Experimental psychology as a model?

[Esa Itkonen]

Dear Dirk: It is interesting that you should mention the journals of experimental psychology as a model for linguists to imitate. Some of my best friends do experimental psycholinguistics, and for years I have been listening to what they have to say. Here it is, in a nutshell. Every major journal has its own very clearly defined profile. No psycholinguist who knows the ropes will ever submit an article to journal X that has not been calibrated to exactly meet the requirements of journal X. When they submit to journal Y, they recalibrate. Novices who do not know this, pay the price, but they learn quickly. This is the TRUTH, but there are always those who make anything to deny it. In this respect, I would say that the situation is better in linguistics.

You are of course right that different people may have different views about what it means to prove that A, rather B, is the case. This is true often but not always. Suppose someone says e.g. that analogical relations among a set of sentences cannot be formalized; and suppose, furthermore, that it IS formalized (i.e. it is not just the case that it can be formalized but that it IS formalized); then every sane person accepts this as a proof (cf. Michael Kac's review in Studies in Language, Vol. 32:4).

There are those who do not practice what they preach, and then there are those who do. When acting as a referee, I have always accepted generativist articles if (as is mostly the case) they are of high quality by their own standards. If you (whoever you may be) dislike my mentioning this elementary fact, it is not in my power to appease you.

Esa

  

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