A query...

[Mark P. Line]

Claire Bowern wrote:
> Mark P. Line wrote:
>>
>> Surely we don't have to appease the status quo of tenure decisions if we
>> think that status quo is broken. Seems like the tail wagging the dog.
>
> Perhaps a better analogy is that scientists in the natural sciences
> don't get tenure for collecting data, but for what they do with it.

I can't imagine how that can be true in, say, experimental physics,
observational astronomy or field biology.


>>> Of course, one can say that what needs to be done is to get tenure
>>> committees to consider these kinds of activities.  In the short term,
>>> though, this doesn't seem like much of a solution---if Claire does
>>> what you suggest, odds are really good she won't get tenure, no?  And
>>> that would be a very bad thing for the documentation of Bardi...
>>
>> I know Claire and I don't intend to pick on her specifically. But I
>> think
>> that for as long as tenure decisions do not tend to reward good science,
>> any young linguist has to decide for herself if she's more interested in
>> tenure or more interested in doing good science. It's not an ethical
>> dilemma, just a biographical choice.
>
> It's not that simple at all (and it doesn't just apply to females...) I
> don't think for a minute that what I do is "purely" science - it can't
> be, simply because of the nature of the data and the methodology used to
> collect it. We don't have anything exactly akin to double-blind
> experimentation in descriptive fieldwork. Sure, we do participant
> observation and hypothesis testing on different data-sets, but most
> descriptive fieldwork is not impartially collected. Isn't part of doing
> science seeing where the methodology fails?

I see no reason why linguistics couldn't have a community of practice in
which science and only science is practiced (and funded) as well as a
community of practice in which more than just science is practiced (and
funded).

So I guess my complaint is that the former community is not being allowed
to flourish -- you can't even get tenure in that one, apparently. That's
where the change would have to set in.


> We're talking about two different things - data accountability, and
> widespread data access. Full accountability of the researcher and
> replicability of results is one thing, and I'd argue that this is one of
> the things which makes any particular piece of research "scientific"
> versus "humanistic". How data are disseminated is another question. In
> the article that started this discussion, for example, the issues wasn't
> that the guy didn't put his data on the web, it's that he fabricated the
> results and then lied about it. If he'd put the fabricated data on the
> web, no one would have been better off.

Can you record your own voice speaking Bardi such that everybody here
would be convinced that it's a recording of a native speaker?


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX