘‘an integrationist would point out
that since almost anything from the time of day to the height above sea level might,
in particular circumstances, have such an effect, it seems highly arbitrary to reduce
the list of possibilities to sixteen’’ (p. 97). This is an irrelevant comment, given that
both time and altitude would fall within Hymes’s category of ‘setting’, but it perhaps
explains Harris’s strategy of playing it safe with ‘integrational proficiency’ by
introducing it as a closing flourish and leaving it undefined.3 One trusts, however,
that arriving at a deeper understanding of it will be a central goal of future
integrationist research.
Harris’s broad conception of communication brings to mind a number of twen-
tieth-century attempts at constructing a ‘pragmatics’ or otherwise extending the
understanding of ‘verbal’ communication beyond language. Harris makes a nod to
four of these, when he says that in the linguistics of Sapir, Malinowski, Pike and
Firth, ‘‘there are significant strands of integrationist thinking’’, but he quickly adds

3
It is hard to imagine Harris, disdainful as he is of other people’s analytical categories, denying himself
and his reader the delight of making mincemeat of ‘integrational proficiency’ had it appeared in anyone’s
work but his own.
104 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109

that ‘‘in none of these cases did this develop into anything more than a cautious
modification of the prevailing segregationist programme’’ (p. 10). ‘Cautious mod-
ification’ hardly seems to apply to Firth’s sweeping reconceptions; a better fit might
be the attempts by his follower Halliday (who would have fit at least as well as Sapir
into that list) to bring Firthian ideas closer to the mainstream. Again, however,
integrationism is all or nothing for Harris, who would as soon hang a segregationist
for a goat as for a sheep. This may explain why he has not even bothered to dismiss
Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957), a project with very similar aims of integrating
language into a broadly defined communication in which the ‘verbal’ is not confined
to the linguistic. Skinner spent 23 years working out an elaborate scheme for
understanding verbal communication in terms close enough to the integrationist
ones that the lack of so much as a citation is surprising. But still more so is the lack
of any comment on how Harris’s conception of communication relates, as it would
appear to do rather directly, to Wittgenstein’s famous late definition of language as
‘a form of life’, again not mentioned here.
Then there is the spectre of the apparently unmentionable Derrida, whose highly
original (even when over the top) views on language and meaning, according to
which il n’y a pas de hors texte, make another apt point of reference for Harris’s
concept of communication. Where the intellectual presence and bibliographical
absence of Derrida loom largest, though, is in the chapter on ‘‘Language and Writ-
ing’’. Harris’s work of the late 1990s focussed on developing his ‘theory of writing’
and the semiology of communication as he conceives it. The latter is touched
upon only briefly here, but as in the 1996 book, one would think that no work in
semiology worth speaking of had been carried out from the death of Saussure until
now. As for the theory of writing, the most striking thing is how many of its facets
are transparently derivative of the unspeakable Jacques’s De la grammatologie
(1967). Yet Harris’s new book Rethinking Writing has little more to say of him than
that ‘‘Jacques Derrida’s ambition to ‘destablize’ traditional Western discourse about
writing, while substituting a preferred discourse about an ‘arche-writing’ which can
never be subject to scientific investigation, would be an example of the more inge-
niously and absurdly self-defeating extremes to which this kind of intellectual
engagement with writing can be taken’’ (Harris, 2000, p. 40). This from the same
man who dismisses Sapir et al. on the grounds that they did not develop their
‘‘significant strands of integrationist thinking [. . .] into anything more than a
cautious modification of the prevailing segregationist programme’’ (see earlier).4

4
A still deeper intellectual bond can in fact be detected between Derrida and Harris. The integrationist
view that there can be no objective grounds for judging communication successful or unsuccessful makes
it sound like an extreme form of relativism, but it actually rests upon a rock-solid faith in the power of
rationality to overcome unreason and see things as they really are, beyond the illusions produced by such
mythical constructs as objectivity and, indeed, language. This underlying faith is shared by Derrida’s
deconstructionism, a method often unfairly equated with nihilism, and it makes integrationism, like
deconstruction, ultimately a quite traditional form of inquiry. In the case of integrationism, it is the sort of
inquiry that is extremely wary of any systematic analysis pretending to discover ultimate truth while in
fact inventing arbitrary ‘truths’ of its own.
 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109 105

Every conceivable predecessor of integrationism, it seems, has failed by going

either less far than Harris or farther. Why does Harris consider it unnecessary to
discuss possible links certain facets of integrationism might have with particularly
innovative thinkers in the ‘Western language myth’ tradition? Perhaps it is simply
that he considers such discussion unnecessary in an introductory textbook. One does
get the sense, though, that he thinks the integrationist paradigm shift makes every-
thing he says so fundamentally new that any apparent anticipation of it in any other
thinker is merely superficial. For this to be so, integrationism needs somehow to
have sprung fully formed from the head of Harris within a world otherwise com-
pletely immersed in segregationist thinking. Not surprisingly, this sui-generic, auto-
genetic imperative leads to some contradictions. Harris says that the myth is ‘‘based
on two ancient theses about communication’’ (p. 32), ‘telementation’ (the notion
that communication consists of the transfer of ideas from the speaker’s mind to the
hearer’s) and the view that a language is a ‘fixed code’ (also called the ‘determinacy
thesis’). Yet no text ancient or modern actually describes communication as tele-
mentation or language as a fixed code; these are Harris’s interpretations of their
authors’ intentions, based on inferences and silences. Ironically, a number of the
texts he treats are attempts at dealing with the obvious consequences of the evident
fact that languages are not fixed codes. Harris knows this: he recognises for instance
that Locke’s concern to improve understanding by bringing language closer to the
condition of a fixed code ‘‘presupposes that semantic indeterminacy is the mode for
language in general’’ (p. 88). Yet even Locke’s awareness of indeterminacy has to be
turned into a product of the language myth, lest Locke become a precursor of the
Harrisian enlightenment: ‘‘Locke’s scepticism about communication is a direct con-
sequence of his own (fixed-code) assumptions about the criteria that need to be
satisfied in discourse for understanding to occur’’ (p. 106). In a further irony, this is
part of Taylor’s (1992) position vis-à-vis both Locke and Harris.
Here as in earlier work, Harris locates the ‘classic application’ to language of the
segregationist ‘sender–receiver model of communication’ in the Course in General
Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1916, 27ff.). In Joseph (1997, 24ff.) I have
shown in detail how, in reading the passage from the Course on the ‘speech circuit’,
Harris interpolates assertions as to what each statement from the passage ‘implies’
that are plausible (taken out of context) but by no means necessary.5 Although it
does not cite my critique, the present book at least makes it explicit that his reading
of this passage from the Course is indeed a complete tissue of ‘implications’:

5
I would not consider the matter worth revisiting except that, Harris (1999) having responded to my
critique, the editor of this journal (the same notorious agent provocateur who commissioned my 1997
paper) has specifically asked me to include a counter-response in this review. It hardly seems necessary,
since all Harris (1999) has managed to muster is a louder shouting of his deterministic, indeed segrega-
tionist interpretation of the passage. But it does give me an opportunity to direct readers to Linda (2000),
which, independently of my paper, has reached a similar conclusion to mine concerning Harris’s position
on the passage, and has made available important corroborative evidence from Saussure’s unpublished
papers.
106 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109

Saussure’s model is segregationist through and through. To see this, we have to

realize that the model has certain implications that are not immediately appar-
ent in Saussure’s initial presentation of it. The most important are as follows. 1.
The model implies that communication is ‘telementational’, i.e. that commu-
nication is a process of thought-transference from one person’s mind to
another’s. 2. The model implies that communication is successful only if the
concept that originally triggered the start of the process in A’s brain is the same
as the concept that is eventually triggered in B’s brain. (. . .) 3. This matching
requirement in turn implies that for successful communication a fixed code must
be in operation [. . .] (p. 21).

(‘‘The model has certain implications’’ - this statement, a classic example of the
segregationist approach to meaning, must have slipped in by accident. The integra-
tionist, I should have thought, would reply that texts do not ‘have implications’ any
more than ‘words have meanings’. Implications, like meanings, are constructed in
the communicative context of the reader’s interpretation.)
Again, out of context, Harris’s interpretation of the passage from the Course is
not an impossible one; but by no means is it the only possible one, as he insists. The
question we need to ask is this: can the passage be construed in a way that does not
require the ‘telementational’ or ‘fixed-code’ implications? I invite readers to inform
themselves on the matter and make their own judgement. First of all, read the pas-
sage in the Course, bearing in mind that Harris’s interpretation involves certain
interpolations that are not immediately apparent in his initial presentation of it, and
trying not to let them get in your way. You will see that the passage is presented
explicitly as an enquiry into the place of langue within the more general sphere of
langage, and that it says absolutely nothing about communication, or what ‘suc-
cessful’ communication consists of, or about the concept in A’s brain being the same
as the one in B’s. The terms ‘telementational’ and ‘fixed code’ do not appear here or
elsewhere in Saussure, being entirely Harris’s. The word ‘transmission’ is used, but
only with reference to the process that takes place within each individual, e.g. as the
‘acoustic image’ is translated from the speaker’s brain to his speech organs. Between
speaker and hearer, all that occurs is ‘‘the purely physical process’’ (emphasis in the
original) of sound waves being propagated from A’s mouth to B’s ears. The
emphasis on the words ‘‘purely physical’’—i.e. not mental—directly confutes Har-
ris’s ‘telementational’ interpretation. All the passage implies about ‘communication’
is that, when I am the one talking, I start with a concept, which triggers a sound
pattern that is likewise psychological and that then gets realised as spoken sounds
via muscular movements; and that when I am the one listening, things proceed in the
reverse order, with me first hearing sounds via muscular movements, these then
being processed as sound patterns in my mind and finally being associated with
concepts. The point is to lay out the order in which these things occur, as a
preliminary to locating where exactly the language (langue) fits into the picture.
Now go to Engler’s critical edition of the Course (1968–1974), where you will see that
Saussure’s own drawing of the ‘talking heads’, as copied in all three of the students’
notebooks in which it appears, has dotted lines connecting each head’s mouth to the
 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109 107

other’s ear, with the brain literally not in the picture at all. Have a look too at the
relevant materials from the Saussure manuscripts in the Harvard Library recently
published by Linda (2000), which make it all the more apparent that what the circuit
de la parole is about is not communication, but the relationship between the mental
and physical aspects of language. Saussure’s own diagrams included there are
restricted to what goes on within the individual.6
So then, can the passage be construed in a way that does not require the ‘tele-
mentational’ or ‘fixed-code’ implications? Without wishing to prejudice reader’s
independent judgements, my answer is a resounding ‘yes’, because these implications
require the context of a ‘theory of communication’ when there is no independent
evidence that Saussure was ever concerned with communication. Harris’s insistence
that Saussure could not possibly have been talking about anything else derives from
his misinterpretation of the decision by the editors of the Course to extend the lines
in the ‘talking heads’ figure to join the heads’ ears and mouth to their brain. Bally
and Sechehaye likely assumed that the text made it sufficiently clear that what hap-
pens within and between the heads is so totally different in character, there was no
need to mark a distinction between Saussure’s original lines and their extensions.7
They did not reckon on the determination of a certain later reader to ride his hobby
horse all the way up their extended lines.
This is just one of the most prominent of the cases (more can be found in Joseph,
1997) in which Harris uncharitably reads a questionable implication into a text or
set of texts, then reifies his interpretation into a ‘thesis’ which the authors of these
texts supposedly share. The procedure embodies some of the intellectual errors to
which integrationism is most opposed, from decontextualised interpretation to rei-
fying second-level abstractions out of the utterances in which he locates them. He
then insists that these mythical primary realities like ‘telementation’ really exist, no
less stringently than the orthodox linguist insists on the reality of categories like
nouns and verbs. When I suggest here, as I have done at a couple of other points in
this review, that one could easily make Harris himself into a segregationist by turn-
ing his own method of reading back upon him, my purpose is not to take a jejune
pot shot at his superb writing. Rather it is to cast doubt on whether integrationism
can cogently stand so aloof from all previous thinking about language as it pretends
to do. If there is a ‘language myth’, can we really be so confident that integrationism
is anything other than its latest avatar? To answer that question we must first
understand how integrationism is embedded in the thought whence it arose and

6
Saussure’s passage on the speech circuit closely reflects discussions on the mental functioning of
language in French and Swiss psychological journals from the 1880s to the 1900s, as well as in books such
as Egger (1881), Charcot (1884) and Ballet (1886). Ballet (1886, p. 7) includes a diagram from Charcot
that is close to Saussure’s on certain points where spoken language is concerned, though it differs in giving
a separate and equal status to writing. See further Joseph (2001 and in press).
7
This is not simply one of those instances of the published Course differing from the surviving manu-
scripts, where one can plead the greater historical authority of the published work over the ‘authorial
intent’ evinced by its sources. Here the written text of the published Course itself does not license either the
misinterpretation of the drawing or the putative ‘implications’, while the Nachlass so underscores what is
in the texts as finally to resolve any ambiguity in the editors’ altered drawing.
108 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 99–109

which it aspires to leave behind. That in turn requires abandoning the parochial
dichotomy between segregationists, all relegated alike to the primordial darkness,
and integrationists, who alone have ascended to the light.
As I said in 1997, my historical quibbles with Harris are minor in comparison with
his overall achievement in putting together a method of critical thinking about lin-
guistic thought, the validity of which does not in fact require historical justification.
In the same spirit I would point out that the concerns I have expressed here about
the foundational concepts of ‘communication’ and ‘integrational proficiency’
not being as fully worked out as one might wish reflect the teething pains of
any new intellectual endeavour. My other main criticisms, about the device of ‘the
integrationist’ and the attempt to present integrationism as monolithic, and the
opportunities missed for drawing links with linguists and philosophers outside
the integrational movement, may in fact be little more than disagreements over
rhetorical method, and inappropriate criticisms of what is, after all, an introductory
textbook.
In the end, only one thing matters. If you seek an introduction to integrational
linguistics that is ‘authoritative’ in the truest sense of the word—maybe even to a
fault—look no further.

References

Ballet, G., 1886. Le langage intérieur et les diverses formes de l’aphasie. F. Alcan, Paris.
Charcot, J.-M. 1884. Differenti forme d’afasia. Ed. by Rummo, G. Milano.
Derrida, J. 1967. De la grammatologie. Minuit, Paris. English translation, Of Grammatology, by Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkin’s University Press, Baltimore, 1976.
Egger, V., 1881. La parole intérieure: Essai de psychologie descriptive. G. Baillière, Paris.
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