Re truth in science

Tue Mar 11 16:33:33 UTC 2014

On this topic, there is a truly wonderful (for me, life-changing) series consisting of 24 thirty-minute lectures by physicist and philosopher Steven L. Goldman at Lehigh University. The series is titled "Science wars: what scientists know and how they know it". It is available on DVD from the company "The great courses". 

Starting with Plato, Goldman goes over the history of physics and philosophy by focusing on a single question: to what extent and in what ways does what scientists say about the world tell us about "reality out there" and to what extent does it reflect human conceptualization. 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Daniel Everett" <DEVERETT at bentley.edu> 
To: "Edith A Moravcsik" <edith at UWM.EDU> 
Cc: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG 
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 11:01:24 AM 
Subject: Re: Re truth in science 

One reason I loved reading his biography. Great quote. 

Dan 

Sent from my iPhone 

On Mar 11, 2014, at 11:58, "Edith A Moravcsik" < edith at UWM.EDU > wrote: 

Danish physicist Niels Bohr said: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns only what we can SAY about nature." (emphasis original) 

From: "Plank" < Frans.Plank at UNI-KONSTANZ.DE > 
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG 
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 6:57:36 AM 
Subject: On Edge 

Dear typologists, 

typology is about linguistic diversity and unity, right? I quote from memory, but I'm sure I've seen this claim made in many a textbook, sinngemaess. At any rate that, this is what your papers were expected to be about if they were to go into LT, because the mission statement of that journal wanted them both, diversity and/in relation to unity. But then, tempora mutantur, nosque mutamur in illis. Is this dual assignment water under the bridge, yesteryear's snow, old hat, passé? Has our professional remit been assuaged? Can we forget the unity half? So it indeed seems to the most complex and sophisticated minds. 

The annual question of Edge.org for 2014 was: 

WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? 

One of the candidates nominated for retirement -- alongside "The Theory of Everything", "Urvogel", "People Are Sheep", "Languages Conditioning Worldviews", "The Standard Approach to Meaning", "Culture" (retired twice), "Only Scientists Can Do Science", "Planck's Cynical View of Scientific Change", and some 170 other ideas (all at http://www.edge.org/annual-questions ) -- was "Universal Grammar". I'm copying this contribution in full below, in case you're not regular followers of Edge. (Edge ad speak about its business model: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." ) 

The sentiment here expressed seems to be gaining popularity. It is typically vented outside professional fora, and not only by outsiders who have heard the name Chomsky and otherwise know little about linguistics, but also by professionals keen on maximising impact, at the expense of having to somewhat overdo the rhetorics. 

But seriously, can anybody be confident that there are no universal constraints on how languages can vary from one another, and that this is a consensus to this effect among those scholars who ought to know best (typologists, naturally)? (Replace "languages" by "mental lexicons-and-grammars" if you're a mentalist or by "doculects" if you work with corpora.) Is it really anywhere close to the truth that "basically every proposed universal feature" has been empirically shown to be invalid through crosslinguistic research? (Which is different from not having found much support from acquisition research inspired by the Poverty of the Stimulus argument. But that does not seem what was at issue in the present Edge contribution.) Conceivably there is disagreement on whether linguistic universals are genetic/innate language-specific biases or have one or another other explanation. (Such as, perhaps most promising, being constraints on linguistic change, on transitions rather than on states.) But that wouldn't be denying that there ARE universals. 

Incidentally, Dan Everett is also on Edge. He wants to retire an idea seemingly similar: 'The idea that human behavior is guided by highly specific innate knowledge has passed its sell-by date. The interesting scientific questions do not encompass either "instinct" or "innate."' But I'm sure Dan wouldn't dream of retiring linguistic universals, such as these (almost) random examples: 

• Provided a language distinguishes grammatically relevant lexical classes ("parts of speech"), if there is one for property concepts, there will also be distinct classes prototypically accommodating thing/time-stable concepts and action/time-unstable concepts. 
• If words other than those designating action concepts inflect for tense, words designating action concepts will inflect for tense, too (notwithstanding the possibility of nominal tense). 
• If nouns inflect (most likely for number), verbs will inflect, too (most likely for person, number, tense). 
• Provided words designating property concepts are divided in their allegiance between object words and action words in the grammar of predication, then those designating human propensities will follow the model of action words and those designating materials will follow the model of object words. 
• Provided a language distinguishes main and dependent clauses, the morphosyntax and prosody of dependency will take predictable forms –– too complex to go into here: but it's all about deficits relative to main clauses. 
• Provided a language has numerals, if it has one for 9 it will also have ones for 1-8, etc. 
• Provided a language has numerals, the numeral system won't have 3, 7, 9, or 11 as a base or as one of its bases (and I won't enumerate the legitimate bases here: there are more than have sometimes been recognised: 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, 60 -- read it up in LT). 
• Provided a language has three series of numerals for (i) counting, (ii) quantifying, (iii) locating in an ordered sequence, the quantifying forms and/or their constructions won't be more complex than the others; if there are differences in complexity, they will be the other way round. 
• Syllable weight resides in the rhyme and cannot be contributed by the onset (or not exclusively -- if you insist, Dan). 

And so on and on and on. Are the valid/uninvalidated universals all trivial/superficial, with the interesting/profound ones all invalid? I'd say that depends on what sense is made of such descriptive generalisations. Universals aren't discovered at a glance and aren't self-explanatory: in-depth analysis and proper sense-making are integral parts of the typological enterprise together with the inductive generalising. (Since this seems so dear to the Edge author, I'm not really sure there are known languages which entirely fail to distinguish the lexical categories N and V, if properly analysed.) 

Obviously I'm not denying that many items documented in the Universals Archive ( http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/ ) are dubious or defunct, especially as I have debunked many myself. But I'd advise against pushing the baby over the edge and throwing it out with the bathwater. 

Innateness seems to be going through a bad patch in general: Allison Gopnik also wants it thrown out on Edge. Encouragingly, Steven Pinker only questions whether "Behavior = Genes + Environment". And anti-innateness, aka "Radical Behaviorism", is also up for retirement. 

Also on Edge, Ian McEwan questions the question (vindicating Hoelderlin, not on Edge: Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter): Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing! 

If you find the rhetorical questioning of the existence of universals a waste of time, we can perhaps still take inspiration from Edge and ask ourselves: Are there ideas in typology OTHER THAN universals which are ready for retirement? Your nominations, please! Expect restatements of LT's mission statement in due course. However, for the time being, unity is being kept along with diversity. 

Frans Plank 

PS: If you've been wondering, Planck's Cynical View of Scientific Change was as follows: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." I hate to unretire and out-Planck Planck, but I'm afraid that may be true of falsehoods, too. 

Sprachwissenschaft 
Universität Konstanz 
78457 Konstanz 
Germany 

Tel +49 (0)7531 88 2656 
Fax +49 (0)7531 88 4190 
eMail frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de 
http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/plank/ 

******************************************** 

Benjamin K. Bergen 

Associate Professor, Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego; Author, Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning 

Universal Grammar 

The world's languages differ to the point of inscrutability. Knowing the English word "duck" doesn't help you guess the French "canard" or Japanese "ahiru." But there are commonalities hidden beneath the superficial differences. For instance, human languages tend to have parts of speech (like nouns and verbs). They tend to have ways to embed propositions in other ones. ("John knows that Mary thinks that Paul embeds propositions in other ones.") And so on. But why? 
An influential and appealing explanation is known as Universal Grammar : core commonalities across languages exist because they are part of our genetic endowment. On this view, humans are born with an innate predisposition to develop languages with very specific properties. Infants expect to learn a language that has nouns and verbs, that has sentences with embedded propositions, and so on. 
This could explain not only why languages are similar but also what it is to be uniquely human and indeed how children acquire their native language. It may also seem intuitively plausible, especially to people who speak several languages: If English (and Spanish… and French!) have nouns and verbs, why wouldn't every language? To date, Universal Grammar remains one of the most visible products of the field of Linguistics—the one minimally counterintuitive bit that former students often retain from an introductory Linguistics class. 
But evidence has not been kind to Universal Grammar. Over the years, field linguists (they're like field biologists with really good microphones) have reported that languages are much more diverse than originally thought. Not all languages have nouns and verbs. Nor do all languages let you embed propositions in others. And so it has gone for basically every proposed universal linguistic feature. The empirical foundation has crumbled out from under Universal Grammar. We thought that there might be universals that all languages share and we sought to explain them on the basis of innate biases. But as the purportedly universal features have revealed themselves to be nothing of the sort, the need to explain them in categorical terms has evaporated. As a result, what can plausibly make up the content of Universal Grammar has become progressively more and more modest over time. At present, there's evidence that nothing but perhaps the most general computational principles are part of our innate language-specific human endowment. 
So it's time to retire Universal Grammar. It had a good run, but there's nothing much it can bring us now in terms of what we want to know about human language. It can't reveal much about how language develops in children—how they learn to articulate sounds, to infer the meanings of words, to put together words into sentences, to infer emotions and mental states from what people say, and so on. And the same is true for questions about how humans have evolved or how we differ from other animals. There are ways in which humans are unique in the animal kingdom and a science of language ought to be trying to understand these. But again Universal Grammar, gutted by evidence as it has been, will not help much. 
Of course, it remains important and interesting to ask what commonalities, superficial and substantial, tie together the world's languages. There may be hints there about how human language evolved and how it develops. But to ignore its diversity is to set aside the most informative dimension of language. 

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