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From: steve@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Steve Finch)
Subject: Re: IS LINGUISTICS A SCIENCE?
Message-ID: <Czq1rt.EsI@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <3aj6ek$pig@ruccs.rutgers.edu> <3aqodb$39n@newsbf01.news.aol.com> <3atepr$hgl@ruccs.rutgers.edu>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 13:07:01 GMT
Lines: 41

jirifkin@ruccs.rutgers.edu (Jay Rifkin) writes:

>The tack of trying to discount abstractions and only refer to "existential"
>reality has been taken in the past, not only in linguistics but in other
>fields of study.  I am (for some reason) reminded of the view of the
>medieval Church (and others at the time) concerning the work of Copernicus
>and Galileo.  We can clearly see that the sun goes around the earth; why
>indeed would one question this perceived reality?  The idea that the
>earth and sun might be construed as members of a physical system following
>non-transparent physical laws was certainly difficult to grasp.
>I would have thought we were beyond that at this point.

Science needs data.  Gallileo put a different interpretation on not
only perceived data, but objectively measurable data (which has since
become even more objectively measurable).  That's science.  The
question of whether linguistics is a science depends crucially on
whether linguistic intuitions count as scientific data.  To so count,
they have to be:

1. Repeatable(ish).
2. Objectively measurable.

In my view linguistic intuitions fail on both counts, with the same
sentence inconsistently being labeled as "acceptable" over thirty
years, and being inherently (almost by definition) subjective
(although some correlations with neural activity has been found, this
of course does not make intuitions "objective").  Even if we say the
"acceptable/unacceptable" distinction is an approximation to a partial
"better-than" relation, this does not help.

Of course some data is uncontroversial, but centre embeddings, some
parasitic gap sentences, island violation sentences and many other
constructions fail both 1 and 2 and have been used strongly to
motivate various linguistic theories.  Can this be science? 

In particular, there has been no scientific evidence I have been aware
of to show that anything which linguists would like to call
"competence" has repeatable objectively measureable data associated
with it.  

Steve.
