Kenneth Burke's Influences & Contemporaries,
circa Permanence & Change


Columbia University
Charles A. Beard, historian
John Dewey, "Philosopher" on social sciences faculty)
Franz Boas, anthropologist
Richard McKeon, classicist and later rhetorical theorist

Broom
(Literary & Arts magazine)
Sherwood Anderson (novelist), Amy Lowell (poet), Conraid Aiken (novelist), Gertrude Stein (poet), John Dos Passos (novelist), Man Ray (photographer), Picasso (painter), Jospeh Stella (painter), Fernand Leger (painter), Virginia Woolf (novelist), Pirandello (dramatist), Dostoevsky (novelist), Lipschitz (painter), Matisse(painter),Gris(painter), Sheeler (painter), Marianne Moore(poet), e. e. cummings (poet), Malcolm Cowley(literary critic), Hart Crane (novelist),William Carlos Williams (poet), Yvor Winters (literary critic)


Translations & Reviews for The Dial
\Translated, Oswald Spengler's introduction to The Decline of the West; Thomas Mann, Loulou.; Death in Venice; Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler (author of the novel on which the movie Eyes Wide Shut was based), Richarrd Specht
Reviewed, Stravinsky, Ravel, Toscanini, Gershwin, Copland, Woolf, Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, William Carlos Williams, Paul Elmer More, Gertrude Stein, I. A. Richards

Colleagues & Other Authors at The Dial
John Dewey (philosopher), Thorstein Veblen (social theorist), Charles Beard, Van Wyck Brooks (literary critic), Lewis Mumford (social theorist),Malcolm Cowley (literary critic), Sherwood Anderson (novelist), William Carlos Williams (poet), Djuna Barnes (novelist), Marianne Moore (poet), Edmund Wilson (literary critic), Santayana (philosopher), , Hesse (novelist),Bertrand Russell (philosopher), Alfred Stieglitz (photographer),Toulouse Latrec (printmaker), Brancusi (sculptor), T. S. Eliot (poet), Ezra Pound (poet), Ford Maddox Hueffer / Ford Maddox Ford (novelist), Wyndham Lewis (novelist/painter), James Joyce (novelist), e. e. cummings (poet), Carl Sandburg (poet), William Butler Yeats (poet), Wallace Stevens (poet), Rimbaud(poet),Kreymbourg (poet), H. D. (poet),Anatole France (novelist), D. H. Lawrence (novelist), John Dos Passos (novelist), Joseph Conrad (novelist),Virginia Woolf (novelist), Valery (poet), Gorky(novelist),Unamuno (philosopher), Schnitzler(novelist),Demuth (painter), Van Gogh (painter),Picasso(painter), Marin (photographer; painter),Matisse(painter), Chagall (painter), O'Keefe(painter),Cezanne (painter), Gauguin (painter)

The Science of Language at the Time of
Permanence & Change

What is Logical Positivism?

Most vitally endorsed by a school of philosophers now identified as the Vienna Circle (Carnap, Neurath, and others), Logical Positivism marked a philosophy of language with two essential tenets:

  1. Language can, at its fundamental level, be seen to follow patterns of use that were as tightly systematic as the logic of geometry.
  2. Language, at its fundamental level, can be reduced to "statements" which have a referential or pictorial relationship to the objects in the world. Here logical positivism shares a surface similarity to Enlightenment anxieties about rhetoric -- which would obscure the power of language to name or to depict the world.
The Evaluation of Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism was for decades a kind of boogeyman in the philosophy of language. All that was wrong or inadequate in our understanding of language was pinned on these philosophers.

Recent scholarship has rehabilitated the Logical Positivists by noting that their work was tied to strong socilaist causes in Austria, and by noting that Logical Positivism was sen by its contemporaries as a kind of corrective for the more metaphysical German political discourse of the day, which "named " things ("the People," for example, ) whose existence the Logical Positivists would have found untenable. This kind of critique of Nazi discourse would be undertaken by Victor Klemperer during and after the war (see I Will Bear Witness).

The Dissemination of Logical Positivism

Variations of Logical Positivism were transmitted through (for example) Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (a work advancing a picture theory of language which Wittgenstein quickly admitted was insufficient, but nonetheless caught on quite quickly) and through the writings of Bertrand Russell.

The Critiques of Logical Positivism

There are five central critiques of Logical positivism, of which Burke is only one. Burke was deeply aware of at least three of these critiques.
 
Triadic Semiotics General Semantics Speech-Act Theory Anthropological Theories of Language Kenneth Burke
As proposed by Charles Pierce and later developed by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, a theory of triadic semiotics notes the influence of psychology on the interpretation of signs. No linguistic signs can refer to reality in a means unmediated by psychology. (Theories of psychology consulted included William James' philosophy of mind and C. S. Sherrington's neuropsychology.)  As proposed by Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity) and advanced by S. I. Hayakawa (Language in Thought and Action), the General Semantics movement was the keystone in especially postwar English education. The system emphasized the study of the levels of abstraction involved in language used, and argued that distorted communication often occurred at the higher levels of abstraction. As proposed by J. L. Austin (How to Do Things With Words) and advanced by John Searle and Jurgen Habermas, Speech Act Theory emphasized the role of language in action (like creating a marriage contract, or christening a boat, for example). 

Additionally, Austin emphasized the role of context in driving language use -- language can only successfully act in a context in which necessary conditions of felicity are met. In no context, for example, could I conduct a marriage ceremony. 

Searle's elaboration of Speech-Act theory is deeply a part of recent cognitive science and studies in artificial intelligence. 

 As proposed by Bronislaw Malinowski (in Coral Gardens and their Magic and in his contribution to I. A. Richards' and C. K. Ogden's The Meaning of Meaning) and elaborated by Raymond Firth and other anthropologists, this perspective insists that language is not a "countersign" of thought or a depiction of thought, but rather language originated in collaboration and work processes. Language is likely to be the result of the need to yell commands to your collaborators, like "pass the net" on a fishing boat. A key example, widely disseminated across disciplines, was the notion f "phatic utterance," like "Hello."   

The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
Created by the Department of Communication Studies
University of Minnesota
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.

http://www.comm.umn.edu/burke/pandcinfl.html
Last revised:  1 October 2003.