From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!think.com!rpi!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!quads!gal2 Tue Mar 24 09:58:02 EST 1992
Article 4663 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Xref: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca comp.ai.philosophy:4663 sci.lang:4980
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!think.com!rpi!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!quads!gal2
>From: gal2@quads.uchicago.edu (Jacob Galley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.lang
Subject: linguistics vs philosophy vs cogsci / Whorf vs Grice?
Message-ID: <1992Mar23.154322.1199@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 23 Mar 92 15:43:22 GMT
Sender: news@uchinews.uchicago.edu (News System)
Reply-To: gal2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Lines: 44

Hi all. I have a question that has been bugging me quite a bit
recently, especially now that I'm so disillusioned by cognitive
science, which I am trying to make my field.

First, let me explain my situation: I am sick of the term
"interdisciplinary!" What is so interdisciplinary about studying
the lower levels of thought process? The only answer I have been
able to provide for myself is that my field is simply newer than
philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science, which
all currently occupy different parts of the niche which I expect
cognitive science to take over in about thirty or fifty years.
I really hate to sound like there are big concrete walls with
razor wire and armed guards between these fields, but I am finding
it very difficult to do what I want to as an undergraduate at the
University of Chicago. I have to work around departmental rivalries
and can only study this thing from the perspective of one department
at a time! My recent AI professor said to a linguistics grad student
taking his class: "Do they know you're over here?" (Incidentally,
we were reading Schank's _Scripts Plans Goals and Understanding_
at the time.) Of course he was kidding, but why should this be funny?

I'm getting fed up. Maybe someone out there can help me feel better
about the current state of things. Maybe you can give me a reasonable
answer to this question:

Why is Whorf considered a linguist, when Austin and Grice are considered
philosophers?

The only thing I could come up with is that Whorf knew a few exotic
languages, and his work dealt more with the differences between the
semantic systems of different languages, rather than the tactics of
communication in general. This distinction to me seems moot. All three
of them were working on different aspects of exactly the same problem.
Right now I can only take this as evidence of the useless and somewhat
harmful barrier between natural language philosophy and this area of
linguistics (which I can't even come up with a good name for --
?semantics?).

I am only being this critical because I hope I am wrong. What am I
missing?

Jake.
-- 
Reinheitsgebot <-- "Keep your laws off my beer!" <-- gal2@midway.uchicago.edu


