Jul 29, 2017 12:51 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-study-of-l...-a-science
EXCERPT: [...] Consciously contrived examples are nothing unusual in science. Frictionless planes, perfect spheres and ideal gases are tremendously useful abstractions from the messy reality of ‘stuff in the world’. However, it is unusual for a science to depend as heavily as linguistics does on intentional violations and bad examples – which, when it comes down to it, are only violations to the extent that our intuitive judgment says they are. From this perspective, the object of study in linguistics is not words, sentences or human communicative behaviour, the things we can see and hear – it’s an underlying system, an abstraction. The abstraction makes predictions, not necessarily about what people will say, but about what their intuitive judgments should be.
In Chomsky’s formulation, we are not just after a set of abstract rules that account for the things we can see and hear, but one that explains why they are the way they are. In the late 1970s, Chomsky began to refer to this method of enquiry as the ‘Galilean style’ – a term coined by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and popularised by the American physicist Steven Weinberg. For Galileo to get at the mathematical truths, he had to have the vision to abstract away from real-world effects that interfered with the expected observations. The laws governing falling bodies, for example, had to be considered apart from air resistance or friction. Air resistance is a fact of the real world, but the scientific view of the motion of falling bodies is the ‘truth’. As Weinberg put it in a 1976 paper, these are ‘abstract mathematical models of the Universe to which at least the physicists give a higher degree of reality than they accord the ordinary world of sensations’.
Chomsky’s Galilean vision was that our intuitive judgments about language stem from an innate language faculty, a universal grammar underlying the human capacity for language. His project is to determine the essential nature of that universal grammar – not the nature of language, but the nature of the human capacity for language. The distinction is a subtle one. Many linguists use the same kind of evidence (native speakers’ intuitive acceptability judgments) and the same methods (hypothesising structures and constraints that account for them), but simply want to discover the rules of particular languages, or to examine how different languages handle comparable phenomena. There are also many linguists who look at language use in the real world, and want to answer questions such as: what are the social factors that lead to the use of one linguistic formulation over another? What do children’s errors reveal about their knowledge of language? What does context contribute to the interpretation of linguistic meaning? All of this can be done without making any commitment to whether or not the descriptions are part of an innate universal grammar.
However, for Chomskyans there is a standing commitment to this idea. Universal grammar is not a hypothesis to be tested, but a foundational assumption....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-study-of-l...-a-science
EXCERPT: [...] Consciously contrived examples are nothing unusual in science. Frictionless planes, perfect spheres and ideal gases are tremendously useful abstractions from the messy reality of ‘stuff in the world’. However, it is unusual for a science to depend as heavily as linguistics does on intentional violations and bad examples – which, when it comes down to it, are only violations to the extent that our intuitive judgment says they are. From this perspective, the object of study in linguistics is not words, sentences or human communicative behaviour, the things we can see and hear – it’s an underlying system, an abstraction. The abstraction makes predictions, not necessarily about what people will say, but about what their intuitive judgments should be.
In Chomsky’s formulation, we are not just after a set of abstract rules that account for the things we can see and hear, but one that explains why they are the way they are. In the late 1970s, Chomsky began to refer to this method of enquiry as the ‘Galilean style’ – a term coined by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and popularised by the American physicist Steven Weinberg. For Galileo to get at the mathematical truths, he had to have the vision to abstract away from real-world effects that interfered with the expected observations. The laws governing falling bodies, for example, had to be considered apart from air resistance or friction. Air resistance is a fact of the real world, but the scientific view of the motion of falling bodies is the ‘truth’. As Weinberg put it in a 1976 paper, these are ‘abstract mathematical models of the Universe to which at least the physicists give a higher degree of reality than they accord the ordinary world of sensations’.
Chomsky’s Galilean vision was that our intuitive judgments about language stem from an innate language faculty, a universal grammar underlying the human capacity for language. His project is to determine the essential nature of that universal grammar – not the nature of language, but the nature of the human capacity for language. The distinction is a subtle one. Many linguists use the same kind of evidence (native speakers’ intuitive acceptability judgments) and the same methods (hypothesising structures and constraints that account for them), but simply want to discover the rules of particular languages, or to examine how different languages handle comparable phenomena. There are also many linguists who look at language use in the real world, and want to answer questions such as: what are the social factors that lead to the use of one linguistic formulation over another? What do children’s errors reveal about their knowledge of language? What does context contribute to the interpretation of linguistic meaning? All of this can be done without making any commitment to whether or not the descriptions are part of an innate universal grammar.
However, for Chomskyans there is a standing commitment to this idea. Universal grammar is not a hypothesis to be tested, but a foundational assumption....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-study-of-l...-a-science