Reply to carnie from LLJ

[Andrew Carnie]

Hi All,

I guess there is no point in arguing with polemics. So I won't respond to the
vast majority of this. The tenor of LLJ's message below simply proves my
original point. I could barely be bothered to read the thing (I did
read it) let alone try to evaluate if they have anything of importance to
say, the style is so utterly obnoxious. This was my original point about
honey and vinegar... take it or leave it -- it's your funeral.

However, I would like to clarify, as I did in my
last note to Ivan, that I should not have referred to the J & L book, in
my reference to nastiness, misinformation or bias. I should have only
referred to the article.  For this I apologize to Lappin & Johnson.

As to why their book (not the article) has never been responded to in
print. I can only assume it was because by 1999, when the book had been
published MP certainly wasn't using global economy constraints. And while
I haven't actually thought about the ontological status of phase theory,
it strikes me as being more like local trees and and local constraints
than like Local economy, and that work became popular in 1998-1999, right
when J&L was published.

Best,

AC

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Shalom Lappin wrote:

> We will pass over the offensive style and tone of Andrew Carnie's
> recent notes and limit ourselves to correcting the more obvious
> misrepresentations of our work with which his comments are replete.
> Johnson and Lappin (1997), "A Critique of the Minimalist Program",
> Linguistics and Philosophy, and Johnson and Lappin (1999), Local
> Constraints and Economy, CSLI, Stanford, are not polemical pieces
> but detailed critical studies of the Minimalist Program, primarily
> as it was presented in Chomsky (1995). There is not a trace of
> rancour in these publications. Instead, we did our best to
> accurately describe the defining assumptions and the primary claims
> of the MP, and to subject them to a thorough examination. We made
> every effort to formulate this model (program, assembly of ideas,
> or however one wishes to describe it) as generously as possible,
> frequently supplying what we took to be missing premises and
> reformulating questionable definitions in order to strengthen the
> proposal. After a careful consideration of the computational and
> formal properties of the MP (of that period) and an examination of
> the main empirical arguments in support of it we concluded that it
> was an untenable framework that had not been properly motivated.
>
> To the best of our knowledge, these arguments were never taken up in
> print. Most of the critical replies in NLLT to our Topic-Comment did
> not refer to this work but dealt only with the T-C piece and our
> subsequent reply. This is also true of Freidin and Vergnaud (2001),
> "Exquisite Connections: Some Remarks on the Revolution of Linguistic
> Theory", Lingua, which also addresses only our T-C note and discards
> the debate that followed in NLLT, as well as Johnson and Lappn
> (1997) and (1999).
>
> Our T-C piece and subsequent replies were indeed polemical, as this
> forum is intended to be. They were written after the extended absence
> of any discussion of what we took to be the deep foundational
> problems that we had identified. Our contributions to the debate
> were not "nasty", nor were they intended to give offence. They
> raised questions concerning the nature of scientific discourse
> in the field. We did not accuse the adherents of being "mindless drones"
> or "slaves" (Carnie's terms,not ours). We presented
> evidence for asserting that the transition from GB to the MP
> had been made rapidly and without the sort of detailed examination
> of the relative advantages of the two theories that one would
> expect in the case of a major theory change. This evidence
> consisted in a comparison of the percentage of syntax pieces
> in major linguistics journals that were formulated within GB at
> the beginning of the 1990's with the percentage of MP-inspired
> syntax papers in the same journals at the end of the 1990's. We
> found a move from approximately 75% in GB mode to approximately
> 75% in MP orientation in less than ten years. Most strikingly, we
> did not find a single article or monograph that provided a
> systematic argument for abandoning GB and its core theoretical
> notions of government, theta-theory, Case theory, DS/SS, etc. in
> favour of the MP, which discards all of these elements. This led
> us to the conclusion of unmotivated theory change that we
> presented in the context of the NLLT debate. So far neither Carnie
> nor anyone else has said anything of substance to challenge this
> conclusion. It is understandable that one might feel uncomfortable
> or embarrassed by these facts, but to point them out is not "nasty"
> or "insulting". It is a legitimate part of inquiry into the way in
> which theory change occurs within our field. If we are wrong in
> either our empirical observations or the conclusions that we draw
> from them, then the reasonable response is to show us where we
> have gone wrong. Unfortunately, this is not how the debate has
> been conducted until now.
>
> Rather than addressing the substantive issues raised in the
> NLLT debate, Carnie returns to the question of whether the move
> to the MP was actually a paradigm change or simply a natural
> progression within the P&P framework. Two of the MP respondents
> in the NLLT debate, Juan Uriagareka and Ian Roberts, strongly
> endorsed the paradigm change view of the MP, with Roberts
> going so far as to characterize it as a new mode of explanation
> in linguistics. Eric Reuland dissented, adopting Carnie's
> incremental revision approach. The other two participants did not
> address the issue directly. As far as we can see, there is no
> real point at issue in the choice of terminology here. Regardless
> of whether one regards the MP as a paradigm change or an
> incremental revision of the P&P assumptions underlying GB, it is
> clearly a fairly radical departure from the latter theory, given
> that it dispenses with most of its architecture (levels of
> representation and constraints defining those levels) and
> introduces either global or local economy conditions
> (transderivational constraints). It also postulates a (vague)
> notion of grammar as a "perfect computational system" and the
> related (exceedingly vague) idea of "virtual conceptual necessity",
> both of which are frequently invoked to justify the machinery of
> the theory. We discuss all of these concepts in considerable detail
> in both our technical work and within the NLLT. None of our main
> concerns with them have been answered. We invite readers of this
> list to revisit the NLLT debate to reach their own conclusions on
> this matter. Of course we could have missed something that appeared
> recently, and, if this is the case, we would be interested in hearing
> about it.
>
> We invoked the term "postmodernist", which Carnie is so fond of
> brandishing as an ironic self-ascribed epithet, when discussing
> the metaphorical use of terms from physics in some MP publications,
> particularly Uriagereka's. We had in mind his penchant for
> expressions like "entropy" and "event horizon ". We attempted to
> make sense of this use of "entropy" in one of our replies in the
> NLLT debate, but without apparent success. In fact, as we showed
> and Uriagerka seemed to concede, the principes which he based on
> this notion of entropy turned out to predict exactly the
> opposite of what they were intended to. In using the term
> “postmodernist” we were referring to Sokal and Bricmont's
> (1999) masterful study of the peculiar insistence of postmodernist
> cultural theorists on using terminology from physics and
> mathematics in their work without providing any sense of how they
> intended this terminology to be interpreted. Nothing that we have
> seen since the NLLT debate was published has persuaded us that this
> reference is inappropriate.
>
> Carnie informs us that the adherents of the MP were well aware
> of the issues that we raised in our L&P article and our monograph,
> and they were attempting to address them. This is interesting and
> important news. Why weren't these efforts published? Where is the
> record of critical examination of these problems within the MP
> literature? Are we alone in having missed it?  Was our monograph
> an exercise in redundancy?  More seriously, where are the
> solutions to these problems? Collins (1996) and Yang (1996) did
> indeed propose substituting local for global economy conditions.
> We discuss these suggestions in detail in a chapter of our
> monograph, where we argue that both proposals are computationally
> problematic and empirically unmotivated. Specifically, they do not
> appear to allow for a coherent integrated economy metric in which
> all the local economy conditions are consistently applied to a
> derivation to yield a single economy value. We point out numerous
> other difficulties with these proposals that we will pass over
> here. Readers are invited to consult the book for the relevant
> arguments.
>
> Oddly, in his first note Carnie tells us "Any good scientist
> attempts to be aware of the real problems in their own work,
> even if they choose to temporarily ignore them for practical
> reasons. The MP world doesn't need HPSG critics, it has its
> own. What it needs are solutions to those problems." This is a
> remarkable assertion. It appears to deny the desirability of
> criticism from non-adherents and limit their role to offering
> fixes for the MP's difficulties. Chomsky has frequently pointed
> out the importance of evaluating criticism solely on the basis
> of its merits and not its source. Surely discussion of a
> theorie’s flaws is not a privilege enjoyed only by its advocates.
> If MP theorists are not inclined to be receptive to critical
> comment coming from outside the confines of their assumptions,
> as Carnie suggests, then this would indicate that there is
> indeed a serious problem in the way in which scientific
> debate is conducted within the field, and this is, of course,
> precisely the point that we were trying to make in our NLLT
> pieces.
>
> Finally, it was not our intention, either in our technical work
> or in the NLLT debate, to promote one particular theoretical
> paradigm over another. We were concerned to examine the foundations
> of an influential theory which has been shaping work in the theory
> of grammar for the past fifteen years. Any model that purports to
> offer a serious framework for describing and explaining
> the facts of natural language should be subjected to rigorous
> scrutiny on a continuing basis. In our view the dominance of tribal
> theoretical wars has rendered linguistics an increasingly barren
> field over the past several decades. Theories are instruments of
> explanation, not religious affiliations. Our focus should be not
> on advancing the hegemony of a particular paradigm banner but
> arriving at the best possible account of the properties of natural
> language. This is, after all, what linguistics is supposed to be
> about.
>
>        Shalom Lappin, Robert Levine, and David Johnson
>
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	/ \			Andrew Carnie, Ph.D.
       /   \	  		Assoc. Professor of Linguistics
     	  / \    		Department of Linguistics
     	 /   \			Douglass 200E, University of Arizona
    	    / \			Tucson, AZ 85721
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				Tel: (520) 621 2802  Cell: (520) 971 1166
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