Science Quote by Roman Jakobson

Jakobson is needling his own field for falling in love with what it could measure. Phonetics, with its waveforms, articulatory diagrams, and lab-ready units, offered linguistics the comforting sheen of hard science. Meaning, by contrast, stayed embarrassingly slippery: context-bound, socially negotiated, and resistant to being pinned down without smuggling in philosophy. His sentence is a quiet indictment of a discipline that mistook technical precision for conceptual centrality.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Remained undeveloped” implies not that semantics was unimportant, but that it was neglected, treated as a secondary problem or someone else’s job. “Made rapid progress” and “occupy the central place” reads like a procedural coup: the method became the mission. Jakobson isn’t denying phonetics’ achievements; he’s diagnosing an imbalance where the easiest layer of language to instrument became the flagship, while the layer most tied to human intention and culture got postponed indefinitely.

Context matters: Jakobson, a key figure in structuralism, worked amid early 20th-century pushes to formalize linguistics as a rigorous science. Structural linguistics prized systems and oppositions; behaviorism and later information theory made “signal” feel cleaner than “sense.” His subtext is almost political: if you build a science around what your tools can see, you end up with a theory of language that privileges sounds over speakers, form over function. The warning lands now, too, in an age of models that can parse and predict patterns at scale while still stumbling over meaning in the most human sense of the word.