Understanding souls: A commentary on Anna Wierzbicka's natural semantic metalanguage

There is a legend about the famous Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget delivering a distinguished lecture at Clark University in the late 1960s. During the question and answer period he was observed furiously jotting down notes. When the event concluded his host complimented Piaget for being so engaged. He responded: ‘I was writing my next book!’ Anna Wierzbicka too is one of those anomalous and seemingly superhuman researchers with analytic powers and a writing capacity far beyond those of mortal academics. Her scholarly productivity is so off the charts that one imagines she must never sleep, or that she composes books while riding in the elevator. Piaget had his structural developmental stage theory, which he tirelessly applied to various domains of human thought (space, number, causality, morality, logical reasoning, even dream understandings). Anna Wierzbicka has her Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory which she believes makes it possible to do comparative research without ethnocentrism and can be used to more objectively define, translate or derive the meaning of almost anything. And over the past decades she and her colleagues (Cliff Goddard for example) have been extraordinarily diligent in applying that theory to almost everything (from the meaning of the concept expressed by the English word ‘emotion’ to the explication in NSM terms of key concepts in a variety of languages and cultural traditions—such as the Australian idea of a ‘mate’, the German idea of ‘verboten’ or the Malay idea of ‘malu’ (which is often translated in non-NSM terms as ‘shame’ or ‘propriety’)—to the meanings conveyed by Jesus Christ in his Sermon on the Mount. Here she examines some of the conceptual challenges one faces doing comparative analysis of the meaning of kinship terms. She challenges (among other things) the deployment of the concept of kinship obligations in anthropological theories. In general Anna Wierzbicka’s work has been deeply skeptical of the applicability of most theoretical or ‘etic’ concepts (such as ‘emotions’ or ‘kinship’ or ‘morality’) widely used by social scientists to understand the understandings of others. That skepticism is displayed in this essay (to pick but one example) by her suspicion that ‘loyalty’ is an ethnocentric concept. It does not stop there. Most researchers in comparative ethics (including myself) assume that the idea of a moral obligation is a universal human concept, which can be conveyed by one of the meanings associated with the English