Conservative dilemma

Larry Trask larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Mon Sep 6 12:57:53 UTC 1999


On Tue, 31 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> It appears that Larry Trask is much more balanced in the textbook
> he has written than he is in the discussions on email.

Curious, but it's true that, in writing my textbook, I went out of my
way to try to be fair and balanced.

> Here, it seems like pulling teeth to get him to regard
> proof as not definitionally related to the Comparative Method.

Really?  I don't recall ever saying anything about `proof' at all.

My view is that it is exceedingly difficult to prove anything at all.
As a rule, the best that we can hope for is to show that the evidence
for some conclusion is so overwhelming that rejection of that conclusion
is irrational.  And we can't even do that very often.

As for the comparative method (no capitals, please), it's the single
most valuable and reliable tool we have.  But it's not the only one.
I myself am a great fan of internal reconstruction, and I have often
expressed the hope that mathematical methods (especially probabilistic
ones) might be developed into useful tools.

> Yet he asserts that in his textbook he has done so.
> I have no reason to doubt his word, and accept it.
> I have not read his textbook, and am conversing with what
> he actually says here on the IE list.

Well, my textbook is in the public domain.

[ Moderator's comment:
  Highly unlikely--my copy bears a copyright notice, certainly.  I suspect that
  Larry means "is available to the general public".
  --rma ]

> So why the difficulties on email?

Beats me.

> Is there some felt need to defeat ANY notion that
> there might be ANY value in for example Greenberg's work?
> That is certainly what it appears to me to be.
> If so, it appears to be something political,
> because he has agreed in principle that
> Multilateral Comparison can be useful as a heuristic to
> generate hypotheses for further investigation by other means.
> (He now tells me he has said something like that in his
> textbook.)

You can find what I say on page 389.  A brief summary:

It is *possible* that multilateral comparison, skilfully pursued, might
be capable of throwing up interesting hypotheses for further
investigation by more rigorous methods.  But I do *not* believe that MC
is capable, all by itself, of establishing previously unknown genetic
groupings -- contra Greenberg, who obviously believes that it is.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk



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