I have a confession to make: I read (and even monetarily
support) Aeon. I know that they
publish junk (e.g. Evans has dumped junk on its pages twice), but I think the
idea of trying to popularize the recondite for the neophyte is a worthwhile
endeavor, even if it occasionally goes awry. I mention this because Aeon has done it again. The editors
clearly understand the value (measured in eyeballs) of a discussion of Chomsky.
And I was expecting the worst, another Evans like or Everett like or Wolfe like
effort. In other words I was looking forward to extreme irritation. To my
delight, I was disappointed. The piece (by Arika Okrent here)
got many things right. That said, it is not a good discussion and will leave
many more confused and misinformed than they should be. In what follows I will
try to outline my personal listing of pros and cons. I hope to be brief, but I
might fail.
The title of Okrent’s piece is the title of this post. The
question at issue is whether Chomskyan
linguistics is scientific. Other brands get mentioned in passing, but the piece
Is linguistics a science? (ILAS), is
clearly about the Chomsky view of GG (CGG). The subtitle sets (part of) the
tone:
Much of linguistic theory is so
abstract and dependent on theoretical apparatus that it might be impossible to
explain
ILAS goes into how CGG is “so abstract” and raises the
possibility that this level of abstraction “might” (hmm, weasel word warning!)
make it incomprehensible to the non-initiated, but it sadly fails to explain
how this distinguishes CGG from virtually any other inquiry of substance. And
by this I mean not merely other “sciences” but even biblical criticism,
anthropology, cliometrics, economics etc.
Any domain that is intensively studied will create technical,
theoretical and verbal barriers to entry by the unprepared. One of the jobs of
popularization is to allow non-experts to see through this surface dazzle to
the core ideas and results. Much as I admire the progress that CGG has made
over the last 60 years, I really doubt that its abstractions are that hard to
understand if patiently explained. I speak from experience here. I do this
regularly, and it’s really not that hard. So, contrary to ILAS, I am quite sure
that CGG can be explained to the interested layperson and the vapor of
obscurity that this whiff of ineffability spritzes into the discussion is a
major disservice. (Preview of things to come: in my next post I will try
(again) to lay out the basic logic of the CGG program in a way accessible (I
hope) to a Sci Am reader).
Actually, many parts of ILAS are much worse than this and
will not help in the important task of educating the non-professional. Here are
some not so random examples of what I mean: ILAS claims that CGG is a
“challenge to the scientific method itself” (2), suggests that it is
“unfalsifiable” Popper-wise (2), that it eschews “predictions” (3), that it
exploits a kind of data that is “unusual for a science” (5), suggests that it
is fundamentally unempirical in that “Universal grammar is not a hypothesis to
be tested, but a foundational assumption” (6), bemoans that many CGG claims are
“maddeningly circular or at the very least extremely confusing” (6), complains
that CGG “grew ever more technically complex,” with ever more “levels and
stipulations,” and ever more “theoretical machinery” (7), asserts that MP,
CGG’s latest theoretical turn confuses “even linguists” (including Okrent!)
(7), may be more philosophy than science (7), moots the possibility that “a
major part of it is unfalsifiable” and “elusive” and “so abstract and dependent
on theoretical apparatus that it might be impossible to explain” (7), moots
that possibility that CGG is post truth in that there is nothing (not much?)
“at stake in determining which way of looking at things is the right one” (8),
and ends with a parallel between Christian faith and CGG which are described as
“not designed for falsification” (9). These claims, spread as they are
throughout ILAS, leave the impression that CGG is some kind of weird semi
mystical view (part philosophy, part religion, part science), which is
justifiably confusing to the amateur and professional alike. Don’t get me
wrong: ILAS can appreciate why some might find this obscure hunt for the
unempirical abstract worth pursuing, but the “impulse” is clearly more Aquarian
(as in age of) than scientific. Here’s ILAS (8):
I must admit, there have been
times when, upon going through some highly technical, abstract analysis of why
some surface phenomena in two very different languages can be captured by a
single structural principle, I get a fuzzy, shimmering glimpse in my peripheral
vision of a deeper truth about language. Really, it’s not even a glimpse, but a
ghost of a leading edge of something that might come into view but could just
as easily not be there at all. I feel it, but I feel no impulse to pursue it. I
can understand, though, why there are people who do feel that impulse.
Did I say “semi mystical,” change that to pure Saint Teresa
of Avila. So there is a lot to dislike here.[1]
That said, ILAS also makes some decent points and in this it
rises way above the shoddiness of Evans, Everett and Wolfe. It correctly notes
that science is “a messy business” and relies on abstraction to civilize its
inquiries (1), it notes that “the human capacity for language,” not “the nature
of language,” is the focus of CGG inquiry (5), it notes the CGG focus on
linguistic creativity and the G knowledge it implicates (4), it observes the
importance of negative data (“intentional violations and bad examples”) to
plumbing the structure of the human capacity (5), it endorses a ling vs lang
distinction within linguistics (“There are many linguists who look at language
use in the real world … without making any commitment to whether or not the
descriptions are part of an innate universal grammar”) (6), it distinguishes Chomsky’s
conception of UG from a Greenberg version (sans naming the distinction in this
way) and notes that the term ‘universal
grammar’ can be confusing to many (6):
The phrase ‘universal grammar’
gives the impression that it’s going to be a list of features common to all
languages, statements such as ‘all languages have nouns’ or ‘all languages mark
verbs for tense’. But there are very few features shared by all known
languages, possibly none. The word ‘universal’ is misleading here too. It seems
like it should mean ‘found in all languages’ but in this case it means
something like ‘found in all humans’ (because otherwise they would not be able
to learn language as they do.)
And it also notes the virtues of abstraction (7).
Despite these virtues (and I really like that above explanation
of ‘universal grammar’), ILAS largely obfuscates the issues at hand and gravely
misrepresents CGG. There are several problems.
First, as noted, a central trope of ILAS is that CGG
represents a “challenge to the scientific method itself” (2). In fact one
problem ILAS sees with discussions of the Everett/Chomsky “debate” (yes, scare
quotes) is that it obscures this more fundamental fact. How is it a challenge?
Well, it is un-Popperian in that it insulates its core tenets (universal
grammar) from falsifiability (3).
There are two big problems with this description. First, so
far as I can see, there is nothing that ILAS says about CGG that could not be
said about the uncontroversial sciences (e.g. physics). They too are not Popper
falsifiable, as has been noted in the philo of science literature for well over
50 years now. Nobody who has looked at the Scientific Method thinks that
falsifiability accurately describes scientific practice.[2]
In fact, few think that either Falsificationism or the idea that science has a method are coherent positions. Lakatos
has made this point endlessly, Feyerabend more amusingly. And so has virtually
every other philosopher of science (Laudan, Cartwright, Hacking to name three
more). Adopting the Chomsky maxim that if a methodological dictum fails to
apply to physics then it is not reasonable to hold linguistics to its standard,
we can conclude that ILAS’s observation that certain CGG tenets are falsifiable
(even if this is so) is not a problem peculiar to CGG. ILAS’s suggestion that
it is is thus unfortunate.
Second, as Lakatos in particular has noted (but Quine also
made his reputation on this, stealing the Duhem thesis), central cores of
scientific programs are never easily directly
empirically testable. Many linking hypotheses are required which can usually be
adjusted to fend off recalcitrant data.
This is no less true in physics than in linguistics. So, having cores that are very hard to test
directly is not unique to CGG.
Lastly, being hard to test and being unempirical are not
quite the same thing. Here’s what I mean. Take the claim that humans have a
species specific dedicated capacity to acquire natural languages. This claim
rests on trivial observations (e.g. we humans learn French, dogs (smart as they
are) don’t!). That this involves Gs in some way is trivially attested by the
fact of linguistic creativity (the capacity to use and understand novel
sentences). That it is a species capacity is obvious to any parent of any
child. These are empirical truisms
and so well grounded in fact that disputing their accuracy is silly. The
question is not (and never has been) whether
humans have these capacities, but what the fine structure of these capacities
is. In this sense, CGG is not a theory, anymore than MP is. It is a
project resting on trivially true facts. Of course, any specification of the capacity commits empirical and theoretical
hostages and linguists have developed methods and arguments and data to test
them. But we don’t “test” whether FL/UG exists because it is trivially obvious
that it does. Of course, humans are built for language like ants are built to
dead reckon or birds are built to fly or fish to swim. So the problem is not that this assumption is
insulated from test and thus holding it is unempirical
and unscientific. Rather this
assumption is not tested for the same reason that we don’t test the proposition
that the Atlantic Ocean exists. You’d be foolish to waste your time. So, CGG is a project, as Chomsky is noted as
saying, and the project has been successful as it has delivered various
theories concerning how the truism could be true, and these are tested every
day, in exactly the kinds of ways that other sciences test their claims. So,
contrary to ILAS, there is nothing novel in linguistic methodology. Period. The
questions being asked are (somewhat) novel, but the methods of investigation
are pure white bread.[3]
That ILAS suggests otherwise is both incorrect and a deep disservice.
Another central feature of ILAS is the idea that CGG has
been getting progressively more abstract, removed from facts, technical, and
stipulative. This is a version of the common theme that CGG is always changing
and getting more abstruse. Is ILAS pining for the simple days of LSLT and Syntactic Structures? Has Okrent read
these (I actually doubt it given that nobody under a certain age looks at these
anymore). At any rate, again, in this regard CGG is not different from any
other program of inquiry. Yes, complexity flourishes for the simple reason that
more complex issues are addressed. That’s what happens when there is progress.
However, ILAS suggests that contemporary complexity contrasts with the
simplicity of an earlier golden age, and this is incorrect. Again, let me
explain.
One of the hallmarks of successful inquiry is that it builds
on insights that came before. This is especially true in the sciences where
later work (e.g. Einstein) builds on early work (e.g. Newton). A mark of this
is that newer theories are expected to cover (more or less) the same territory
as previous ones. One way of doing this for newbies to have the oldsters as
limit cases (e.g. you get Newton from Einstein when speed of light is on the
low side). This is what makes scientific inquiry progressive (shoulders and
giants and all that). Well linguistics has this too (see here
for first of several posts illustrating this with a Whig History). Once one
removes the technicalia (important stuff btw), common themes emerge that have
been conserved through virtually every version of CGG accounts (constituency,
hierarchy, locality, non-local dependency, displacement) in virtually the same
way. So, contrary to the impression ILAS provides, CGG is not an ever more
complex blooming buzzing mass of obscurities. Or at least not more so than any
other progressive inquiry. There are technical changes galore as bounds of
empirical inquiry expand and earlier results are preserved largely intact in
subsequent theory. The suggestion that there is something particularly odd of
the way that this happens in CGG is just incorrect. And again, suggesting as
much is a real disservice and an obfuscation.
Let me end with one more point, one where I kinda like what
ILAS says, but not quite. It is hard to tell whether ILAS likes abstraction or
doesn’t. Does it obscure or clarify? Does it make empirical contact harder or
easier? I am not sure what ILAS
concludes, but the problem of abstraction seems contentious in the piece. It should not be. Let me end on that theme.
First, abstraction is required to get any inquiry off the
ground. Data is never unvarnished. But more importantly, only by abstracting
away from irrelevancies can phenomena be identified at all. ILAS notes this in
discussing friction and gravitational attraction. It’s true in linguistics too.
Everyone recognizes performance errors, most recognize that it is legit to
abstract away from memory limitations in studying the G aspects of linguistic
creativity. At any rate, we all do it, and not just in linguistics. What is
less appreciated I believe is that abstraction allows one to hone one’s
questions and make it possible to make contact with empirics. It was when we
moved away from sentences uttered to judgments about well formedness
investigated via differential acceptability that we were able to start finding
interesting Gish properties of native speakers. Looking at utterances in all
their gory detail, obscures what is going on. Just as with friction and
gravity. Abstraction does not make it
harder to find out what is going on, but easier.
A more contemporary example of this in linguistics is the
focus on Merge. This abstracts away from a whole lot of stuff. But, it also by
ignoring many other features of G rules (besides the capacity to endlessly
embed) allows for inquiry to focus on key features of G operations: they spawn
endlessly many hierarchically organized structures that allow for displacement,
reconstruction, etc. It also allows one
to raise in simplified form new possibilities (do Gs allow for SW movement? Is
inverse control/binding possible?). Abstraction need not make things more
obscure. Abstracting away from irrelevancies is required to gain insight. It
should be prized. ILAS fails to appreciate how CGG has progressed, in part, by honing sharper questions by
abstracting away from side issues. One would hope a popularization might do
this. ILAS did not. It made appreciating abstractions virtues harder to
discern.
One more point: it has been suggested to me that many of the
flaws I noted in ILAS were part of what made the piece publishable. In other
words, it’s the price of getting accepted.
This might be so. I really don’t know. But, it is also irrelevant. If
this is the price, then there are worse things than not getting published. This is especially so for popular science
pieces. The goal should be to faithfully reflect the main insights of what one
is writing about. The art is figuring out how to simplify without undue
distortion. ILAS does not meet this standard, I believe.
[1]
The CGG as mysticism meme goes back a long way. I believe that Hockett’s review
of Chomsky’s earliest work made similar
suggestions.
[2]
In fact, few nowadays are able to identify
a scientific method. Yes, there are
rules of thumb like think clearly, try hard, use data etc. But the days of
thinking that there is a method, even in the developed sciences, is gone.
