On the occasion of the recent publication of the French translation of Bühler's Sprachtheorie (1934) - la Théorie du langage. La fonction représentationnelle, edited by Janette Friedrich and Didier Samain, Agone, January 2009 [1] -, the Chair of Philosophy of Language and Knowledge at the Collège de France (Pr Jacques Bouveresse) and the UMR 7597 History of Linguistic Theories (HTL) of the CNRS and Université Paris-Diderot are organizing a colloquium on April 29 and 30 at the Collège de France, Paris, entitled : Karl Bühler, penseur du langage. Linguistics, psychology and philosophy.
Born at a time when psychology was establishing itself as an autonomous discipline, yet still nourished by philosophical reflection, Bühler's work occupies a privileged position in the contemporary history of the language sciences, and is permeated by the various questions of the time. His critical relationship with Wundt and Gestalt, with Husserlian phenomenology and the Vienna Circle, and, on the linguist side, with nascent phonology, have often been mentioned. These are only the most notorious interferences. In linguistics, the work undoubtedly owes as much to Paul and Brugmann as to Troubetzkoy, and the same applies mutatis mutandis to other disciplinary fields. The originality of Bühler, a physician and philosopher by training, lies in the constant dialogue he maintained with the great linguists of his time, without being, strictly speaking, a " linguist " himself.
Long ignored in France, Bühler is now attracting real interest. The forthcoming publication of a French translation of his major work, Sprachtheorie, the first critical edition of which, moreover, will fill a real gap in French-language publications. However, as with the rest of his work, access to this text and understanding of its issues remains no less tricky. To cite just one immediate example, Bühler is generally credited, and rightly so, with the thesis that language is not limited to its cognitive function, since it also has a " d'appel " and a " d'expression " function. Yet it is the representational function that the author mentions as the sub-title of Sprachtheorie, automatically giving it a privileged status. Bühler's work, by virtue of its connection with the entire body of linguistic, psychological and philosophical knowledge of an era that was particularly fertile for the human sciences, engaged a general reflection on the relationship between language and cognition, and between the sciences of language and related disciplines. It also, and perhaps more fundamentally, invites today's linguists and philosophers to reflect on many of the notions (language, sentence, etc.) that make up their ordinary metalanguage.
1] Prefaced by Jacques Bouveresse, this edition includes a presentation of the work by Janette Friedrich, the text translated by Didier Samain, a set of notes and an extensive glossary