Why linguistics needs the cognitive scientist.

In his classic article in the first number of this journal (Sapir 1938) and in many other writings, Edward Sapir urged that a true social science, including an understanding of the nature and working of culture, must necessarily be founded on an understanding of the individuals who participate in culture and society: “In the psychological sense, culture is not the thing that is given us. The culture of a group as a whole is not a true reality. What is given — what we do start with — is the individual and his behavior.” (Sapir 1994, p. 139). And the central term in this understanding is the nature of the mind and personality of the individual, not an external characterization of his actions and responses or some system that somehow exists outside of any particular person. Trained by Franz Boas as a cultural anthropologist, Sapir devoted most of his professional life to the study of language and the development of the nascent discipline of linguistics (see Anderson 1985, chap. 9 and Darnell 1990 for sketches of his personal and professional life). For Boas, as for Sapir, language was a key to all other understanding of cultural realities, since it is only through an appreciation of the particularities of an individual’s language that we can hope to gain access to his thoughts and conception of the world, both natural and social. Sapir, indeed, is widely associated with the notion of ‘Linguistic Relativity,’ according to which the structure of an individual’s language not only reflects but even contributes to determining the ways in which he construes his world. Language thus occupies a central place among the phenomena that can lead us to an understanding of culture; and it must follow that the way to study language is in terms of the knowledge developed in individual speakers, not in terms of such externalities as collections of recorded linguistic acts. In the history of linguistics, Sapir is remembered especially as one who emphasized the need to study what speakers know and believe (perhaps unconsciously) about their language, not simply what they do when they speak. In addition to his primary focus on linguistics, Sapir also wrote widely of more general issues in the nature of society, culture, and personality. His contribution to this journal was far from isolated in the sympathy it showed with the project of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. This interest in psychiatric issues and approaches was certainly not isolated from his work as a linguist and anthropologist, however. On the contrary, as reflected in the title of his