Whether language-evolution debates count as scientific depends on conviction that society can change.

Evidence

Historical speculation is here only exacerbated by the drawing of political and social consequences. The question of the origins of language itself (the ur-formation of the sentence and the word in some galactic magma at the dawn of human time) has been declared illicit by everyone from Kant to Levi-Strauss, even though it is accompanied by a question about the origins of the social itself (and used to be accompanied by another, related one about the origins of the family). But that of the possible evolution and modification of language is still conceivable and entertains a vital relationship to the Utopian question about the possible modification of society (where that is itself still conceivable). Indeed, the forms taken by just such debates will seem philosophically receivable or on the contrary antiquated and superstitious in strict proportion to your deeper convictions as to whether postmodern society can be changed any longer or not. The Marr debate in the Soviet Union, for example, has been classed with Lysenko as a scientific aberration, largely owing to Marr’s hypothesis that the very form and structure of language itself altered according to the mode of production of which it was a superstructure. As Russian had not sensibly evolved since the tsarist period, Stalin put an abrupt end to this speculation with a famous pamphlet (“Marxism and Linguistics”). In our own time, feminism has been virtually alone in attempting to envision the Utopian languages spoken in societies in which gender domination and inequality would have ceased to exist: the result was more than just a glorious moment in recent science fiction, and should continue to set the example for the political value of the Utopian imagination as a form of praxis. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 275

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core interest in the cognitive map / position in the world system: reception of a theory tracks your political conviction about changeability.
• QUESTION: Marr’s linguistic hypothesis as a test case — is the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis similarly declared illicit unless you believe postmodernity is changeable?