Draft:Randy Allen Harris

Randy Allen Harris (born 1956) is a Canadian rhetorician and linguist, a professor at the University of Waterloo in the department of English Language and Literature, cross-appointed to the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His research and teaching focus on the history of linguistics, the rhetoric of science, communication design, stylistics, and Construction Grammar, with particular attention to the neurocognitive dimensions and computational affordances of rhetorical figures. His books include Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Interfaces^[1]; Rhetoric and Incommensurability^[2]; two volumes in the Taylor & Francis Landmark Essays series, both in aspects of Rhetoric of Science^[3][4]; the co-edited (with Jeanne Fahnestock) Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion^[5]; and The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff and the Battle over Deep Structure^[6].

Randy Allen Harris was born in Kitimat, B.C., where he was raised, moving later to Campbell River, B.C.. He attended the University of Lethbridge in Southern Alberta, but transferred to Queen's University in Southern Ontario (BA Hons, English Literature), with graduate degrees from Dalhousie University in Halifax (MA, English Literature, thesis "Romance structures in the novels of Henry Fielding"); the University of Alberta in Alberta, Canada (MSc, Experimental Psycholinguistics, thesis "Acoustic Dimensions of Functor Comprehension in Broca's aphasia"^[7]); and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York (MS, Technical Communication and Graphic Design, non-thesis, and Ph.D., Communication and Rhetoric, dissertation "The Life and Death of Generative Semantics"^[8]). He took up a position at Bell-Northern Research (the Research & Development arm of Northern Telecom) in Ottawa, ON, working on online documentation and usability testing. He then returned to the University of Alberta for a Killam Postdoctoral fellowship, where he rewrote his doctoral thesis as The Linguistics War, and later accepted a position at the University of Waterloo. He settled in Milton, Ontario, Canada, where he currently resides with his wife, Indira Naidoo-Harris (married 1984). They have a son, Galen Naidoo Harris (b.1994), a public servant and politician; and a daughter, Ori (Oriana) Naidoo Harris (b.1999).

Harris’s MSc thesis at the University of Alberta reports an experiment suggesting that the difficulty Broca’s aphasics have processing function words (like articles and connectives), which was largely held to be a competence issue^[9][10][11], might be better explained by performance, namely with acoustic resolution^[12][13]. He found that increasing the acoustic salience (e.g., duration, volume) of function words, providing a more prominent acoustic signal, improves comprehension in individuals with Broca's aphasia.

Harris published a socio-rhetorical chronicle of the linguistic wars, the prolonged dispute within Chomskyan generative grammar that occurred during the late 20^th century. Noam Chomsky had developed and championed a formal theory of linguistics that was becoming highly influential in the 1960s and 1970s, but it came under increasing attack by his colleagues and students, including George Lakoff, Robin Lakoff, Paul Postal, John Robert (Haj) Ross, and James D. McCawley. These scholars developed an alternative framework known as Generative Semantics. Harris examines the argumentation on both sides of the dispute and discusses various sociological factors surrounding it, such as the style of argumentation associated with the counter-culture of the period.

In Harris's account, the Chomskyan side initially appeared to be the clear winner, emerging with the leading theory Chomsky called Principles and Parameters. However, Harris argues that the outcome of the linguistic wars was not just the triumph of a superior theory as it was portrayed at the time, most notably by Frederick Newmeyer, but the result of a complex process in which both sides managed to evolve their position substantially while also competing for influence within the discipline. He suggests that the Principles and Parameters framework incorporated many elements of generative semantics, which in turn helped introduce and promote the emerging linguistic field of Pragmatics and functional approaches to it. Additionally, he says that it brought about a focus on the role of general cognitive principles for the acquisition and structure of language, in opposition to Chomsky’s theory of specialized mechanisms that he calls universal grammar, giving rise to the Cognitive Linguistics framework. Harris is sometimes credited with giving the dispute its name, but Paul Postal coined it, and it appears earlier in Newmeyer’s Linguistic Theory in America.

The Linguistics War received reviews in several publications when it appeared, including a cover story by David Berreby in The Sciences, and an active discussion on Linguist List^{[14][15][16][17][18]} that revealed its hostilities had not died down. Neal Smith called it “outstanding” in Nature, saying “Harris has achieved the near impossible: being fair to both sides in a civil war."^[19] A second edition came out in 2021, with the subtitle Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure in which Harris follows Chomsky’s theories into their Minimalist and Biolinguistics phases, and the influence of Generative Semantics into Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and the Conceptual Metaphor strains of Cognitive Linguistics^[20][21]. It was also reviewed in several academic journals, though Geoffrey Sampson paid it the backhanded compliment of saying “Harris … has done the intellectual world a remarkable service” in the context of a polemic against all the theories involved; the remarkable service is in showing the dispute was all heat, no light^[22].

Harris’s history of linguistics research lies within the framework of the Rhetoric of Science, which he studied under his supervisor, S. Michael Halloran. It has resulted in several of his books, all of them curations of essays. Landmark Essays in Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies (1997) contains a collection of essays on rhetorical analysis of scientific argumentation, with Harris’s introduction widely cited for its definitions, methodological overviews, and framing of the field as the study of scientific argumentation by “Giants” (Darwin, Newton, Copernicus), in “Conflict” (over quantum mechanics, cold fusion, phlogiston), and in public policy (evolutionary theory in schools, vaccinations, recombinant DNA research). The book was given a second edition in 2018, with an expanded introduction and new essays, but Harris’s framing had become controversial with younger scholars^[23][24]. A few years later, there was a companion volume, Landmark Essays in Rhetoric of Science: Issues and methods (2020).

His other notable contribution to science studies was to commission essays by the leading figures in Rhetoric of Science (including Alan G. Gross, Carolyn R. Miller, Leah Ceccarelli, John Angus Campbell, Charles Bazerman, and Jeanne Fahnestock), as well as philosopher and historian of science, Paul Hoyningen-Huene, to consider the problem of incommensurability in rhetorical terms. The incommensurability thesis, introduced to the history, philosophy, and sociology of science in separate works by Thomas S. Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, holds that competing scientific paradigms cannot be compared in any meaningful way, so that they are effectively articles of faith for scientists. Accordingly, scientists in different paradigms, like people in different religions or cultures, Kuhn said in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “practice their trades in different worlds … [they] see different things when they look from the same direction.”^[25]

Harris starts with a taxonomy of the way incommensurability is used in science studies and ethics (incommensurability of values): “brick-wall, cosmic, semantic, and pragmatic incommensurabilities.”^[26] He claims that all four can be disregarded. The first two (brick-wall and cosmic) he objects to as unrealistic ‘different world’ extremes that don’t accurately characterize theories in any formal sense. The other two (semantic and pragmatic) he argues describe situations that are in fact commensurable, with a little work. Gross offers a dissenting opinion (incommensurability is a formal property of some pairs of theories), and Hoynigen-Huene reserved comment, but the argument of the volume collectively with the other essays, in concert with Harris’s very long introduction, is that incommensurability is a problem of theorists, not of theories^[27], that the resources of argumentation are flexible enough to frame theories in fully compatible ways. The book casts “incommensurability as pragmatic rather than epistemologic.”^[28] As Miller puts it in her essay, incommensurability is a way disputes can be framed by arguers,

not only by the differing intellectual commitments and habits that constitute a disciplinary matrix [paradigm] but also by argumentative positioning—by accusation or defense, presumptions of authority, expected alliances—and which can be magnified by social-political interests.^[29]

This position has subsequently become standard in science studies, to the point that the term incommensurability has now largely been replaced by commensurability. What Miller, Harris, and their colleagues point out is that resolving theoretical differences just requires goodwill, noting that scientists in the throes of a paradigm dispute rarely display much of that. Instead, they move the goalposts, propose ad hoc solutions to counter-evidence, ignore data, and actively avoid agreement in pursuit of victory (see also the Motte-and-bailey fallacy).

Harris also explored the potential of voice interfaces when they were comparatively primitive—driven by hierarchical menus and limited by speech recognition, processing power, and storage. He was particularly intrigued by the advances in text mining in the 1990s while working with OpenText and Research in Motion (BlackBerry). He outlines a design framework of principles and heuristics in his Voice Interface Design: Crafting the New Conversational Interfaces that draws on rhetorical notions like ethos and pathos as well as speech act theory, conversational analysis, and text linguistics. While the book has now been made largely obsolete with the late 2010s advances in Generative AI, it is notable that Machine Learning chatbots behave much the way Harris framed, with an ‘awareness’ of speech acts, turn-taking, coherence, cohesion, and the facets of linguistic presentation that increase credibility and appeal to emotions. They also rest crucially on the technology of text-mining for assembling the information, as well as aspects of the phrasing, for correct responses to queries.

Inspired by resemblance between Construction Grammar and Figural Logic, as articulated by Mark Turner^[30], Harris and his collaborators launched a research programme in the 2010s based on the interaction of rhetorical figures and grammatical constructions^{[31][32][33][34]}, including ontological representation^{[35][36][37][38]} and computational figure detection^[39][40][41].

• Editor, with Jeanne D. Fahnestock. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion. London: Routledge, 2023^[5].
• The Linguistics Wars. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022^[6].
• Editor. Landmark Essays in Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies. 2nd ed., 2017^[3], and Landmark Essays in Rhetoric of Science: Issues and Methods, 2020 London: Routledge^[4].
• Editor, with Shelley Hulan and Murray McArthur. Literature, Rhetoric and Values: Selected Proceedings of a Conference held at the University of Waterloo, 3-5 June 2011. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013^[42].
• Editor. Rhetoric and Incommensurability. Parlor Press, 2005^[2].
• Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Interfaces. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2005^[1].
• Acoustic Dimensions of Functor Comprehension in Broca's Aphasia. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1988^[7].