Reflections cont'd (3)

[Mark P. Line]

Interesting response.

Does that mean you're not going to try to rebut my point about direct
realism being unfalsifiable? I don't blame you, since it's something that
I consider unchanged since the days of Thomas Reid and David Hume. I
believe that if people in the related fields of psychology,
psycholinguistics, speech, hearing and cognitive science had gotten
themselves up to speed on ideas that were tried and discarded for good
reason in the 18th century, they wouldn't be wasting time and money trying
to make them work today.


-- Mark

P.S. You are in fact preaching to the choir about low scientific standards
in linguistics. I was harping on that over thirty years ago, and
ultimately left linguistics for a while partly because of the lack of any
signs of improvement.

P.P.S. Undergraduates know exactly what you're talking about because
they've been indoctrinated to your system of beliefs. That's not much of
an argument either, is it?


Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX



Diane Frances Lesley-Neuman wrote:
> Mark,
> People in the related fields of psychology, psycholinguistics, speech and
> hearing do it all of the time. Even undergraduates in these fields manage
> these research paradigms, execute projects and know exactly what I am
> talking about. You simply are not familiar with the literature, and you
> are calling things nonsense without reading anything, which is an easy
> thing to get away with in linguistics, because of the low scientific
> standards in our field.
> Linguistics as a field can no longer afford the luxury of remaining
> willfully ignorant of research that applies to their theories and their
> professional practice, in order to maintain their autonomy in a war over
> political turf.  Because this behavior causes us to lose ground
> scientifically, and dictates funding priorities of university programs.
> Eventually, linguistics programs will lose their standing and
> credibility, be unfunded or so underfunded as to lose their autonomy,
> because of their intellectually and scientifically backward behavior.
> --
> Diane Lesley-Neuman, M. Ed.
> Linguistics Department
> Institute for Cognitive Science
> University of Colorado at Boulder
>
>
> Quoting "Mark P. Line" <mark at polymathix.com>:
>
>> Diane Frances Lesley-Neuman wrote:
>> > You are calling upon concepts and images built and generated by
>> > experience.
>>
>> That's a pretty hard claim to substantiate, isn't it?
>>
>> In any event, the point is that it doesn't make much sense that
>> perception
>> would evolve to work independently of all this magnificent ability to
>> construct images of anything on the fly, and that an hypothesis that it
>> has done so anyway would be unfalsifiable.
>>
>> -- Mark
>>
>> Mark P. Line
>> Polymathix
>> San Antonio, TX
>>
>>
>>
>> > Quoting "Mark P. Line" <mark at polymathix.com>:
>> >
>> >> Diane Frances Lesley-Neuman wrote:
>> >> > "Reality makes language intelligible.""Language makes reality
>> >> > intelligible."
>> >> > How about Carol Fowler and Direct Realism?
>> >>
>> >> I can see images in my mind when I hallucinate, and there's no direct
>> >> realism involved. I can see images in my mind when I imagine a scene
>> >> with
>> >> my eyes closed, and there's no direct realism involved. Why would I
>> want
>> >> to postulate that there's anything special, much less more direct or
>> >> more
>> >> realistic, about perception? If direct realists had any *evidence* of
>> >> something special, they wouldn't have to postulate it.
>>
>>
>
>


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX