Edge and universalism vs. particularism

Thu Mar 13 16:13:11 UTC 2014

Although the discussion seems to have died down a bit, I would still like to make two points in response to some of the posts:

1.
The question of truth and how we can know anything about anything has been a longstanding question of philosophy and science (which used to be one thing), and this question gave rise to what we think of as the scientific method. That is, it was philosophers, not scientists, who defined what science is, most recently Karl Popper. In the modern era we can start with David Hume, who tried to move away from the Aristotelian and theologically based science of his time, to try to create a "science of man". He importantly showed that induction is problematic, so we cannot say that an inductive generalization is absolutely true, only contingently true. Hume awoke Kant from his "dogmatic slumbers", as Kant put it, and Kant tried to define what is necessarily true and what isn't with his analytical/synthetic distinction and his a priori/a posteriori distinctions. Both men them influenced Mill and Pierce and many others down the line. Peirce (the founder of Pragmatism) was important for showing the role of abduction in hypothesis creation. William James was influenced by Hume, Kant, and Pierce, and he in turn influenced Wittgenstein, who, in his Tractatus, tried to use language to define the limits of our world, and defined necessary truth (tautology--showing that logic and math are all tautology), necessary untruth (contradiction), and possibility, what is in between (cf. Halliday's discussion of epistemic modality as the space between yes and no). Wittgenstein's work was hugely influential on the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle (who in turn were very influential on Bloomfield), and they tried to develop the idea of verification as truth. Karl Popper (also directly influenced by Hume in his discussion of induction) criticized this idea and said we cannot verify; the best we can do is falsify (a concept actually similar to Peirce's fallibilism): we come up with a hypothesis, test it, and if it isn't falsified, then it stands for the time being. So in this view nothing is true; all our facts are simply hypotheses we haven't proven wrong yet. There has been much criticism of Popper's view, but nowadays it has become something of a received view, so when asking if something is a scientific hypothesis or not, we ask if it is falsifiable (see for example Bernard Comrie's argument in Ch. 1 of his textbook that Chomsky's assumption of an innate UG is not a falsifiable hypothesis). Popper himself developed this because he was concerned to show that Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist "scientific materialism" (what Popper called "historicism") were not scientific, as he felt that they had been used to justify totalitarianism (he was a refugee from the Nazis).

2.
I did understand Christian's contribution in the way Matthew did, as saying that someone who believes in the uniqueness of languages is not being scientific.

In doing linguistics we have looked to similar things found in different languages (I think this is what is Christian meant by sinngemäß, not exact equivalents), and in order to talk about them, we have abstracted away from the details of the individual languages to some aspect that is thought to be comparable in the two or more languages. Greenberg and Haspelmath have taken semantics as that commonality, comparing, for example, property words in different languages as if they are the same because they represent the "same" property concept. We have also constructed implicational universals that take the form of material implications, e.g. if p then q, again based on abstract categories that may or may not actually be manifest in the languages being compared, such as "subject" (e.g. in "SOV") or "noun".

I have argued against this methodology, as I find it unscientific, because it ignores the empirical facts of the languages involved and also because the material implications do not imply causation or any sort of necessary relation (e.g. "If I am sending this message then I live in Singapore" is a true material implication), and are only false when the antecedent is true and the consequent is false (so if the antecedent and the consequent are both false, the statement is true). Statistical correlations also do not entail causation.

What I have advocated instead is looking at whether a language does or does not constrain the interpretation of some semantic domain, and if so, to what extent, but also in terms of what particular mechanism is used in the language to do so.

From doing this we can build up inductive generalizations, but as we have known since Hume's work, induction is problematic. We can only say what we have found so far in the small number of languages we have looked at and cannot predict what we will find in the next language we look at with certainty. That is, we can have de facto contingent universals, but not de jure universals.

Particularly if we understand language as an emergent phenomenon, then we wouldn't assume there are any de jure / a priori language universals, but only common reactions to communicative needs (unless you want to count the communicative needs as universals) often working with the same basic materials (e.g. constrained by the physical nature of our bodies and mode of production of speech). We should then look for the functional pressures that give rise to those commonalities.

There are many threads of linguistics, as hoped for by Franz Dotter, but this list is dominated by people who still believe in the Structuralist notion of language as a static system where all things hold together. I think this notion limits what we can do and leads to the sorts of problems Bill Croft has clearly pointed out. The kind of science we can do will be limited. If instead we take the emergent nature of language seriously, and see language not as a thing, but as a form of interactional behavior, then we need to approach it differently. And linguistics is then not the study of language, but the study of communicative behavior, or even more broadly, the study of intentional behavior. Linguistics is ontologically late as a science because communicative behavior is a complex phenomenon, not one where it is easy to isolate one or two variables and make predictive statements and falsifiable hypotheses. This is why it is good for linguistics that complexity science is on the rise. It is precisely things like communicative behavior and economic behavior that complexity science was created for, as it is designed to deal with many variables at the same time. I often hear people talk about the behavioral sciences as the "soft" sciences, compared to the "hard" sciences like physics. In fact the contrast is one of complex vs. simple, respectively. The following quote is from an article published in 1948 by a scientist. I post this in response to the posting that science is just about making mobile phones and the like.

“Impressive as the progress has been, science has by no means worked itself out of a job. It is soberly true that science has, to date, succeeded in solving a bewildering number of relatively easy problems, whereas the hard problems, and the ones with perhaps promise most for man’s future, lie ahead.
  “We must, therefore, stop thinking of science in terms of its spectacular successes in solving problems of simplicity. This means, among other things, that we must stop thinking of science in terms of gadgetry.”  Warren Weaver, “Science and complexity”, E:CO 6.3 (2004[1948]): 65-74, p. 73.

Randy
-----
Prof. Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （罗仁地）| Head, Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies | Nanyang Technological University
HSS-03-80, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332 | Tel: (65) 6592-1825 GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6795-6525 | http://sino-tibetan.net/rjlapolla/

On Mar 11, 2014, at 12:11 PM, William Croft wrote:

I didn't interpret Christian's statement this way at all. Particularism is an approach that argues that traits in different cultures (including language) are incommensurable, and is therefore strongly relativistic. It is predominant in cultural anthropology, and anthropologists I have spoken to use that specific term in that way.

Measuring diversity involves comparison, and comparison requires some degree of abstraction. That is how I understood Christian's characterization of seeking unity in diversity. To me, that is what is important in typology, exemplified for example in the implicational universal. This is the point that is often missed in discussions by non-typologists of "language universals", which frequently still assume that all such universals are (or must be) of the form "All languages have X".

Bill

On Mar 10, 2014, at 2:31 PM, Matthew Dryer <dryer at BUFFALO.EDU<mailto:dryer at BUFFALO.EDU>> wrote:

I have often commented informally to other linguists that there are two kinds of typologists, those who are more interested in the way that languages are similar to each other and those who are more interested in the way that languages are different from each other.  Of course, many typologists fall in between, but at least many typologists “lean” more in one direction.

Frans is quite right of course, that the mission of LT is both enterprises.  It may, however, be the case that there is some imbalance in papers in LT, an imbalance that may reflect current fashion.  I read Frans’ email as lamenting this imbalance rather than a suggestion that one enterprise is more important than the other.

But I see no need for chauvinistic comments like those of Christian. The idea that the search for diversity is somehow less scientific than the search for similarity is nonsense.  Science is the pursuit of truth, whether that truth involves diversity or similarity.  Some of the recent swing toward diversity is precisely a reaction to a tendency for linguists to make false claims about similarity and hence is precisely making linguistics more scientific.

It is also very misleading to suggest that the search for typological diversity is similar to the famous view of Joos.  For one thing, the very question of how languages might differ with respect to some phenomenon was not a question that interested Joos.  Second, the search for typological diversity is, contrary to what Christian suggests, impossible without abstraction.  One cannot recognize that some phenomenon in a given language is unusual without abstracting over phenomena across languages.

I see nothing in Frans’ comments to suggest he thinks the search for diversity is unscientific or that that search is not an essential part of typology.  I read his email as lamenting that there is too little attention paid to similarities.

Matthew
_______________________

Matthew Dryer, Professor
Department of Linguistics
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University at Buffalo (SUNY)
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Phone: 716-645-0122
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On 3/10/14 11:30 AM, Prof. Dr. Christian Lehmann wrote:
Dear Frans and fellow typologists,

I would like to second Frans in every respect. Some specialists have
been confounding the theory of universal grammar with linguistic
universal research. As far as empirically based knowledge goes, there is
no universal grammar. But since grammar does not exhaust language, that
does not entail that nothing about language is universal.

Apparently the history of our discipline is doomed to follow the motion
of a pendulum: after North American structuralism ("languages could
differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways" [Martin
Joos 1957]), we have had Generative Grammar ("Grammatica una et eadem
est secundum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter
varietur" [Roger Bacon 1244]); and apparently it is now time to swing
back to Joos. Wilhelm von Humboldt had already gotten it right: The task
of science in the field of the humanities, especially linguistics, is to
seek the unity in the diversity (thus, sinngemäß, Humboldt 1836). This
task requires abstraction. In some fundamental sense, linguistic
particularism alias relativism is a refusal of abstraction. Maybe some
colleages have to be asked to take our task as scientists more seriously.

Best wishes to all of you,
Christian Lehmann
-----
Prof. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
Universität
D - 99092 Erfurt

www.christianlehmann.eu<http://www.christianlehmann.eu>

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