three final replies

[David Pesetsky]

A CLARIFICATION:

At 10:42 AM +0200 1/13/97, John Myhill wrote:

> To David P.: You write:
>
>         Discussions of these alternatives can and do change minds
>         (mine, for instance).
>
> You've changed your mind about the autonomy thesis? You used to not believe
> (didn't used to believe?) in autonomous syntax? After you got out of
> graduate school? Did you put this in print anywhere?
> And you got a job at MIT? Am I understanding you correctly? Please clarify.
> (I'm not being facetious, I really am interested in
> this)

Sorry, nothing that exciting.

What I said was the following. The disagreement that has occupied us the
most here is really a difference over hunches, interests and research
strategies.  So there can't be much question of true and false, nor is the
notion "changing one's mind" well-defined for hunches and interests.  On
the other hand, this "hunch-level" disagreement does produce analyses and
discussions of particular phenomena which, not surprisingly, can be true
and false, and can be matters on which one changes one's mind.

I have been in countless discussions about whether some phenomenon is
properly attributable to a discourse factor, to a property of
sentence-internal syntax, or some mixture of these.  On such matters,
people's opinions should, can, and do change in response to reasoned
discussion and argument.  That's what I meant.


*****************

ON THE NOTION "INTERESTING":

I wrote:

> The problems
> arise *after* we've offered our varying interpretations of the  data.
> Do we defend our interpretation with specious     propositions like 3-7?
> Or do we try to discover the truth?

To which John Myhill replied:

> I agree with you in principle, but unfortunately that is not the tone the
> discussion (such as it is) has taken. To take the most blatant example,
> Chomsky's favorite 'defense' of whatever approach he feels like pursuing at
> the moment has always been that it is 'interesting,' (your specious
> proposition #3), [...]

                [Chomsky quotes omitted]
>
> Such examples could be multiplied many times over [...]
> This is particularly significant, and
> worrying, because the great majority of Chomsky's followers appear to be
> similarly basing their choice of approach on what Chomsky finds
> 'interesting' as well, to judge by the general lack of serious effort to
> give more convincing arguments for this approach. I assume that you (David)
> yourself are thinking something similar about functionalists, so this
> appears to be a general property of the field.

I think it's a general property of *people*.

If we're given the opportunity, we do what we find most interesting.  Then
we act as though "interesting" is an argument for something.

Sure Chomsky's guilty of this. Who isn't?  It's even argued that the false
argument serves the useful purpose of focusing research, though that, of
course, is a two-edged sword (to mix a metaphor).

The trick is to learn how to see where "interesting" is being used as an
argument, discard that non-argument without rancor, and examine what's left
in a serious fashion.

On a related issue, do consider the possibility that at least some of the
people you call "Chomsky's followers" look like followers because they
share (some of) his interests -- rather than sharing his interests because
they're followers.

*****************
FINALLY:

Jon Aske wrote (two days ago, sorry for the delay):

> David, I'm sorry if I put words into your mouth.  I was going by my
> interpretation (corroborated by many others) of what people in your
> school, not necessarily you yourself, have been saying for the last few
> decades, at least until the last time I checked.

Thanks for your remarks.  It's an easy but unproductive shortcut to
criticize X for what Y says Z (who went to graduate school with X) thinks.
But it's usually also unfair.

The issue at hand was a certain characterization of work on functional
categories.  I'd like to address that further, but I don't think I can do
that here and now.  A book currently being written by Guglielmo Cinque may
soon be the best place to look for good work (in my linguistic neck of the
woods) on the topic.  But that's not fully written yet.  He cites lots of
the typology literature, by the way.

> Perhaps my
> interpretation was erroneous.  If so, I am quite willing to stand
> corrected.  I think that that is what this discussion (I don't dare call
> it "dispute") is all about.  I feel, and I'm sure many others do too,
> that we need a lot more communication in our field.  It may turn out
> that we agree on more things than we ever thought we did.

I suspect the opposite.  I suspect that we *disagree* on more things than
we ever thought we did.  But what's wrong with that, so long as discussions
address the real disagreements -- not specious ones rooted in primeval
animosities or based on logic like proposition 7 of my previous message?
(Anyone look it up?)


Thanks for the discussion,
David Pesetsky






*************************************************************************
Prof. David Pesetsky, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy
20D-219 MIT,  Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
(617) 253-0957 office           (617) 253-5017 fax
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/pesetsky.html