--- title: What did Jerrold Katz say about animist sentences as nonsense? description: The American philosopher and linguist Jerrold Katz never wrote about animism. With Jerry Fodor in 1963 he set out a theory of meaning in which some grammatical sentences are not false but anomalous, because their words do not fit together… url: "https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/wiki/what-did-jerrold-katz-say-about-animist-sentences-as-nonsense/" updated: "2026-11-10" category: People tags: - A. Irving Hallowell - everything is conscious - Graham Harvey - grammar of animacy - Jerrold Katz - Jerry Fodor - language and separation - linguistics - Ojibwe - philosophy of language - Robin Wall Kimmerer - selection restrictions - semantic anomaly - semantic markers - words shape perception --- # What did Jerrold Katz say about animist sentences as nonsense? The American philosopher and linguist Jerrold Katz never wrote about animism. With Jerry Fodor in 1963 he set out a theory of meaning in which some grammatical sentences are not false but anomalous, because their words do not fit together in sense, and on a theory of that kind a sentence that gives life, feeling or speech to a stone or a storm fails in meaning before anyone asks whether it is true. Languages that speak of some rocks and trees as persons, and the teaching that everything is conscious, put the same sentences in a very different light. ## Who was Jerrold Katz? A philosopher of language and linguist, born in 1932, who took his doctorate at Princeton in 1960 and worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1961, alongside Noam Chomsky's new generative grammar. From 1975 until his death in 2002 he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the graduate centre of the City University of New York.^[1](#note-1) His books include *Semantic Theory* (1972), *Language and Other Abstract Objects* (1981) and *Realistic Rationalism* (1998). In later life he moved from treating meaning as something in speakers' minds to the view that languages are abstract objects, real in the way numbers are real.^[1](#note-1) See [Who is Noam Chomsky, and what does linguistics say about how language shapes thought?](/wiki/who-is-noam-chomsky-and-what-does-linguistics-say-about-how-language-shapes-thought/) 1. D. Terence Langendoen, biographical note on Jerrold J. Katz, University of Arizona (read 9 November 2026). ## What is semantic anomaly? A sentence that is grammatically correct and yet does not make sense. Katz and Fodor's own example was "The paint is silent". The grammar gives it the same structure as "The street is wide", yet "English speakers will at once recognize that this sentence is anomalous in some way."^[2](#note-2) For them, spotting such sentences is part of what it is to know a language. Their explanation was that the meaning of each word is built from parts they called semantic markers, such as (Human) or (Female), and that some words carry selection restrictions, which means they only combine sensibly with words that have the right markers. The expression "spinster insecticide", they wrote, would be regarded as anomalous by speakers of English.^[2](#note-2) A present-day textbook keeps the distinction. A sentence such as "I know an old woman who swallowed a cow" is improbable, and people answer it with disbelief; a sentence such as "This sausage doesn't appreciate Mozart" breaks a restriction, and people are more likely to say that it cannot be said at all. On this view the restrictions are "linguistic in nature, rather than simply facts about the world."^[3](#note-3) 1. Jerrold J. Katz and Jerry A. Fodor, "The Structure of a Semantic Theory", *Language* 39(2), 1963, pp. 170-210 (pp. 173, 175, 191, 199). 2. Paul R. Kroeger, *Analyzing Meaning: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics*, section 7.3, "Selectional restrictions" (LibreTexts edition, read 9 November 2026). ## So did Katz call animist sentences nonsense? Not in those words, and not about animism, which he does not discuss. The question comes from what a theory like Katz and Fodor's seems to imply, as it is read here. Verbs such as 'yawn', 'listen' or 'apologise' expect something alive and able to feel, and sentences that hand them a stone, a storm or a sausage are the kind of example used to show anomaly. Read that way, a sentence like "The stone is listening" would not be a false report that could be checked by watching the stone. It would fail earlier, inside the meanings of the English words, and a competent speaker would sense that without looking at the world at all. If that reading is right, the theory places the line between persons and things not in what people believe but in the meanings of the language they speak. ## Do all languages draw that line in the same place? No. In the 1930s the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell worked with the Ojibwe of the Berens River in Manitoba, whom his National Academy of Sciences memoirist, Anthony F. C. Wallace, called one of the few remaining hunting-and-gathering cultures in North America, though they had by then been involved in the fur trade for more than two hundred years. In Ojibwe, rocks are grammatically animate, so he asked an old man whether all the stones around them were alive. After a long pause the man answered, "No! But some are."^[4](#note-4) The scholar of religion [Graham Harvey](/wiki/who-is-graham-harvey-and-what-is-the-new-animism/) points out that Ojibwe speakers address some rocks, some weather, some plants and some made things as persons, and that a dictionary of the language still insists that its animate nouns "include a number of non-living things". In Harvey's view, such a dictionary either declares the speakers wrong or is unwilling to challenge the English language.^[4](#note-4) The botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a Great Lakes people who traditionally farmed from summer villages and hunted from winter camps, found a verb meaning "to be a bay" in an Ojibwe dictionary and was first annoyed and then delighted. "A bay is a noun only if water is dead," she writes. In her own language rocks, mountains, water, fire and places are animate, and to call a person 'it' would rob them of selfhood.^[5](#note-5) See [Who is Robin Wall Kimmerer, and what is Braiding Sweetgrass about?](/wiki/who-is-robin-wall-kimmerer-and-what-is-braiding-sweetgrass-about/) 1. Graham Harvey, *Animism: Respecting the Living World* (Hurst, 2005), Chapter 1, p. 20, and Chapter 2, "Ojibwe Language", pp. 33-35, quoting A. Irving Hallowell; on the Berens River Ojibwe, Anthony F. C. Wallace, National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir of A. Irving Hallowell, and Victor P. Lytwyn, review of *Memories, Myths, and Dreams of an Ojibwe Leader*, *Manitoba History* 64 (2010). 2. Robin Wall Kimmerer, *Braiding Sweetgrass* (Milkweed Editions, 2013), "Learning the Grammar of Animacy". ## How does Therapeutic Shamanism see such sentences? As descriptions, not mistakes. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, though things very different from us are conscious in ways very different from ours. Westerners divide the world into the living and the non-living, the animate and the inanimate, and struggle to recognise consciousness in anything unlike themselves; anthropologists could just about follow talk of the consciousness of a tree, and were startled by talk of the spirit of the outboard motor.^[6](#note-6) A sentence that sounds anomalous to an English ear may simply be reporting a kind of consciousness that English has no comfortable place for. Words matter here in a second way. They define and shape how we perceive things, something the dominant culture understands and knows only too well; calling city culture 'civilisation' teaches its members that it is better than the hunter-gatherer cultures before it.^[7](#note-7) Our sense of separation is reflected in our language. English makes 'the river' a dead noun, a thing, where some animist languages make it something alive that we can be in relationship with. And in shamanic work the way we speak shapes what we meet. Thinking "Next, Bear appeared" rather than "a bear appeared" keeps a journey with the Lower-World**Lower-World.** The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. [Read the full answer](/wiki/what-is-the-lower-world/) [Oversoul](/wiki/what-is-an-oversoul/) instead of a middle-world**Middle-world.** Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. "If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world." [Read the full answer](/wiki/what-is-the-middle-world/) individual; adding 'a', 'the' or 'my' reduces Animal to animal.^[8](#note-8) Shamans are clear that words have power, and that they shape how we experience reality.^[9](#note-9) 1. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Two, "What Is 'Spirit'?". 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Waking Up". 3. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Two, "Oversouls". 4. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Five, "What a Power Animal Is (And What It Is Not)". ## Is Katz's theory of meaning accepted? Not by everyone. The main challenge comes from the philosopher [W. V. Quine](/wiki/what-did-w-v-quine-argue-about-justifying-experience/), who doubted that any line can be drawn between what is true by the meanings of words and what is simply a belief held very firmly about the world. On a Quinean view, a sentence that sounds anomalous on its own is just silly and false, not senseless.^[10](#note-10) Others, including the linguist Janet Dean Fodor and colleagues in 1975, doubted that breaking meanings down into basic features matches anything real in the mind.^[10](#note-10) On the other side, defenders of the approach hold that semantic markers explain facts about synonymy, contradiction and anomaly that speakers share and that the rival accounts struggle to explain; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the subject suggests they may offer the best account available.^[10](#note-10) The difference matters for animism. On Katz's side, "The stone is listening" fails in meaning; on Quine's, it is a false belief about stones. Neither treats it as true. The languages described above show only that English draws the line between persons and things in one particular place; whether the way a language divides the world shapes the way its speakers think is a further argument, the one associated with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. See [What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?](/wiki/what-did-sapir-and-whorf-actually-claim-about-language-and-thought/) 1. "The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction", supplement "Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics", *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy* (read 9 November 2026), on Katz and Fodor (1963), Katz (1972), Quine, and J. D. Fodor and others (1975). ## Where does Therapeutic Shamanism differ? In where it looks for the answer. Katz's question is about what English speakers know when they know their words. Whether a stone listens is, for Therapeutic Shamanism, not a question of grammar at all but of experience. Shamanism rests on direct personal experience, not on an act of faith, and anyone can journey and find out for themselves.^[11](#note-11) A sentence such as "The stone is listening" is not made true by a grammar that allows it, nor made senseless by a grammar that forbids it; it is tested by meeting the [Stone People](/wiki/what-are-stone-people-and-what-gifts-do-they-bring/). See [What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?](/wiki/what-does-it-mean-to-say-the-world-is-alive-and-full-of-persons/) 1. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Three, "Real, Not Imaginary". - [What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?](/wiki/what-did-sapir-and-whorf-actually-claim-about-language-and-thought/) - [Who is Robin Wall Kimmerer, and what is Braiding Sweetgrass about?](/wiki/who-is-robin-wall-kimmerer-and-what-is-braiding-sweetgrass-about/) - [Who was A. Irving Hallowell, and where does the phrase "other-than-human persons" come from?](/wiki/who-was-a-irving-hallowell-and-where-does-the-phrase-other-than-human-persons-come-from/) - [What did Gilbert Ryle mean by a category mistake?](/wiki/what-did-gilbert-ryle-mean-by-a-category-mistake/) - [Who is Noam Chomsky, and what does linguistics say about how language shapes thought?](/wiki/who-is-noam-chomsky-and-what-does-linguistics-say-about-how-language-shapes-thought/) - [What did Nurit Bird-David say about animism as relational knowing?](/wiki/what-did-nurit-bird-david-say-about-animism-as-relational-knowing/) - [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/) (Chapter Two, what Spirit is; Chapter Five, the power of the words we use) - [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/) (Chapter Two, Oversouls; Chapter Three, words and the dominant culture) - [all courses](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/shamanic-courses/)