Adam Schaff “was the only Polish Marxist in the post-world war two period with an academic background,” according to Marxists.org (is that some kind of Polish joke?), and the official ideologue of the Polish Communist Party. I don’t know that our Western assumptions about the perverting effects of Soviet-style communism on pure scholarship apply here—at least not in terms of content—but there is a certain stylistic grim-and-grey that while meaningless in and of itself (for we are not children, and do not need to be jollied), makes it that much harder to forgive the total misunderstanding and magpie arbitrarism passing as systematic thought with which he treats structural linguistics, Chomsky, and the relativistic tradition. The guy is a logician, and seems to have thought that just boning up on his language philosophy and jotting down his impressions in his graceless industrial prose would serve as a keynote to a conference on linguistic universalism and relativism. He is wrong! He gets things wrong constantly! Comparing the structure of language to the structure of DNA is fine if you are Deleuze but not if you are trying to say real things in a plain way! Especially not when it leads you to almost say that linguistic differences are genetically based. Taking Chomsky’s word on the history of linguistics is inadvisable! Europeans, you are not allowed to pronounce your own unusual ad hoc takes on intellectual traditions of which you know nothing as though you describing commonly agreed upon concepts (cf. Schaff’s division of structural linguistics into “phonetic” and “descriptive” schools). He does seem to establish convincingly for his own historical moment that the state of neuroscience was not adequate to help settle the relativism question (and that philosophy is not the way to settle it once for all, but that's just common sense). But overall, he gets so much wrong, so obliviously, you wonder if he learned it from his dad. Paper appeared in Fishman, ed., Universalism and Relativism in Langauge and Thought. ( )