422 Human Reasoning and Language Interpretation
data. The Gricean (and related) programs have always
been notoriously hard to compute. From a cognitive
point of view, the logical approaches have opened up
the issue of how the systems can be implemented
in the mind. The default logic appealed to here turns
out to be highly tractable and implementable in
spreading activation networks (Stenning and van
Lambalgen, in press). The next few years should de-
termine which is the more productive program of
research for semantics and pragmatics.
Assessment of peoples’ reasoning requires a firm
foundation on the interpretations they adopt. This
does not mean that their reasoning will be perfect,
or that they cannot be faulted for adopting inap-
propriate interpretations. The rich framework for
interpretation provided by modern logic offers the
apparatus to link formal studies with a much
wider range of communication, both in vacuo and
in context.
See also: Discourse Processing; Implicature; Information
Structure in Spoken Discourse; Logic and Language: Phil-
osophical Aspects; Logical Consequence; Logical
Form in Linguistics; Modal Logic; Multivalued Logics;
Neo-Gricean Pragmatics; Nonmonotonic Inference;
Propositional and Predicate Logic: Linguistic Aspects;
Quantifiers: Semantics; Semantics in Psychology.
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Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835)
K Willems, University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Humboldt was born in Potsdam into a family of
Prussian nobility. (His full name was Friedrich
Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von
Humboldt. Alexander von Humboldt [1769–1859],
the famous natural scientist and explorer, was his
younger brother.) After studying law at the univer-
sities of Frankfurt an der Oder and Göttingen in
1787–1789, Humboldt alternately traveled in Europe,
worked as a jurist in civil service, and lived the life
of an independent scholar (especially since his mar-
riage into a wealthy family in 1791) for several years.
From 1794 to 1797 he lived in Jena with his family,
where he became close friends with Schiller and
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Goethe, and then in Paris from 1797 to 1801, where
he met the ‘Idéologues,’ who advocated a materialist
philosophy which had considerable influence on its
time. From Paris he occasionally traveled to Spain.
There he learned about the Basque language, which
he began to study extensively in relation to the history
and culture of the region and its people. From 1802
to 1808 Humboldt was Prussian ambassador to the
Vatican in Rome, where he expanded his already
vast knowledge of antiquity and the classical lan-
guages. Back in Germany he was appointed council-
lor of state, reformed the educational system, and
founded the University of Berlin. From 1810 to
1818 Humboldt served as a diplomat in various
European capitals and at several important confer-
ences, and in 1819 he eventually became Prussian
minister (‘Minister für ständische und kommunale

Angelegenheiten’). He retired from civil service on
Dec. 31, 1819 (in the wake of the Carlsbad Decrees
which imposed censorship on the press, supervision
of universities and student organizations etc.), devot-
ing most of his time to linguistic research and regular-
ly presenting linguistic papers at the Berlin Academy.
He studied several languages, including Sanskrit, na-
tive languages of America, partly from material his
brother had acquired on his journeys (e.g., the native
Aztec language in Mexico) and Malayo-Polynesian
languages (e.g., Kawi). He introduced Champol-
lion’s discoveries on the Egyptian hieroglyphs to the
German public. The work of the French sinologist
J. P. Abel Rémusat led him to study Chinese as well.
Humboldt died at his exquisite manor in Tegel (now
in Berlin) in 1835.
Humboldt’s versatility is legendary. He was an in-
fluential politician who combined his civil duties with
sustained reflection on public matters, to which sev-
eral writings, especially on the state and educational
reforms, bear witness. He was also an art collector,
writer, and translator (his translation of Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon is well known), but above all he was a
humanist with a great talent for languages. As a young
man he already took a keen interest in philosophical,
philological, literary, and aesthetic issues and was
considerably influenced by G. W. Leibniz, I. Kant,
Schiller, and Goethe. Humboldt’s writings on lan-
guage, most of which appeared posthumously (the
17 volumes of his collective writings, Gesammelte
Schriften, appeared in Berlin between 1903 and 1936;
all citations in this article refer to this edition), are
the product of research spread over several decades.
They contain many discoveries and a host of subtle
structural descriptions, bearing testimony to the
author’s consummate skill as a linguist, philosopher
of language, and cultural anthropologist.
For Humboldt the study of language was part and
parcel of a vast anthropological project, through
which he ultimately tried to implement his conserva-
tive educational ideals. One of the most remarkable
features of Humboldt’s writings on language from a
modern point of view is that they are always contri-
butions to empirical linguistics and to the philosophy
of language (including ideological assessments) at the
same time. They are conceived as a synthesis of idea-
tional insights into language in general on the one
hand and minute observations based on empirical
linguistic data on the other. Informed by a profound
knowledge of many, often very different, languages,
Humboldt was able to reconsider, from the vantage
point of language, the philosophical issues of his
time, especially those engendered by Kant’s so-called
transcendental philosophy, including the nature
of thecategories of human understanding, reason,
Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835) 423
imagination, and morality. Unlike Herder, who
attempted in vain to rewrite Kant’s Critique of pure
reason mainly by replacing reason with language
(Verstand und Erfahrung/Vernunft und Sprache.
Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft,
1781; cf. see Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–
1803)), Humboldt did not object to the central claims
about reason and understanding that Kant had put
forward in his three Critiques. On the contrary, Hum-
boldt’s own research can be read as an endeavor to
adapt Kantian philosophy to the theory of language.
At the same time, however, he succeeded in preserving
the true assets of Herderian romanticism, which was
directed against the rationalist logicistic tradition of
the Allgemeine Sprachlehre (‘Universal Grammar’) in
the 18th century, and combined the view that the study
of language is the clue to understanding the spiritual
and intellectual condition of mankind with the histor-
ically very important insight that the diversity of lan-
guages constitutes a universal aspect of language
(Humboldt, 1903–1936: VI, 4–6). Not surprisingly,
the collocation ‘die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
Sprachbaues’ (‘the diversity of human language struc-
ture’) enters into the title of Humboldt’s two main
texts on language (written 1827–1829 and 1830–
1835). For Humboldt, language, nationhood, and
the intellectual activity of the individual are indis-
solubly interconnected and can be separated only
by an act of abstraction, which, although necessary,
is legitimate within the purview of scientific research
only (Humboldt, 1903–1936: VI, 119–128, 197,
241–245; VII, 46). Furthermore, language is, strictly
speaking, comparable to nothing else (Humboldt,
1903–1936: IV, 16).
Humboldt believed that universal concepts and
forms of understanding unique to the human species
come to be realized in historical and culturally bound
instantiations, and it is in these particularizations of
the universal that natural language assumes a central
role. A language is not merely a code based on con-
ventions and used for communication. Humboldt
even went so far as to reject the view that language
is conventional altogether: according to him, such a
view erroneously presupposes a shared conceptual
world of objects prior to language (Humboldt,
1903–1936: III, 167; cf. VI, 119, 155). In the same
vein, defining language as a tool for communication
is bound to lead to mistakes (Humboldt, 1903–1936:
VII, 20) because it is based on an external and arbi-
trary point of view. For Humboldt language is much
more; it is the locus par excellence where the princi-
ples of human understanding and knowledge as well
as the diversity of mankind meet. Language is the
organ that shapes thought (Humboldt, 1903–1936:
‘Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedanken,’
424 Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835)
VI, 152, and VII, 53). At the same time, Humboldt
was convinced that a rich inflectional system with
complex grammatical forms was particularly benefi-
cial for abstract (philosophical and formal) reasoning
(Humboldt, 1903–1936: IV, 285–313).
Moreover, in every language there is a proper world
view (‘‘so liegt in jeder Sprache eine eigenthümliche
Weltansicht,’’ Humboldt, 1903–1936: VI, 180; cf. IV,
33, 420). This stance generally – but somewhat mis-
leadingly – goes under the name of ‘linguistic relativ-
ism’ in linguistic historiography. Although it has had
a profound and enduring influence on the later history
of linguistics (see Boas, Franz (1858–1942); Sapir,
Edward (1884–1939); Coseriu, Eugenio (1921–
2002)), its reception rarely does full justice to the com-
plexity and breadth of Humboldt’s original thought, in
which it is not some kind of challenging hypothesis but
a corollary of a general idealistic focus on language. For
Humboldt, linguistic worldviews are the natural result
of the potentially infinite ways in which the universal
language competence in man moulds the substance of
experience. Furthermore, the rules and forms of mean-
ing from which each language derives its individual
character (‘innere Form,’ Humboldt, 1903–1936: VII,
86–97) generally display a common unitary principle.
However, Humboldt’s concept of the ‘character of a
language’ differs substantially from the classificatory
typologies put forward by earlier authors, such as
J. C. Adelung and the brothers A. W. and F. Schlegel,
and should not be mixed up with current linguistic
typology, which is very different from Humboldt’s in
being based on comparative classifications of different
languages. Although it has formed the basis for a new
focus in (synchronic as well as diachronic) typological
linguistic research, linguists have yet to consistently
pursue the full implications of Humboldt’s typology
of language.
Humboldt’s approach to the relationship between
language, thought, and nationality is intimately
linked to his Aristotelian view that language is an
intentional creative activity (enérgeia) rather than a
product fixed once and for all (érgon) (Humboldt,
1903–1936: VII, 46). Again, many linguists (see,
e.g., Chomsky, Noam (b. 1928)) have taken up the
important concept of enérgeia, yet generally in a fair-
ly loose sense that differs substantially from its origi-
nal meaning with Humboldt. For Humboldt the
notion of enérgeia implies that language cannot be
studied adequately from a naturalistic point of view
(Humboldt, 1903–1936: VI, 151). Language is enér-
geia because it is a mental process (‘geistiger Process,’
Humboldt, 1903–1936: VI, 146) that has reality in
innumerable acts of speech only, not in a finite set of
rules or fixed elements. As a consequence, language
use is only partly a realization of an already acquired
linguistic knowledge; it is, above all, the free and con-
stant creation of such a knowledge. This also explains
why languages unceasingly change (Humboldt,
1903–1936: VI, 243), their history reflecting the his-
tory of ideas, more or less corresponding organically
to their inner forms, and why for Humboldt language
ultimately finds its true realization in the genius of
literature.
See also: Boas, Franz (1858–1942); Chomsky, Noam (b.
1928); Coseriu, Eugenio (1921–2002); Herder, Johann
Gottfried (1744–1803); Sapir, Edward (1884–1939).
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