moving beyond

[W. Schulze]

Undoubtedly, Liz's contribution to the 'Moving Beyond' debate helps very much
to understand *why* there is in fact nothing to 'move beyond'.

'Beyond' (in my humble opinion) implies that there is a more or less monolithic
structure which we are used to treat as 'our world', furnished with guarded
boundaries and a (restricted and well defined) number of passages that allow
people 'to move beyond' in case they are equipped with visa emitted by the
world's administration. Passing these borderlines without such a visa (i.e,
without a private history that is related to the 'world's paradigm') would be
denounced as 'revolt of against the world'.

Liz has clearly shown that such a monolithic (Chomskian) 'world' did not exist,
nor does it today. However, things are a bit different if we think of the
Chomskian world as a construction of scientific (and sometimes) personal
cognition. It may well be that some people feel to be absurbed by the Chomskian
paradigm both in a scientific and a personal way (I mean in terms of getting a
job, or just because the paradigm fit into their general needs to get around in
the world). Many of them feel good in the MIT orthodoxy, and undoubtedly, they
make considerable progress in elaborating 'their world'. Others, perhaps, feel
the need to get out of this 'world' because of various reasons, some of them of
private nature, some of them resulting from scientific insights and experience.
All this reminds me of the Freudian 'Vater-Komplex' which may become the more
relevant in science the more there is a 'father' who 'represents' *the* world
(or scientific paradigm in question). A 'revolt' against the 'father(s)' would
then mean to 'move beyond' by declaring the fathers world as "basically empty
and irrelevant" (to quote Bruce Richman). Such a revolt, however, is basically
a 'personal revolt' (perhaps fed by some kind of envie against the father ["the
general public have concluded that Chomsky has somehow made a great discovery
about language of great scientific importance" (Bruce Richman)]). The act of
'revolting' (and thus gaining public attention) resembles more an act of
'self-liberation' and is blind towards the fact that there already exists a
world 'out there' which is (more or less) 'different' from the world of the
revolutionary's father.

Also, the revolting one should bear in mind that the Menon paradoxon not only
is fundamental for the understanding of human cognition, but also for the
evolution of scientific paradigms:

"Even those transcendent parts of new knowledge cannot be completely unrelated
to old knowledge, for otherwise they could never be grasped, at least by human
beings" [in a reformulation by Miller 1987].

In Europe (esp. in Germany), we have faced the same 'problem' many times. The
history of e.g. Indeoeuropean studies is full of (nearly always) 'fathers' who
from time to time provoked some kind of more or less 'personal' rebellion [in
general, these rebellions failed, also because there always was the option for
the 'rebels' to finally end up in the father's system (and to acquire the same
role boldly fought against before).

It also was Europe (in its broadest sense) that hosted many of those who have
developed scientific paradigms etc. that (earlier or later) competed with the
Chomskian world. The reluctance, however, that is often observed regarding the
reception of European thinking in the US (and that has many reasons) [see e.g.
the fate of Vygostkij, the Neolinguistica school (Bartoli, Bertoni), even
Functional Grammar in terms of Simon Dik [a Chomskian, before!] or European
Cognitivism in a non-US standard - I know what I'm talking about :-)) has - for
many of 'us' - created a 'new' father (or mother): The US tradition of
linguistics, disregarding whether Chomskian or not. Some people in Europe would
gladly opt for 'Moving Beyond the US', out of the same reasons Bruce Richman
wants to move beyond Chomsky.

All we learn from this is that linguistics (just as any other scientific
paradigm) takes part in the dialectal process of paradigms. It simply is a
matter of condition, of personal experience and training whether someone lives
'on one side' of this dialectal structure (sometimes revolting against it) or
whether (s)he knows to handle both (or more) sides. That is why I dare to be
end by quoting Liz's final words:

>  What we need to do now is to sort through a complex
> landscape of beliefs (emergence vs. learning vs. unfolding of innate
> knowledge; modularity vs. interactionism; autonomous syntax vs. embodied
> grammar) and figure out how they can be reconfigured and recombined for a
> new era.

This is, how science should be!

Wolfgang

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang M. Schulze
IATS - Institute for General Linguistics and Language Typology
[Institut fuer Allgemeine und Typologische Sprachwissenschaft]
Dept. II [Communication and Languages - Kommunikation und Sprachen]
F 13/14 - Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
D-80539 Muenchen
Tel.:   ++49-(0)89-21802484 (Secretary)
  ++49-(0)89-21805343 (Office)
Fax:  ++49-(0)89-21805345
Email:  W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Web:  http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ats_eng.html