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So, I’m saying that a single datum (or the result of an experiment, if you will) is not enough to prove or doom a scientific theory, at least if standard scientific norms and practice are anything to go by. <br /><br />2) <i>If your data consistently disagree with theory, then the theory needs to be modified, constrained, or thrown out entirely. Period.</i><br /><br />Sure, but are you suggesting that there is anything in linguistics that comes close to the discrepancy between theory and data that has existed in physics since the early 80s? (Btw, I’m taking Rubin 1980 as a starting point, though the data were already recognised as problematic in the 60s). Physicists continue to assume the Standard Model is largely correct, and postulate a kludge (“dark matter”) for which the “evidence” is entirely theory-internal, akin to the post-Newtonian postulation of the aether. They may recognise that the Standard Model needs to be revised but, if they haven’t "thrown out the theory entirely" after 50+ years of failing to find a solution, then I can’t help but feel that you are holding linguistics to a higher standard than the hard sciences.<br /><br />Which data can you point to that so decisively and “consistently disagree with" anything in GG? <br /><br />3) <i>Data are always "cleaned" using a variety of procedures--outlier trimming, standardization, manipulation checks, etc.--but these are done without the goal of obtaining a particular result.</i><br /><br />Again, an example of this happening in linguistics would help. In physics, vacuums and frictionless planes go far beyond “outlier trimming, standardization, manipulation checks” and, indeed, far beyond anything that I can think of in linguistics, since the “arcane” examples you disparage have actually been uttered in the real world.<br /><br />4) Can we agree that your characterisation of Chomsky as always having had "a tough time dealing with data" was inaccurate?<br /><br />OK, so much for keeping it short...doonyakkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02672078319967509135noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-91092659913136057952017-01-30T08:03:05.486-08:002017-01-30T08:03:05.486-08:00@Tim Hunter: Well, when my colleagues in psycholog...@Tim Hunter: Well, when my colleagues in psychology give people (say) passages to remember, they have to be remarkably specific about how they selected those passages, etc., and they typically have to argue that the results they've obtained are not specific to those particular passages. Now, something similar does happen in corpus linguistics and the like, but it's generally pretty clear that judgments of competence/acceptability are not as universal as they seem. (I do agree that acceptability judgments are what matter.)<br /><br />@doonyakka: I'm not sure what you mean by "individual" data--I didn't use the word. If you mean "one single experiment" then you're right, but that's not what anyone means by "adjudicated by data." If your data consistently disagree with theory, then the theory needs to be modified, constrained, or thrown out entirely. Period.<br /><br />As for what you mean "abstract[ing] away from the noise of the unanalysed mass of data," it depends on what you mean. Data are always "cleaned" using a variety of procedures--outlier trimming, standardization, manipulation checks, etc.--but these are done *without the goal of obtaining a particular result.* If you are throwing out data *because* they don't agree with a theory, then it's not clear to me why you bothered collecting the data in the first place; it's something like cargo-cult science. (As for your comments about the Standard Model, it was pretty clear by at least the late 90s that the model needed to be revised; by the 2000s, the need was so well-accepted that it was showing up in Scientific American and Wikipedia.) I nvere said that "big data" was necessarily useful, though obviously it can be.<br /><br />@Omer: There's a lot more to neuroscience than p-values (which I acknowledge are at best highly dubious and at worst actively misleading and destructive).<br /><br />@davidadger Thanks; I"ll read the Lobina paper.<br /><br />Steven P.https://www.blogger.com/profile/16074887598246037628noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-60665856052362304302017-01-30T00:29:32.761-08:002017-01-30T00:29:32.761-08:00@StevenP: I think your your reading of generative ...@StevenP: I think your your reading of generative linguistics and your characterisation of the standard view in science more generally are both way off. Open up any issue of NLLT, Syntax, LI, etc and you'll find systematically collected data where the data collection methodology is appropriate to the data (usually judgment tasks, sometimes formal experimental work), and use of these data for development of theories. But the theories, in generative linguistics as in science more generally are not theories of the data. They are theories of the principles and laws of some aspect of the natural world (galaxies, ecosystems, vision, language,...). The data, together with an interpretation emerging from an analysis of that data (whether statistical or not), provides evidence for one theory or other of the relevant aspect of the world. That Chomsky quote you used simply states that providing summaries of data isn't engaging in the whole of the scientific enterprise and makes the further claim that that is true of `behavioural science'. That latter claim probably too strong, depending on what one characterizes as `behavioural science' - there's clearly good theoretical work in various aspects of psychology grounded in theory - but the point is fairly straightforward. <br /><br />On recursion, I'd recommend Lobina's 2014 `what linguists are talking about when talking about ...'. I don't dispute that the field as a whole has not been confused about this concept until recently (indeed, I think that one good effect of Everett's work is to force us to bring some clarity to this issue), but I think Chomsky himself has been pretty consistent (I spent a long time reading all of this stuff while preparing that response to Vyvyan Evans a while back and, on this matter, Chomsky has been remarkably consistent, with hardly any terminological slips over half a century of writing on the topic).davidadgerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00821774928618824698noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-17327887593852713202017-01-28T14:26:01.504-08:002017-01-28T14:26:01.504-08:00Another dimension of this is that unlike neuroscie...Another dimension of this is that unlike neuroscientists, many linguists are completely immersed in data (when they are working on their native language), or can very easily get access to considerable amounts of it (by opening a book or looking at a webpage in a language other than their native one that they are working on); it's not until you're doing fieldwork on remote or marginalized languages or varieties without literatures that getting data becomes a problem. So the arcane examples that figure in the literature are like peaks in a landscape that linguists know pretty well.<br /><br />The lower areas of which have for centuries (actually millenia) been the subject of traditional descriptive work as found in pedagogical grammars and philological handbooks, which many linguists spend significant parts of their adolescence studying (Icelandic, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Hebrew, etc etc).<br /><br />That's the history, but now, the advent of computing technology, large corpora etc makes something like Alex's vision above much more amenable to realization than it used to be, so I expect that this will start happening to an increasing degree, and indeed already goes on to some extent in LFG & HPSG.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-84184612759530637402017-01-28T10:23:41.982-08:002017-01-28T10:23:41.982-08:00@doonyakka: I also like how linguistics is said to...@doonyakka: I also like how linguistics is said to rely on "arcane" data – and this is supposed to contrast with the "sciences as traditionally understood." Because, you know, everyone can recreate the conditions in the Large Hadron Collider in their own backyard. Nothing "arcane" about that.<br /><br />This also misses (by a mile) the fact that the more arcane the linguistic data, the cleaner the experiment. That's because, if there are still robust judgments on this arcane data, there is little to no chance that those judgments come from rote learning or prior exposure. Hence those judgments are much more likely to be clean probes into the nature of linguistic knowledge. Insert your own analogies about creating artificial (near-)vacuum conditions for physics experiments, etc. etc.<br /><br />I suspect the previous commenter is equating "sciences as traditionally understood" with large quantities of datas, statistical significance metrics, and p-values – a false equivalence if I've ever seen one.<br /><br />Omerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06157677977442589563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-70517621400911947362017-01-28T10:06:58.981-08:002017-01-28T10:06:58.981-08:00KoL is intended for a general audience, as is your...KoL is intended for a general audience, as is your other source, <i>Science of Language</i>. If you look at Chomsky's technical publications - to pick one at random, his <a href="http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/On_WH-Movement.pdf" rel="nofollow">On WH-movement</a> - they are replete with crucial examples, systematically contrasted and elucidated. Literally hundreds of them, in a 50-something page paper.<br /><br />That said, the quality of a research paper isn't necessarily related to the amount of data it adduces, as demonstrated by countless, pointless Big Data publications. A mass of unanalysed data is scientifically worthless.<br /><br />Your claim that scientific truth is traditionally adjucated on the basis of individual data is simply false. When Chomsky says that Mendel and Galileo had the right idea because they abstracted away from the noise of the unanalysed mass of data, he is accurately describing the methodology of some of history's greatest scientists. In contrast, if what you are claiming were true, the Standard Model would have been abandoned in around 1980, when it started to become clear that 90-99% of the universe's predicted mass is unaccounted for, undetectable. There is hardly a more stark conflict between theory and data in any of the sciences, yet theory prevails.<br /><br />Finally, I don't think linguists need to be taking any methodological cues from neuroscience, which is a bastion of inflated claims and false promises. <a href="http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268" rel="nofollow">Very recent work</a> suggests that the field's approach to data itself is misguided and, yes, unscientific.doonyakkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02672078319967509135noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-64204615968346356242017-01-28T07:47:06.277-08:002017-01-28T07:47:06.277-08:00I didn't suggest that Chomsky or anyone else d...I didn't suggest that Chomsky or anyone else defines recursion as Merge, but only that Merge is recursive. Recursion simply describes a function that effectively enumerates a set. Such functions that allow for embedding are an interesting subset, but also produce non-embedding structures. I couldn't follow the rest.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06409248369107264434noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-76386980020907304402017-01-28T00:30:02.903-08:002017-01-28T00:30:02.903-08:00But one can imagine an alternate universe in which...But one can imagine an alternate universe in which generative grammmarians actually wrote generative grammars and systematically evaluated the predictions of the models by sampling from the grammars and testing the accuracy of the predictions by acceptability judgments or ambiguity, or by looking at the coverage of the grammar over some set of examples. This would allow a more systematic and quantitative comparison of different proposed grammars, and grammatical theories.<br /><br />(Without going down the Penn treebank route).<br /><br />We can start to see glimmers of how this might develop now, with various example sets, with collected acceptability judgments. Alex Clarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04634767958690153584noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-67041891791356916602017-01-27T22:55:16.140-08:002017-01-27T22:55:16.140-08:00Steven P. wrote: Certainly there are examples, typ...Steven P. wrote: <i>Certainly there are examples, typically grounded in fairly arcane sentences, but these are more like anecdotal evidence than data; they can provide existence proofs and the like, but there's nothing systematic about their collection, selection, or use.</i><br /><br />Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "but there's nothing systematic about their collection, selection, or use"?<br /><br />The way in which Chomsky selected the sentences discussed in KoL (or anywhere else) is, I would think, roughly the same way that any scientist selects the stimuli for their experiments. It is certainly not systematic in the sense that there is no recipe for designing the next "killer experiment"; there is a systematicity required when it gets down to the specifics of designing the appropriate manipulations and controls and so on, but that's there in KoL in the form of minimal pairs (and "minimal 2x2 quadruplets", etc.).<br /><br />I think it's misleading to speak of the sentences being collected. What was collected were acceptability judgements, reported by an asterisk or absence-of-asterisk in front of each of the stimuli sentences.Tim Hunterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11810503425508055407noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-11445276279704126242017-01-27T17:11:33.056-08:002017-01-27T17:11:33.056-08:00Well, let me preface this by saying that I'm a...Well, let me preface this by saying that I'm approaching this issue from the sciences, specifically neuroscience; perhaps the meaning of "data" is different in a field like linguistics. That said, a few points: <br /><br />If you read, say, <i>Knowledge of Language</i>, the absence of empirical data is quite striking; it's very different from what a scientific book would do. Certainly there are examples, typically grounded in fairly arcane sentences, but these are more like anecdotal evidence than data; they can provide existence proofs and the like, but there's nothing systematic about their collection, selection, or use.<br /><br />If you look instead at the works of Tomasello, Gleitman, Clarke, Bates, etc., you'll see a lot more empirical evidence. Couple that with Chomsky's attitude towards Everett, not to mention his treatment of statistical learning, and you have a field, or at least a professor's perspective, that's very different from the sciences as traditionally understood.<br /><br />Heck, you can even listen to Chomsky himself. In the widely panned book <i>Science of Language</i>, he writes "Behavioural science is...keeping to the<br />data; so you just know that there’s something wrong with it." When discussing Mendel in the Atlantic, he notes that Mendel "thr[ew] out a lot of the data that didn't work," and "he did the right thing. He let the theory guide the data." To be blunt, there is no point in collecting data if you are going to let the theory dictate what data you are going to accept. <br /><br />Or at least that's the view in the sciences; again, linguistics might be different. As Feynman put it, if your idea disagrees with data, it is wrong, and if it can't be tested by data or experiment, it isn't science. Linguistics might have a different view from the sciences--that's a question worth exploring.<br /><br />As for recursion--well, it's uncontroversial that Chomsky doesn't mean what "recursion" means anywhere else. For more on the confusion, etc., see <a href="http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2014/01/more-on-recursion.html" rel="nofollow">this thread</a> which helps explain why Tecumseh Fitch didn't seem to know what he was looking for. Thus "[t]he empirical question remaining for the generativist" is not "why Merge...does not issue in embedding structures," but whether something like Merge exists at all. String-production is pretty feeble on its own, and probably isn't specific to language as normally understood.Steven P.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05451796204888100102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-47260280963746937082017-01-27T05:16:36.142-08:002017-01-27T05:16:36.142-08:00All of these criticisms are rather odd - the first...All of these criticisms are rather odd - the first one being fallacious, at best - but the last one is particularly baffling, given that Chomsky's insights, from the very beginning, have been motivated by a wealth of interesting facts about data that no one had even noticed, let alone tried to explain, before. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that, were it not for those data (coupled with Chomsky's original and incisive reflection on them), linguistics would be a very different beast than it is today. This may be for better or worse, depending on your theoretical/sociopolitical biases and commitments, but it's not a result of any supposed aversion to data from Chomsky, because there's no such thing.doonyakkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02672078319967509135noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-44775845563874914562017-01-27T03:50:03.557-08:002017-01-27T03:50:03.557-08:00Apologies, this is John Collins using someone else...Apologies, this is John Collins using someone else's account:)BouncingBeingshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17498038129621453171noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-89945134189656510142017-01-27T03:47:57.657-08:002017-01-27T03:47:57.657-08:00Chomsky has been consistent about the recursive de...Chomsky has been consistent about the recursive device, viz., Merge, which allows for embedding, but also produces strings (to trun to a weak generative perspective) that do not feature embedding in the relevant sense. If DE is right, the empirical question remaining for the generativist is why Merge in this case does not issue in embedding structures. I fail to see any confusion, vagueness, or equivocation here. BouncingBeingshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17498038129621453171noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-44055990983598696432017-01-26T20:51:39.918-08:002017-01-26T20:51:39.918-08:00So what exactly kind of data are you complaining a...So what exactly kind of data are you complaining about Chomsky not being able to deal with? There are many kinds of data, so more specificity in the criticism would be helpful.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-49891410140652589662017-01-26T06:19:34.589-08:002017-01-26T06:19:34.589-08:00I am very sympathetic to the hypothesis that the w...I am very sympathetic to the hypothesis that the way people generalize from language data (language learning) is going to directly shape linguistic typology. Frankly, to me it seems like the kind of thing that has to be true just as it is that language must be compositional in order to account for its capacity to construct longer and longer sound-meaning pairs without limit.<br /><br />Alex's example of L0, L1, L2, and L* is a simple case so let's examine it a bit. To clarify some earlier discussion, we are not interested in the fact that for each language there is some algorithm that can learn it, but we are interested in an algorithm that can learn each language L in a set of languages from positive examples of L. In this particular case, we are interested in an algorithm that could learn L0, L1 and L* but not L2.<br /><br />It is interesting to observe that L0, L1, and L* are all Strictly 2-Local but L2 is not. One informal definition of SL2 languages is this: A language L is SL2 if there is a finite set of 2-long substrings S such that if every word in L is broken down into its 2-long substrings, each of these occurs in S.<br /><br />There are well-understood algorithms which learn the Strictly 2-Local languages. Essentially, these learners work by scanning the words they observe for the 2-long substrings. Since for any given SL2 language the set S is finite, with enough input data, eventually the learner sees them all. It is an interesting to me that such an algorithm, given the word forms in L2 will immediately generalize to the language L*.<br /><br />So imagine we discovered another planet whose inhabitants speak L0, L1 and L* but not L2, L3, and so on. Is this fact significant and if so how would we account for it? I personally find the hypothesis that speakers generalize in the way SL2 learners do to be compelling. One reason is that SL2 languages are not just some obscure class of formal languages. Their computational nature reflects a particularly simple kind of memory (essentially Markovian). (BTW, this simple kind of memory is NOT reflected in the size of the automata, but in other kinds of language-theoretic and algebraic properties.) But another reason it would be compelling is because I wouldn't know of any competing hypothesis!<br /><br />So to sum up this exercise, the observed language typology on this imaginary planet can lead us to hypothesize a specific explanatory learning algorithm that has clear psychological implications for the nature of memory insofar as it relates to language.<br /><br />Of course none of this addresses Alex's question, which is why "should" language learning explain typological gaps, given that so many other factors may do so as well. To me it comes down to the standard scientific excursus of examining concrete hypotheses. If there are competing concrete hypotheses for a typological gap we should investigae areas where they make different predictions. And as Greg points out, most of the time we don't even have concrete hypotheses for the gap. So researchers wave a learning IOU, or a minumum description length IOU, or something else.<br /><br />In my opinion, the most concrete learning algorithms which come closest to being able to explain the prenominal possessive type gap are ones developed by Alex and his colleagues for learning subclasses of context-free and context-sensitive languages. These are based on the various notions of "substitutability". One under-appreciated aspect of this line of research, and of grammatical inference more generally, is that the analytical techniques clearly identify finite sets of strings, contexts, or whatever from which the algorithm makes the inductive leap from finitely many strings to infinitely many. Whatever the analogs are in the real world of those finite sets---and some infinite sets which contain those finite sets---are predicted to be gaps if these learning algorithms are hypothesized to underlie the way humans generalize from their linguistic experience.<br />Jeff Heinzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11948399309596507711noreply@blogger.com