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Kenneth L. Pike (1912–2000)

Pike Maxims

• “Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory.”
  (Linguistic Concepts p. 5)



• “Acceptance of the power of God in one's life lays the groundwork for personal commitment to both science and Christianity, which so often have been in conflict.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. ix)



• “That a society controls, to a greater or lesser extent, the behavior of its members is a universal; but the methods, the particulars of that control, vary from one culture to another. It is also, I would guess, a universal that in all societies people value respectability granted to them.”
  (Mixtec social 'credit rating' 1986)



• “We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks—otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?”
  (Language in relation… p. 655)



• “The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study. God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 6)



• “In my view, a child is born with the INNATE POTENTIAL to learn to handle deliberate focus shifts such as are seen in the kaleidoscopic poetry shifts, but both the young and old need to learn such matters from available oral or written culture or from teachers—or must have initiative and imagination to develop some such devices on their own.”
  (Bridging language learning,… 1988)



• “The price that one pays for refusing to act on the truth as one sees it, is to be led to believe untruth to avoid guilt.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 7)



• “If the scholar feels that he must know everything about any topic, he is in trouble—and will not publish with a clear conscience.”
  (Here we stand: creative observers of language 1980)



• “PURE FORMALISM as such, without attention to referential social axioms, is powerless to capture the relevance of many discourse grammatical functions. Experimental syntax, of a mathematical type, geared to referential axioms, may help further along these lines—or others not imagined as yet.”
  (Bridging language learning,… 1988)



• “There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 7)



• “There can be no real peace unless you have a society that is familiar with the notion of forgiveness; unless people learn that God can forgive them and that He expects them in turn, to forgive.”
  (Languages for peace p. 26)



• “Christian kindness, gentleness, and thoughtfulness for others are a showcase of God's light, which even an epistemology cannot completely screen off.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 77)



• “Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective.”
  (Linguistic Concepts p. 44)



• “The detached observer's view is one window on the world. The view of the local scene through the eyes of a native participant in that scene is a different window.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 32)



• “Christianity stands or falls as a living program, a way of life, made concrete in the life of man by the life of God through the life of the concretely living Christ.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 39)



• “I wanted a theory that would allow one to live outside the office with the same philosophy one uses inside it. This required the development of a view which allowed one to integrate research with belief, thing with person, fact with aesthetics, knowledge with application of knowledge.”
  (Bridging language learning,… 1988)



• “Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language. Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 40)



• “Tagmemic theory insists that no sentence is well described unless its external distribution is given. Any unit of human behavior (whether grammatical, lexical, physical, conceptual) includes as one of its components its external distribution in a more inclusive class, in a sequence of hierarchically-ordered events (or spacially ordered events), and in a network of contrastive vectors of a matrix.”
  (Discourse analysis and tagmeme matrices 1964)



• “To equate truth with magnification is to abandon scientific discourse.”
  (With Heart& Mind p. 45)



• “Tagmemics in its insistence on well-defined units as having reference to particle, wave, and field, refuses to reject the unit with its substance, but tries to establish it. Yet in doing so—in terms of relations by way of field matrix—it allows for emphasis upon connections between elements which are seen, also, in relation to dynamic, wave processes. This multiple perspective is mediated by language.”
  (Language in relation… p. 678)



• “Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements. Man must, sometimes, act as if he believed it—or die.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 46)



• “Verbal and nonverbal activity is a unified whole, and theory and methodology should be organized or created to treat it as such.”
  (Language in relation… p. 26)



• “Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success. Courage to continue comes from deeper sources than outward results.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 82)



• “We must be prepared to accept a set of residues for every research project—unsolved problems, or bits of data still not fitting the system. … With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts.”
  (Here we stand: creative observers of language 1980)



• “The maximum degree of individual and group happiness comes by setting local codes (1) to avoid harm to people, and (2) to serve them. The first is law, the second love.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 47)



• “If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning.”
  (Linguistic Concepts p. 13)



• “The etic view is cross-cultural in that its units are derived by comparing many systems and by abstracting from them units which are synthesized into a single scheme which is then analytically applied as a single system. The emic view is mono-cultural with its units derived from the internal functional relations of only one individual or culture at a time.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 32)



• “Identity in the form of continuity of personality is an extremely important characteristic of the individual. If continuity were not part of the identificational characteristics of man, a person could not be sent a bill today for something he bought yesterday, as the Greeks seem to have implied.”
  (Language in relation… p. 656)



• “Truth is person. Truth does not exist in a principle, but in a person. This point of view, which seems so hard to grasp philosophically, is clearly shown in Jesus Christ's words, ”I am the truth.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 52)



• “It is not only individual words which have differences of meaning; the entire semantic system is in a fluid state. Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.”
  (Language in relation… p. 623)



• “So I see that Christianity in believing in a Creator pulls together more facts, data, inner experience and ability than any mechanistic view could hold for me. If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar.”
  (Languages for peace p. 26)



• “When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 52)



• “Cohesion with various kinds of larger background context (of the story as it develops, or of a system of knowledge, or of grammatical or phonological pattern) is essential for normal communication.”
  (Here we stand: creative observers of language 1980)



• “If one refuses to view self as needing integration with God and neighbor, one shrivels like a shrub in the desert.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 60)



• “Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it.”
  (Linguistic Concepts p. 52)



• “Nobody is as good as he thinks he is.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 60)



• “The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.”
  (Languages for peace p. 23)



• “Only the conviction that self is not lost before God in some deep nirvana, but is ever vibrantly particular, individual, permanent—only such a conviction that God knows us and appreciates us by name will eventually allow hope to remain and the commitment for service before Him to be most deeply rewarded.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 86)



• “Within human experience, intuition, and belief, there are numerous items which seem sometimes to differ sharply—to be distinct, or even contradictory—but which need to be seen in a uniting framework of thought if we are to have an integrated existence.”
  (Bridging language learning,… 1988)



• “Fear of the Lord is the beginning—and basic assumption—of wisdom in that it sets up the only ultimately adequate epistemological starting point.”
  (With Heart & Mind p. 76)



• “A theory may be viewed rather broadly as a statement purporting to describe, or to explain, or to help one to understand a phenomenon. More narrowly, a theory may present a claim of truth, or assert the presence of relationships between phenomena, or predict the occurrence of phenomena.”
  (Language in relation… p. 68)