attractions and distractions

[Emily M. Bender]

Dear Andrew (and others),

I think your advice to avoid attacking scholarly behavior
is sound, but I would like to add two things:

I think that what Bob (Borsley, that is) and Tibor are
suggesting is not that so much as a) finding points of
contact where the various theories all have something to
say, but take different approaches which make different
predictions, and going 'toe to toe' there, testing the
predictions and b) even in the absence of a competing
analysis of a particular point, using fora like published
reviews to comment on the substance of MP proposals.

The latter is necessary as a separate activity, I believe,
because the different approaches value different kinds
of practices, argumentation, and results.  At the moment, it
seems MP has the upper hand in defining for the field what
counts as 'interesting' and what kinds of research
methodologies are considered 'sound enough'.  I would
hope that if you read my review of _Step by Step_ (in Lingua),
it would come across as engaging in the debate on this
level, rather than, as you put it "tell[ing] them that they
are wrong and idiots and their theory is crap."

Emily