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REVIEWS411 fear of unraveling the rainbow : language is a wonderful gift, and it is wrong (immoral ? impudent? blasphemous?) to try to explain it. He quotes approvingly (73) from Drury (1973 : 76) : ? want to say that the existence oflanguage and the development of the ability to speak in a child is a miracle, something that the notion of explanation as to how it came, and comes to be, does not make sense. It is something indeed for us to wonder at and be thankful for.' I am sorry that I have been unable to find much to praise in this book. Even those parts which make valid criticisms cannot be recommended without qualification, because of all their absurd asides. The institution R tackles—the field of transformational grammar as defined by the works of Chomsky and his disciples and critics within the field—could use a general critical review, by someone who understands the claims and the assumptions they are based on. That is the sort of book I'd hoped to review. But while Robinson has apparently cast himself in the role of the little boy who dares to say that the emperor has no clothes, he turns out to be more like a rather disputatious little boy who doesn't know a trenchcoat from a breechclout. REFERENCES Chomsky, N. 1971. Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation. Semantics, ed. by D. Steinberg & L. Jakobovits, 183-216. Cambridge: University Press. [Reprinted in Chomsky 1972c] ------. 1972a. Language and mind. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ------. 1972b. Some empirical issues in the theory of transformational grammar. Goals of linguistic theory, ed. by S. Peters, 63-130. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [Reprinted in Chomsky 1972c] ------. 1972c. Studies on semantics in generative grammar. The Hague: Mouton. Drury, M. O'C. 1973. The danger of words. London: Routledge. Katz, J. 1966. Semantic theory. In his The philosophy of language, 151-76. New York: Harper & Row. Lakoff, G. 1971. On generative semantics. Semantics, ed. by D. Steinberg & L. Jakobovits, 232-96. Cambridge: University Press. Lyons, J. 1970. Noam Chomsky. New York: Viking Press. Robinson, I. 1972. Chaucer and the English tradition. Cambridge: University Press. ------. 1973. The survival of English. Cambridge: University Press. [Received 17 August 1976.] Linguistics and metascience. By Esa Itkonen. (Studia philosophica Turkuensia, 2.) Kokemäki: Societas Philosophica et Phaenomenologica Finlandiae, 1974. Pp. 363. FMk. 40.00. Reviewed by Jon D. Ringen, Indiana University at South Bend* This is a challenging and important book, in whichItkonen attempts the ambitious task of constructing a new philosophy of science for linguistics. His major thesis is that the subject matter, aims, and methods of autonomous linguistics exemplify the distinctive features of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), and are qualitatively different from those of natural sciences like physics and chemistry. In * This work was supported in part by grant SOC 75-13423 from the National Science Foundation. 412LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) defending this thesis, Itkonen presents a serious challenge to the widely accepted view that the natural sciences provide an appropriate model for scientific studies of human action and human institutions.1 Itkonen's major premise, that explications ofintuitive knowledge are qualitatively different from empirical theories in the natural sciences, is, of course, widely acknowledged to be true. What has been and remains in dispute is how the distinctions between these different kinds of knowledge-claims should be characterized and applied, in assessing the epistemological status of specific scientific disciplines. Linguistics and metascience constitutes an intriguing and detailed discussion of how the methodology of contemporary transformational generative linguistics (TGL) is related to this question. Ifthe views expressed in the book are correct, then much of contemporary logical-empiricist philosophy of science is fundamentally in error.2 On Itkonen's view, natural languages consist of rules; these determine the distinction between speech acts which are (linguistically) correct and those which are (linguistically) incorrect in a specific natural-language community. It is claimed that this normativity of linguistic rules entails that the rules form part of the knowledge shared by competent users of the language. This is so, Itkonen argues, because a distinction between correct and incorrect actions cannot be maintained unless (1) the actors themselves know the basis for...

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