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

[Graham White]

There are some assumptions behind this discussion that I feel a bit 
unsure about.
i) That we can in principle find out the definition of the word 
"science", and that we can then use this definition to decide on what is 
a science and what isn't. Purely as a position in lexical semantics
I think this is a bit extreme.
ii) That all of the things which we call "science" have some common 
factor which makes them sciences. Sciences are very varied, and a lot of 
the recent literature in the philosophy of science points this out.
iii) That each science has a method, and that its method is what makes 
it into a science.

Now I'm very sceptical about all this. One of the reasons that I'm 
sceptical is that I've read quite a lot of philosophy of science. But 
the other reason that I'm sceptical is that I have a background in 
mathematics, and as far as I can see there's no such thing as a 
mathematical method: mathematicians can tell what is a valid proof 
(fairly reliably), but there aren't any regulated procedures for 
*finding* proofs or for finding out what are good things to try to prove 
(there are quite a lot of guidelines, but they are not regulative, and 
nobody teaches you them anyway: you become a mathematician by being 
exposed to a lot of mathematics). And, in that respect, mathematics is 
very different from more procedural sciences
like psychology or like the quantitative parts of sociology (as far as I 
can see, the sciences which are most procedurally regulated are those 
which want to enforce boundaries between themselves and sciences they 
consider to be "softer").

And obviously, within linguistics, people do things in all sorts of ways.

Graham White

On 23/03/10 13:03, Bruce Anderson wrote:
> Scientific methods attempt to extract rules (with predictive power) from
> observations; artistic methods attempt to apply rules (e.g. harmony,
> balance, abstract metaphor) that elicit a psychological response from
> people - typically admiration of beauty.
>
> With this distinction in mind, I would certainly call Linguistics far
> more of a science than an art. Without stretching definitions too far,
> one might refer to a specific utterance (e.g. a speech) {or even an
> entire language} as artistic - but the goal of Linguistics is to extract
> rules, structures, relationships, etc.
>
> (Does that make a generativist an artist? Not really - creating language
> structures from rigid rules fails the psychological response test.)
>
> Bruce Anderson
> Glendon College / York University
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Yuri Tambovtsev <yutamb at mail.ru>
> *To:* corpora at uib.no
> *Sent:* Tue, March 23, 2010 4:02:01 AM
> *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 <mailto:yutamb at mail.ru> or via the net. Be well,
> Yuri Tambovtsev
>
>
>
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