[Corpora-List] Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS?

[iain]

My understanding of science is that it is a process.

 

.         You make up and idea for how things are structured (the
hypothesis).

.         You devise an objective test in order to try and prove the idea
false.

.         If the test is passed then you are happier with your idea.

.         If not you rethink your idea

 

Corpus linguistics is all about experiments, so I think it reasonably
qualifies as science.

 

'Traditional'  linguistics (here I KNOW I'm going to be shot) - of the sort
based on intuitions and introspection is probably an art in that there were
no objective tests.

 

In all cases you can do bad science and of course introspection is where our
ideas come from.

 

I have no idea why you think that reconstructing a parent language is
required for linguistics to be a science.  I do not believe modern biology
is capable of constructing the first primordial microbe, given a monkey and
a fly, but that hardly makes it less of a science.

 

Iain

 

(Sorry Yuri - first time round I only sent it to you so you have 2 copies!)

 

From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of
Yuri Tambovtsev
Sent: 23 March 2010 08:02
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: [Corpora-List] Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS?

 

Dear Corpora colleagues, Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS? I
think the discussion about linguistics using either the scientific or
artistic methods, is quite interesting. Really, is it ARTS (the Humanities)
or Science. If we divide this man activity into Sciences and Arts, then
linguistics for the exception of phonetics is Arts. Can linguistics
reconstruct some parent language? We know that all the Romance languages
have the parent language, i.e. Latin. But can linguists reconstruct Latin on
the basis of Italian, Spanish, French and other Romance languages? The
answer is NO. If linguistics had been SCience, then it would have been
possible. But it is ARTS, thus it is impossible. Or am I mistaken? Looking
forward to hearing from you either directly yutamb at mail.ru or via the net.
Be well, Yuri Tambovtsev 

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