A Linguistic or an Ontological Problem? Some Comments

"Globalization, Scientific Lexicons, and the Future of Biology" is an ambitious and radical article in which Professor Keller proposes that biology should introduce a new, verb-based linguistic framework for its research. However, instead of developing such a proposal in detail, Keller turns to searching out a cross-cultural grounding. Based on Nisbett's comparative psycho-linguistics and Lloyd's comparative studies on ancient Greek and Chinese sciences, Keller finds that Chinese science is embodied in a verb-based language. For example, the Huainanzi takes the term shui (水, water) to mean "soaking downward," huo (火, fire) "flaming upward," and the like. As a consequence, Chinese language and science appear significantly different from noun-based Western languages and science. Aware of the pitfalls of an East/West dichotomy, Professor Keller takes the development of feminist theory as an analogue to elaborate her position. Carefully noting that "historians, like feminist scholars, have indeed learned to be immensely cautious about such sweeping categories as East, West, men, and women" and "culture itself has become a problematic category" (9), Keller recommends the following moderate and flexible position: "It is sometimes useful to regard the world as if composed of two kinds of people (or three, or four), sometimes of only one kind, Homo sapiens, and at other times, as composed of six billion kinds of people we call individuals" (10). In her conclusion, therefore, Keller returns to her starting point, outlining a verb-based molecular biology. She suggests:

Let us take genes to refer not to particular, more or less well marked sections of the DNA, but to the phenotypically crucial process of gene expression. And let us take DNA to refer to those doings in which DNA participates, even if passively: for example, instead of double helix, think proofreading, editing, repairing, silencing, methylation, activation, transcription, replication.

(11)

I confess that I do not understand Professor Keller's line of thought. I do not understand why, in order to introduce or develop a verb-based linguistic framework for biological research, we have to compare the characteristics of the Chinese language and Eastern (or Chinese) cultures with those of English and Western cultures. What lessons can we learn from such a comparison? That biologists should learn Mandarin or other Eastern languages? This does not seem to be a strategy that Keller wants to suggest. If so, why talk of the differences between Mandarin and Western languages? Keller thinks that Mandarin and Chinese science "show that alternative ways of framing the world are possible and that they are sometimes realized" (377). However, a question immediately springs to mind: even if that were so, it does not imply that this alternative way of framing the world could be realized in current biology. One may reasonably suspect that biology could still follow its own agenda even if it were framed by a radically alternative linguistic system. Would it not become an alternative biology that is incommensurable with today's molecular biology? Aristotle's biology is incommensurable with Darwinian theory, isn't it? In my view, this roundabout way of arguing for the realizability of a verb-based molecular biology seems helpless.

I find it best to treat this article as two separate parts, discussing two related issues: one addresses the difference between the Western and Eastern (or Chinese) languages and cultures; the other proposes the idea of constructing a verb-based linguistic framework for molecular biology. In what follows, I will discuss the two issues separately.

Based on a number of psycho-linguistic investigations, Keller believes that children speaking Mandarin (and other Eastern languages) "learn verbs at the same rate if not faster than they learn nouns." Keller also believes that Eastern languages, cultures, and sciences embody more relationship, contextuality, and dynamicity than their Western counterparts. Therefore, Mandarin appears to be more of a verb-based language than English. But this is simply not true. There is no obvious classification of words or terms in "traditional written Chinese" (文言文, wenyenwen). That is to say, traditional Chinese has no hard-and-fast concept of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on. More precisely, there are no...