What is this dispute anyway?

[John Myhill]

I don't know about anyone else, but what I find most striking about the
current discussion is that, after what seems like an almost interminable
silence on funknet (several times in the past year I have thought that
maybe I unsubscribed by accident), people have been aroused to involvement
not by anything directly related to language but by an abstract ideological
dispute where even the basic terms are interpreted in such a variety of
ways that there is no hope of even achieving a mutual understanding let
alone a resolution. Shouldn't we be a little bit concerned that people with
different leanings interpret the same data in opposite ways according to
what they regard as their view of language
(e.g. Newmeyer vs. Dryer, Prince vs. Aske in the currect debate)? What this
suggests to me is that maybe these views are essentially untestable and a
matter of faith. If they were testable and people agreed on the data,
assuming (as I do) that they are intelligent people and can follow logical
arguments, how could they so consistently come to opposite conclusions
about the theoretical implications of these data? If people's views on
(however they construe) the `autonomy debate' are a matter of faith, I
think this discussion is a waste of time, and if they are not a matter of
faith, why doesn't anyone seem to be convinced by any data to change their
position? Does anyone know of a single linguist who has changed his/her
position either way (after completing graduate school, let's say) on the
`autonomy debate'? Has anyone seen any data which has made them think 'aha,
I used to hold position X on this debate, but now I think position Y is
correct'? Will anyone publically admit to this? If so, I would like to hear
what data caused such a conversion; at least we would have some evidence
which *someone* found convincing enough at some point to admit they had
been wrong. If there are few or no linguists who have experienced such a
conversion (again, after, say, graduate school), I would like to suggest
that we should consider the possibility that maybe this is because both
sides of this argument have defined their hypotheses in such a way that no
data can falsify them. The argument looks like basically a matter of faith
(or a 'hunch', I believe was David Pesetsky's word), with the typical
characteristics of such a dispute, in particular reference to poorly
understood Higher Authorities (the Hard Sciences, in this case, Mathematics
on one side, Biology on the other) to which some participants are claiming
to have a Direct Line. 40 years ago, to the eternal discredit of
linguistics, Chomsky managed to fool enough linguists into believing that
he was a `Mathematician' that he made a research space for himself (he
prudently gave up this claim after he had made this space and began to come
into contact with real mathematicians who might publically call his bluff,
in the unlikely event that they paid any attention to him at all), but the
cost was that his type of linguists have been third-rate `Mathematicians'
ever since then, complete outsiders in the humanities and social sciences
(where they are institutionally located everywhere but MIT) and not taken
seriously by the Real Sciences, and as a result they will be fighting for
their institutional lives during the inevitable coming budget cuts. If the
interest on funknet in the current autonomy debate as opposed to actual
analysis of language is any indication, I am enormously concerned that some
functional linguists are doing the same thing now, parading vague
ideology/`theory' instead of doing real analysis, using Biology, Evolution,
and The Brain instead of Mathematics. I personally am in this field because
I like analyzing language, and I think it is pathetic to substitute vague
speculations based upon third-hand and/or 30-year-old knowledge of other
disciplines for doing actual analysis of language. We're linguists, guys,
this is what we know about, this is our livelihood, and if we don't start
acting like linguists, we aren't going to be anything at all soon.   John
Myhill