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

[chris brew]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 4:02 AM, Yuri Tambovtsev <yutamb at mail.ru> wrote:
> 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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>

This is a good question, but not one that can have a fully satisfying
answer. Personally, I want to extend the title "linguist" to everyone
who studies language in a serious way. Given that, I find myself
confronted with a bewildering range of approaches, and little
commonality between the activities of different kinds of linguist. The
range clearly includes things that could be seen as physics or
physiology, others that look more like philosophy, sociology, history,
geography, psychology, various flavors of biology, lots of computer
science, different kinds of pure and applied mathematics,
anthropology, cultural studies, and so on, even up to astrobiology and
cryptography. Some of these satisfy my internal gut feeling for what
sciences are like, others not so much. Even the ones that don't seem
especially scientific have a tendency to fit squarely into the German
term "Geisteswissenschaften". Literally, this means "sciences of the
spirit", in practice it corresponds to what the Anglo-Saxons tend to
call "Arts" or "Humanities". By this stage in my thinking I am
inclined to reject the dichotomy implied in the question.

I think Linguistics is a good example of why we should not worry too
much about whether things are sciences, and why we should worry more
about whether the work we are doing will make an important difference
to anything that we care about. The second question is quite
challenging enough.

Chris



-- 
 http://www.google.com/profiles/christopher.brew

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