Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: ginzburg@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Yonatan Ginzburg)
Subject: Re: Chomksy, Significance, and Current Trends
Message-ID: <DDGEry.3CG@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <40q490$bbg@mailnews.kub.nl> <1995Aug15.100147.1@ctdvx5.priv.ornl.gov> <40qkp2$1pm@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 12:02:19 GMT
Lines: 61

In article <40qkp2$1pm@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> David Pesetsky <pesetsk@mit.edu> writes:
>s25@ctdvx5.priv.ornl.gov wrote:
>>In article <40q490$bbg@mailnews.kub.nl>, dleblanc@kub.nl (David Leblanc) 
>writes:
>>   I'm sure generations of physicists will be shocked to learn that
>>Michelson and Morley were doing bad science when they disproved the
>>existence of ether. The attitude you describe seems more characteristic
>>of the so-called "social sciences". But even there, Noam Chomsky did not
>>feel the need to propose an alternate model of human behavior when he
>>attacked B.F. Skinner's theories. Nor was it required that he do so.
>
>
>I don't think the analogy holds up.
>
>Michelson and Morley's work didn't dispose of the ether theory of light 
>transmission by asserting that the proponents of ether just did it because 
>they liked prestige and office politics.
>
>They also didn't show that what was wrong with the ether theory was its 
>lack of attention to what people really *use* light for.

The fact that people and other living creatures (plants etc.) use
light is important and one's theory of light needs among other things
to explain various phenomena that relate to this. Nonetheless, light
is still a significant phenomenon regardless of whether there are
agents around to perceive it. Conversely, it's certainly the case that
there are interesting things to say about language that abstract away
from the fact that people use it to communicate. But it is at the very
least a defensible position that the most fundamental thing about
language is that people *use* it in order to communicate. Hence,
arguably, lack of attention to language use leads to lop-sided
research programmes with consequences that reach down to the more
``structural'' aspects of language e.g. syntactic theory might need to
undergo significant revisions once data from spoken corpora begin to
be more influential. 

>They also didn't criticise established physics for using experimentation 
>instead of a corpus of naturally occuring events.

>No, they took an empirical claim, put it to an experimental test, and got a 
>negative result. That's more or less what Chomsky did to Skinner's proposal 
>as well (though his review involved only Gedanken experiments).
>
>We haven't seen anything like the Michelson-Morley result here on sci.lang.  
>Perhaps the right point to make is not that these folks fail to come up 
>with an alternative theory, but that they're not discussing theories at 
>all.

True. The data culled from the grammaticality judgement Gedanken
experiments are experimental data of some significance. However, I
wonder whether I am being unduly pessimistic in thinking that the
average score such data would receive would not be high if assessed at
a scientific court by the usual standards (reproducability, careful
recording of data, consistency of experimental conditions etc).  The
joke about the linguist saying `9 is prime? yeah yeah, I think I can
get that.' comes to mind.  Linguists, of which I am one, hope that bad
data will be ``laughed out of court'' as it were by their
peers. Whether this is merely optimistic or realistic is hard for me
to tell.

Jonathan Ginzburg
