An overdue remark on what linguistics needs

[Straight, H. Stephen]

I agree that observational deficiencies make it unfair to Ptolemy to call Chomskyan approaches Ptolemaic, which makes me wonder why you think Chomsky has more in common with Galileo, who also as you say made stunning observations.  OTOH, Galileo's insistence that orbits must be circular smacks of the same sort of a priori reasoning as Chomsky's insistence that the knowledge underlying language ability must be an abstract rule system ("competence") that language users deploy (in some never-described way) in both comprehension and production ("performance") and that emerges from an innate faculty ("universal grammar").  Despite innumerable terminological changes and constant tweaking, Chomskyan approaches (and many non-Chomskyan approaches) still adhere to this constellation of a priori assumptions (of the sort that have been called a "axioms", I believe, in some recent FUNKNET contributions).

H Stephen Straight 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Harvey [mailto:dharv at optusnet.com.au] 
Sent: Saturday 10 January 2009 12:36
To: Straight, H. Stephen
Cc: Salinas17 at aol.com; funknet at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: Re: An overdue remark on what linguistics needs

None of the parallels are exact of course, but Ptolemy at least attempted to make his theories consonant with observation. In this respect I think Chomsky has more in common with Galileo who made both stunning observations and theoretical contributions but couldn't seem to put the two together.

Davidd Harvey

> Straight, H. Stephen <straight at binghamton.edu> wrote:
> 
> Chomsky has more in common with Ptolemy (2nd century) than Galileo (17th 
> century).  Chomsky, while claiming to replace anti-psychological 
> "structuralism" with a "mind"-focused theory of language, in fact put 
> forward a model of language knowledge as a "grammar" with no (to date) 
> operationalizable relationship to either language comprehension or 
> language production and with only a circular (descriptive but not 
> explanatory) relationship to "grammaticality".  
> 
> The rules of a generative grammar have proven problematic for reasons 
> parallel to those of Ptolemy's heavenly epicycles.  The underlying 
> model--ethnocentricity in the case of Ptolemy, logicentricity in the 
> case of Chomsky--is a non-starter.  Linguistics owes to Chomsky and his 
> followers both its rise into the academic firmament and its having 
> become stuck there with no tie to earthly reality.  The only important 
> insights into language that have emerged in the last 50 years have 
> occurred in spite of or in opposition to Chomskyan theory.  
> 
> Linguistics lacks not only a Galileo or Kepler (17th century) but also a 
> Copernicus (16th century) and, arguably, has not yet even had a theorist 
> as prescient as Aristarchus of Samos (3rd century BC), "the first known 
> person to speculate that the Earth revolves around a stationary sun" 
> (Wikipedia).  FWIW, my candidate Aristarchian insight is a 
> corticocentric view of language, in which the neural subcomponents of 
> language processing, both receptive and expressive, are seen as separate 
> but interacting agents in the creation of linguistic percepts and 
> products, with no overarching "grammar" governing their interaction 
> beyond the brute and always conflict-ridden reality of their need to 
> interact effectively in physico-temporal reality.
> 
> H Stephen Straight
> Professor of Anthropology & of Linguistics |Ã'Â Binghamton University, 
> State University of New York 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu 
> [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of 
> dharv at mail.optusnet.com.au
> Sent: Monday 10 November 2008 02:09
> To: Salinas17 at aol.com; funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Concerning WALS - Bees, Bats, Butterflies
> 
> At 10:48 PM -0500 9/11/08, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> snip..
> 
> >  we need a Copernicus, not a Chomsky or a Greenberg.
> 
> A reminder that it was Kepler who formulated the planetary laws, and 
> a comment that Chomsky has in common with Galileo a 
> discipline-changing body of work (subsequently elevated into a theory 
> of everything). Both also had clashes with authority although of a 
> rather different kind. Maybe we haven't yet had our Darwin or 
> Einstein but to be a Galileo is not to be sniffed at.
> -- 
> David Harvey
> 60 Gipps Street
> Drummoyne NSW 2047
> Australia
> Tel: 61-2-9719-9170

David Harvey