Kenneth L. Pike

Talk, Thought, and Thing: the Emic Road Toward Conscious Knowledge Kenneth L. Pike

Pike addresses the current changing world, in which men are slipping their intellectual moorings. His first presupposition is the fundamental fact of human language. Another is the importance of the emic principle in understanding reality. In stating this principle, Pike says that persons understand persons, things, and events in relation to occurrence in structure, to class membership, and to social, physical, economic, psychological, and historical function and in relation to the control their frames of reference have over them.

Two books about Dr Ken Pike and his work are Ken Pike: Scholar and Christian and Language and Life: Essays in Memory of Kenneth L. Pike. SIL International, the linguistic organization, which grew under his leadership as its first President (1942-1979) and then President Emeritus (1979-2000).

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Personal interaction in a social-physical context is a useful entrance point into theory about cross-cultural knowledge
2. The person, as observer, is tied emically to things (and concepts) via differences, sameness, and appropriateness
3. The person may react to three kinds of hierarchical structures--phonological, grammatical, and referential--each with its features of slot, class, role, and cohesion
4. A person chooses temporary perspectives via particle, wave, and field, as a crucial part of the ability of the self
5. A personal search for knowledge involves the search for patterns within patterns in a holistic context
6. A person may distort innate positive universals into negative particular action

Conclusion
Bibliography