"progress" in linguistics

[weismann]

Hello and many thanks for your reflections : it is an important synthesis
and truly I enjoyed it. Only one question: do you think that is it also
possible to introduce or to deep in Linguistics and Sciences of Language in
general a philosophical ( Plato, the Greeks, Ockham, etc, etc, Russell,
Wittgenstein...) background, context or plainly, a "Grund" or foundational
item?     Many thanks.       Yours,  Francis J. Weismann
weismann at fibertel.com.ar
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Givon" <tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
To: <FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu>
Sent: Saturday, April 06, 2002 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: "progress" in linguistics


> NOTE:
>        THESE REFLECTIONS HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY AN (ALAS BELATED)
>        READING OF ESA ITKONEN'S "A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS"
>        (1991; AMSTERDAM: J. BENJAMINS). OBVIOUSLY, I COULD NOT RECOMMEND
>        THE BOOK MORE ENTHUSIASTICALLY. IT IS A RARE TOUR DE FORCE. WHAT
>        FOLLOWS BEGAN AS COMMENTS DURING CORRESPONDENCE WITH ESA, WHO OF
>        COURSE BEARS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAY I CHOSE TO INTERPRET
>        HIS WORK. STILL, HE HAS MY THANKS.  TG
>
>
>
> Dear Esa,
>
> I have now made a brave if incomplete stab at both your Panini section &
> the conclusions in ch. 6 . Panini has always been a rough going for me,
> so I am thrilled at your determination & erudition in attempting to
> decipher it for ignorami like myself. I wouldn't have been able to do it
> on my own, not having enough patience (not to mention being burdened
> with an atavistic recoil from obscurantism...). But I think I got the
> point. Panini was just as sophisticated as any descriptive linguist of
> the 19th Cent. tradition (yes, that includes us).
>
> Having benefited so much from your tour-de-force of Panini, the Greeks &
> Hermann Paul, I still wonder about your conclusions (ch. 6), in
> particular the
> discussion of progress in science and progress in linguistics.
>
> Let me dispense with philosophy first. To my mind, Kuhn--and especially
> a radical interpretation of Kuhn that foregrounds scientific revolutions
> and downgrades 'normal science' (and makes a huge deal about the radical
> difference between those two phases of science)--is univeresally
> accepted neither in philosophy of science nor in many disciplines of
> science itself. Most 'real' scientists I talk to (mostly chemists and
> biologists) are much more conscious of the gradual nature of their
> disciplines, the slow accretion of factual, methodological and
> theoretical knowledge--even when great leaps occur, as they undeniably
> do. It is not an accident that in Biology, Kuhn was embraced only by a
> small tho media-savvy & articulate fringe of Marxist anti-graduality
> ideologists--indeed, to my thinking, anti-evolutionary ideologists--like
> Gould & Lewontin.
>
> It is not an accident either, I think, that in Linguistics Kuhn was
> embraced in by the Chomskians (and other self-perceived great
> revolutionaries...). And it is not an accident either that most of the
> overblown 'revolutionary
> science' examples cited by Kuhn (or the Chomskians) come from Physics,
> the most mathematics-dependent and the most deductively-driven of all
> sciences. But I suspect that even in physics, Kuhn's sweeping taxonomy
> of the two kinds of science represents a vastly over-blown
> generalization (certainly Lakatos does not accept such a clean
> taxonomy).  Tho admittedly, 'great revolutions' are easier to
> demonstrate in physics, and thus help sustain the revoilutionary
> philosophical biase.
>
> In linguistics, it is precisely the people who view deductivism &
> physics as the proper models for science that espouse the redical
> Kuhn-type view.
> Every time such a linguist farts, an inspired new theory is born. The
> philosophy of science articulated by pragmatists such as Peirce & Hanson
> does not make such a radical distinction between 'normal' and
> 'revolutionary' science. To begin with, it recognizes the fact-driven
> nature of hypothesis formation (not Popper's 'miracle'...)--tho not via
> induction but via abduction. What is more, such an approach also rejects
> the strict Positivist (Carnap, Russell) division between factual and
> theoretical statements. Rather, it concedes the theory-laden nature of
> 'facts' as well as their dynamic nature-- "Today's facts are yesterday's
> theories". Such an approach is much less likely to be swept off its feet
> by radical 'revolutions', not because it doesn't recognize the
> profundity of new abductive insights (hypotheses), but because it sees
> them as embedded in their historical & conteporary--often
> cross-disciplinary--context. The best way I can remind all of us of this
> is by quoting Peirce: "...Any philosophical doctrine that should be
> completely new could hardly fail to prove completely false..." (1940, p.
> 269).
>
> Now let us turn to your observation (ch. 6) that no 'real' progress
> occurred in linguistics between Panini and 1960. Let me first tell you
> why I am
> sympathetic to this rather sweeping generalization--up to a point. One
> thing that really marks the difference between a pre-scientific & a
> scientific investigation of the very same domain is a commitment to
> *methodology*. From such a commitment spring
> both new data-bases and new hypotheses. Here Panini represents the best
> of our
> "competence" methodology, thus the best of arm-chair linguistics, thus
> the best of
> Plato-cum- Aristotle. The facts in such a method are crystal clear and
> available to conscious reflection & analysis. Both intra-subject and
> inter-subject variation is ignored as either methodologically or
> theoretically irrelevant. The analytic method is heavily tipped toward
> deductivism. This is very similar to Physics and inorganic chemistry
> (you've seen one H2O atom, you've seen them all...).
>
> Now, descriptive grammarians from Panini to the end of the 18th Century
> (not 1960!) practiced this analytic "competence" methodology. They
> applied it to
> single languages, and the same *types* of facts were analyzed by the
> same types of method. Should one be surprised that at the lack of
> progress? Does one see much progress in philosophy over the same period?
> (or, for that matter, up to the present?)
>
> It is also good to remind ourselves that there was relatively  modest
> *theoretical* progress in Biology between Aristotle and (ca.) the 16th
> Century--and for very similar reasons. Yes, people did very useful
> *taxonomy* work, vastly enriching Aristotle's initial *scala natura*.
> But the general thrust of the Linnaean taxonomy--the apex of that
> protracted effort--was really not all that different from Aristotle's.
> No insightful new explanations were forthcoming (except for the
> tried-and-true God, or His Romantic stand-in, *force vitale*...).
>
> Eventually, the conflation of new methods cum new data-bases did occur,
> and that's what (I think) stimulated the eventual theoretical
> 'revolution' (Darwin): The fossil record and the mothods of Geology;
> Microbiology. But still, it was the methodological/factual expansion to
> detailed micro-variation within species (Galapagos!), on the one hand,
> and the link to adaptive *behavior* (the birth of what eventually became
> ethology), borrowed from another discipline (Political Economy; Darwin
> was reading Malthus & Adam Smith) that eventually prompted the new
> theoretical perspective(adaptive selection; competition for limited
> resources). And it was the later merger of chemistry and biology into
> molecular genetics that finally clinched the rest of the mechanism (the
> site of mutations, thus the source of spontaneous variation). So from my
> perspective, there was a profound thoretical stasis in biology
> bewtween 300BC and 1600AD.
>
> Now, why do I think scientific progress in linguistics started in the
> 19th century (rather than in the 1960s)? Two reasons, both of them well
> known to you.
>
> (i) UNIVERSALS: Till the 19th century, all Panini-type descriptive
> grammarians may have *assumed* universals implicitly, but they did not
> systematically study cross-language (typological) variation. They
> described single language but did not systematically compare them. The
> advent of the expanded data-base in the 19th Century, first within IE
> and soon across-families, provided a much more realistic factual
> benchmark for raising the question of universals anew--beyond Plato &
> Aristotle. Whether the early answers by Schleicher, von Humboldt,
> Bloomfield, Sapir/Whorf etc. were successful theoretical manoeuvers is
> almost beside the point. We did not had enough cumulation of data-base-
> cum-methodology to raise this issue seriously before the 19th century.
>
> (ii) DIACHRONY & FUNCTIONALISM: Until the 19th century, change was not
> the focus of the study. But it is precisely the expansion of the
> data-base-cum-methodology in the 19th century to *diachrony* that
> allowed Hermann Paul to make his inspired  generalizations about the
> real locus of the "causal nexus" in an explanatory theory of Language
> (rather than descriptions of languages)--the
> cognitively/adaptively-driven *process* of on-line communicative
> *behavior*. This is, surprisingly, a synchronic perspective, but a novel
> one--not of competence, but of *performance*. It is thus not only a
> shift from stasis to process thinking that made the difference, but also
> from competence-based to performance-based methodology. (In saying this,
> I merely interpreting your own description of H. Paul's work).
>
> Now, have we progressed far beyond H. Paul since 1960? First, I think
> Jespersen was already right there with Paul, I see no serious retreat
> (tho no advance
> either). Was Saussure progess? I don't see how. How about Bloomfield &
> Chomsky (or,
> for that matter, the European structuralist)? I am tempted to respond
> with
> *ditto* again. While one may have a lot of respect for Bloomfield the
> descriptivist (the Panin-type Bloomfield), as a theoretician he
> represents the same general retreat from H. Paul (his teacher?) as
> Saussure.
>
> So what actually started in the 1960s, really? Maybe two or three things
> that represent a more systematic--methodological--return to the
> prophetic vision of H. Paul. First, a much more broad-gaged expansion of
> the cross-linguistic (typological) data-base; albeit with an implicitly
> Bloomfieldian biase toward "inductive generalizations".
>
> Second, incompletely and haltingly, the realization that typology *is*
> diachrony, so that the locus of explanatory universals (Paul's "causal
> nexus") is in the process of grammaticalization. But here again, not
> many of the grammaticalization people understand the implications of
> this. Most of them are still looking for Bloomfieldian "inductive
> generalizations"--i.e. a taxonomy of grammaticalization types. And while
> "emergence" is a wonderful battle cry, it is not yet a clear research
> programme. And one of thesae days we'll need to moved on from
> methodology to theory. Taxonomy is very useful (hooray for Linnaeus!),
> but it is not exactly an ambitious theoretical agenda.
>
> Third, and again only dimly & haltingly, the beginning of some
> *cognitive* explanatory theory, at our interface with experimental
> psycholinguistics
> and neuroscience. This was, in essence, the third leg of Paul's research
> programme--the psychological "causal-nexus" hinging on processing
> *behavior* (performance). And in the 1960s it begand to--slowly,
> bashfully--rear its delicate head. But again, the majority of linguists
> who descroibe themselves as "cognitive" or "functionalist" are still
> dyed-in-the-wool *competence* philosophers. They expresse their
> Panini-like generalizations in cognitive-sounding terms. These terms
> have been either invented by inspired but still arm-chair linguist, or
> they are 100% isomorphic to structural categories and thus have no
> independent mtrhodological validity (except for our endearing faith in
> 100% iconicity...).
>
> So yes, the 1960s did represent a return to H. Paul's
> potentially-scientific theoretical agenda. But we are still at the very
> threshold of this process. Most
> of us are still--hopelessly, incurably--methodological humanists
> ('competence Platonists'?). Science is still an alien planet to us.
>
> So, has there been any progress? Will linguistics become, finally, a
> responsible science? Three moves could help us accelerate the shift from
> Panini/Chomsky:
>    (a) Interaction with neighboring adaptively-based disciplines
>        (like Darwin).
>    (b) Commitment to a performance-based empirical methodology
>        (like Labov; like psycholinguistics)
>    (c) The conflation of diachrony, universals & performance
>        (H. Paul's agenda).
>
>
> Best & many thanks,  TG