Edge and universalism vs. particularism
Matthew Dryer
dryer at BUFFALO.EDU
Thu Mar 13 17:43:14 UTC 2014
It has become clear from an exchange of email I have had with Christian
that I did misinterpret what he was saying, for which I apologize,
Matthew
On 3/13/14 12:13 PM, Randy John LaPolla (Prof) wrote:
> 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
>>> 616 Baldy Hall
>>> University at Buffalo (SUNY)
>>> Buffalo NY 14260
>>> Phone: 716-645-0122
>>> FAX: 716-645-3825
>>> dryer at buffalo.edu <mailto:dryer at buffalo.edu>
>>>
>>> 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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