36.1239, Disc: Adding Some Needed Nuance: A Reply to Bedley

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1239. Tue Apr 15 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1239, Disc: Adding Some Needed Nuance: A Reply to Bedley

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Joel Jenkins, Daniel Swanson, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Joel Jenkins <joel at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 15-Apr-2025
From: Ryan M. Nefdt, PhD [editors at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Adding Some Needed Nuance: A Reply to Bedley


Editor's Note: The following reply addresses content in the review for
The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics: A Contemporary Outlook
(Nefdt, 2024; Cambridge University Press) which can be read in its
entirety here: https://linguistlist.org/issues/36/243/.
As a writer of a monograph and a scholar in general, it is always
pleasing to see someone engage thoroughly with your work. This feeling
holds whether or not that person was particularly laudatory or
critical. In fact, critical reviews have immense merit. However, when
someone chooses to produce an unbalanced picture of your work,
emphasising its faults without so much as a glance at its potential
merits, then some nuance and balance needs to be restored. Thus, I’m
writing this review of the review, hoping to not only defend my book
but to also evince the balance and nuance which its target neglected.
In a recent review, Bedley lists a number of grievances with my new
book The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics: a contemporary outlook
(Cambridge University Press 2024). In fact, that’s really all he does.
Specifically, he lists grievances with some of the framing of the book
and its philosophy. He is rather silent on the main aims of the book,
such as providing a philosophy of linguistics, in an eclectic manner
hitherto unattempted. He very briefly and purely descriptively
mentions the pivotal chapters on syntax, pragmatics, and phonology. He
claims the chapter on syntax is “largely well executed” then
immediately gripes that a particular definition was used before it was
provided a few lines later.
But this chapter did so much more! It described and analysed not only
the core scientific claims of Minimalism in generative syntax but
found commonalities with dependency grammar, construction grammar, the
parallel architecture, head-driven phrase structure grammar and
model-theoretic approaches as well as lexical functional grammar. It
compared these frameworks in terms of questions of possible languages
without syntax and, more importantly, it asked what is the central
scientific project in syntactic theory. Many people might not agree
with my analysis or conclusions but surely a review of a book which
spends over a tenth of its words on a topic should receive more than a
nod and quibble?
Earlier on in the review he discusses the subsection of the
introduction I devote to formal approaches and finite state automata
(FSA). He states that “the question regarding what these “machines”
are goes overlooked”. Again, this is a short subsection of a chapter
that discussions formal approaches, social scientific approaches,
describes each chapter of the book and introduces my general view of
theoretical linguistics. And yet, I do discuss what are:
Every automaton is an accepting machine. It can be paired with a
particular formal grammar and language.
Furthermore, what it accepts are sequences of strings of a certain
complexity. (pg 11)
I compare them to phrase structure grammars, include a footnote on the
automata associated with those, and have a figure devoted to FSA!
Nevertheless, Bedley is correct that my critique of why more complex
grammars (like unrestricted Turing machines and the like) are
inadequate as grammars of nature language (and its cognition) does not
mention issues of computational tractability. I’ve written many times
on these issues and my worry was that including such material in such
a short subsection would lead to a perfunctory level description
(although I do mention computational intractability and parsing in FLT
on pg 30). Still, I concede that this is an omission and I should have
had the skill to do better there.
Then Bedley takes me to task for a throwaway comment about platonism
(which I gather is an important topic for him). He questions who the
“hard-line platonists” are that I claim would be satisfied with
linguistics if all the facts about formal languages were settled. He
then defends Katz and recommends his own work as a tonic. But perhaps
I didn’t mention the referents of my term because I was being
intentionally vague so as not to pick any individuals out? I wanted to
gesture at a possible position, i.e. someone who believes that
languages are abstract objects and linguistics is mathematics
simpliciter. Maybe no such individual exists. Again, this is Bedley’s
fourth paragraph on the introduction.
His comments on my second chapter are not entirely fair, in my view.
He describes me as saying that ontological debates are absent from
science. I do no such thing nor do I endorse the irrelevance of
ontology (in fact, that would denigrate much of my own work including
my first book, Nefdt (2023)). What I do say is the following:
It’s interesting to note that these ontological debates are largely
absent in other scientific domains. No one in the cognitive
neuroscience of memory asks how individual tokens or memories are
related to some platonistic concept of Memory, divorced from its
instantiations. I thank Wolfram Hinzen for this particular
observation. (pg 30)
If it wasn’t clear, this is a footnote. The important words are “these
ontological debates” referring to debates about the abstracta which
individual languages are meant to instantiate. I stand by the actual
meaning of the claim being made here. Again a few lines later, he
states that I hold that Michael Devitt’s position “lacks overt
ontological commitment” but Bedley’s fetish for footnotes disappears
here given that my claim is immediately linked to a numeral pointing
to a note about Devitt’s ontological baggage.
Bedley then goes on to bash my modal metaphysical scaffolding for the
question of what a possible human language is. He doesn’t discuss my
axioms or their plausibility but takes issue with my using S5 and my
“loose” characterisations. While I agree that I could have been more
careful in places (even though I describe my account as “dipping my
feet into modal logic”, I do not agree that I needed to do a deep dive
into modal metaphysics. This is the case simply because that is not
the point of the chapter. So to say “[t]his is unusual for a purported
work of philosophical logic” is interesting since the work involves no
such purport. I actually state exactly this before supplementing my
use of the S5 system in accordance with my view.
We’ll skip over the details of my chapter on semantics, since Bedley
does, to focus on his issue with my naturalistic stance. In the
chapter, I suggest that there are two ways to do metasemantics, one is
via traditional metaphysics, and the other is via metascientific
reflection. Bedley considers the former to be “compulsory” and the
naturalism I endorse to be “anti-philosophical”. I can’t enter into a
debate about very different approaches to philosophy (and science)
here. I’ve advocated for scientific naturalism in other places (as has
Quine, Maddy, Ladyman, Ross, Machery, and many others) and indeed I
assumed it here. Perhaps my dismissal of abstract metaphysics was too
harsh or unfair for Bedley’s liking. I’ll own that. I’ll also own the
shorthand which Bedley considers conflation in my discussion of
meaning representations. But as the reader who made it this far might
have anticipated, his characterisation is far from charitable. In
fact, I clearly that “There are methodological issues such as whether
semantic value is best modelled as truth conditions, dynamic
context-change potentials, or numerical vectors representing
collocational data” (pg 84) prior to slipping into shorthand. So
attributing me with a view that confuses vectors (which are data
structures, as Bedley helpfully points out) with actual meanings is
not only unfair but misleading. Again, this is an area in which I have
notable publications.
He states that I make subword level semantics out to be a new trend.
Clearly my references from works published over thirty years ago are
not enough to dispel this impression. He then states “I would have
expected some of that history to be at least mentioned here” after
adding some references to earlier work. But again, in my Preface I
mentioned that I would not be directly engaging in historical
reflection except in specific cases. Bedley might think this case
called for it but since I never indicated that these issues were new
as he claims, I disagree.
This metareview is getting lengthy as Bedley’s mischaracterisations
and uncharitable readings seem too many to address. So I’ll mention
one more clear case and then conclude with my entreaty to readers of
his review and potential readers of my book.
In the computational linguistics chapter, again there is an argument
not discussed in the review, Bedley makes many accusations. He accuses
me of ‘commonly’ misunderstanding the black-box problem in NLP
(despite the fact that I have actually contributed to the literature),
infelicities, a typo, and who knows what else. But there’s a point at
which he claims that I use quantum mechanics as a foil to the
explanation-first approach of the philosophy of science and generative
linguistics. He then adds that my example is “somewhat self-defeating”
as one “might nonetheless aim for the ideal of explanation and
understanding, although one temporarily settles for shutting up and
calculating if that is all one can do.” Fair enough. But there is a
big controversy as to whether this was indeed the position or how
engineering successes were implicated in this history, Einstein versus
Bohr, Kuhn’s involvement etc. If only I had referenced some text that
discusses this or flagged these issues. Oh wait, I did both in a
footnote linked to the paragraph.
Bedley’s final evaluation of my book is unsurprisingly uncharitable
and yet he suggests that “[a]nother one hundred pages might have been
needed to rectify” many of the issues with pacing and pitch. This
reminds me of the joke describing disgruntled patrons of a restaurant
in the Catskill Mountains who complain that the food is horrible…and
in such small portions. It seems clear to me that Bedley did not like
the book and that, of course, is his right. However, using
mischaracterisaton and what seemed to be angry, misleading arguments
to push his personal dislike seems less appropriate (especially in
print). There were many things I could have done better than I did. I
agree that there were pacing issues and some topics might have needed
more attention (and others less). But I stand by my work and the
merits of offering a “song-bird’s eye view” of theoretical linguistics
with a particular philosophical lens. I hope that other readers can
find those merits should they choose to read the book.
Ryan M. Nefdt, PhD
University of Cape Town and University of Bristol

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Linguistic Theories




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List to support the student editors:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Elsevier Ltd http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1239
----------------------------------------------------------