Methodological sadism

Methodological sadism (MS) is quite fashionable nowadays and nothing gets practitioners more excited than the possibility that someone somewhere is proposing something interesting (i.e. something that reaches beyond the sensory surface of things and that might possibly reveal some of the underlying mechanics of reality). You’ve all met people like this,[1] and one of their distinctive character traits is a certain (smug?) assurance that when it comes to the philosophy of science, they are on the side of the angels. They love to methodologically demarcate the boundaries of legitimate inquiry so as to protect the weak minded from fake science.

Of course, the standard demeanor of MSers is severe. Yes they are tough. But standards must be maintained lest we slide joyfully to our scientific perdition. Like I said, you’ve all met MSers. Nowadays, at least in my little domain of inquiry, they are the media stars and have done a pretty good job convincing the outside world (and some on the inside) that GG is dead and that there is really nothing special about the cognitive powers required for language. I think that this is deeply wrong, and will write another brief arguing as much in the next post. But for now, I want to, once again, offer some prophylaxis against the most rabid form of MS, falsification.  Here is a useful short antidote, a paper (which I will refer to as ‘AB’ (Adam Becker is author)) that touches all the right themes. Its main claim is that trying to demarcate science from non-science is a mugs game that relies on ignoring how real successful domains of inquiry have grown.

So what are the main themes?

First AB points out that SMers (my term not AB’s) adhere to a basic erroneous principle: “that a new theory shouldn’t invoke the undetectable” (2).[2] Why? Because this makes it “unfalsifiable.”  So, observability underlies falsifiability and both are used by “self-appointed guardian[s], who relish dismissing some of the more fanciful notions in physics, cosmology and quantum mechanics [and linguistics! NH] as just so many castles in the sky” in order to protect science from “from all manner of manifestly unscientific nonsense” (2).

There are ways of understanding falsifiability that seem unobjectionable, namely that theories that never can have observable consequences are thereby undesirable. Well, yeah. The problem is that this is a very low bar, and any stronger version that “turn[s] ingenuity into fact” must be “much more nuanced” (2). Why? Because falsifiability is hardly ever possible and observability is undefinable. Let’s consider both of these facts seriatim.

First falsifiability. This is impossible for scientific theories for the simple reason that any falsification can be patched up with the right ad hoc statement, leaving the rest of the theory the same. As AB puts it (correctly) (2):

Falsifiability doesn’t work as a blanket restriction in science for the simple reason that there are no genuinely falsifiable scientific theories. I can come up with a theory that makes a prediction that looks falsifiable, but when the data tell me it’s wrong, I can conjure some fresh ideas to plug the hole and save the theory.

Any linguist knows how true this is. Moreover, it is easier the less brittle a theory is, and our current theories tend to be very labile. You can bend them in many directions without ever hearing a creak let alone inducing a crack or a break. You loose nothing when adding a bespoke principle to explain recalcitrant data because the only thing there is to loose in doing this is explanatory power and there was not much of this to begin with in flexible theories. However, even with good theories that have some oomph, it is generally possible (I would say “always possible” but I am being mealy mouthed here) to plug the hole and carry on.  One of the virtues of AB is that it provides some nice historical examples of this happening. As AB notes, the history of science is full of them.

AB recounts the famous one where Uranus’ odd (apparently non Newtonian) orbit begats Neptune, which in turn begats Vulcan to explain Mercury’s perihelion which finally fails when General Relativity replaces Newton. AB notes that each historical move makes sense and that looking for Neptune (victory!) and looking for Vulcan (failure!) were both rational despite the different outcomes.  Of course, with hindsight, Neptune is a bold prediction that strengthens the theory and Vulcan turns out to have been just an unfortunate wrong turn. But Vulcan did not lead to people jumping the Newtonian ship. Rather “astronomers of the time collectively shrugged and moved on” (4). And rightly so. Do you really want to give up Newton just because Vulcan was impossible to spot? What then do you do with all the other stuff it does explain?

Note that this means that there is an asymmetry between potentially falsifying experiments that succeed and those that don’t. The former are declared as triumphs of the scientific will, while the latter are quietly shelved and de-emphasized (or, more accurately, added to the ledger of anomalies that a discipline collects as targets for yet unknown superior explanations yet to come). No reason to show these off in public and take the shine from the powerful rational methods of scientific inquiry.

Of course, one might eventually hit the jackpot and find the anomalies resolved with the right new theory. Mercury was a feather in General Relativity’s cap. And well it should have been, for it allowed us to dump Vulcan and replace it with a story that allowed us to also keep all the good parts of Newton. So yes exceptions prove the rule in the sense that Newtonian exceptions prove (justify) Relativity’s rules.

AB provides other examples, one of the best being Pauli’s proposal to save the Law of the Conservation of Energy via the neutrino. It took over 25 years to prove him right (it’s good to have descendants like Fermi who get interested in your ideas). But what is interesting is not merely the long wait time, but why it took so long: the neutrino had no properties at the time that Pauli proposed it that could have allowed it to be detected. So when Pauli proposed it, the theory was unfalsifiable because its basics were unobservable. But, as history shows, wait 25 years and who knows what unobservables might become detectable. As AB again, rightly, puts it (5):

It’s certainly true that observation plays a crucial role in science. But this doesn’t mean that scientific theories have to deal exclusively in observable things. For one, the line between the observable and unobservable is blurry – what was once ‘unobservable’ can become ‘observable’, as the neutrino shows. Sometimes, a theory that postulates the imperceptible has proven to be the right theory, and is accepted as correct long before anyone devises a way to see those things.

Not only is ‘observable’ irreparably vague, but MSers also often make a second more extreme demand concerning its applicability. They require theory to only postulate constructs with directly observable magnitudes. Laws of nature then simply relate “directly observable quantities” and make no reference “to anything unobservable at all” (6). This was essentially Mach’s views and, in hindsight, they served to hamstring scientific insight. For example, as AB notes, Mach opposed atomic theory as unscientific. Why? Well you cannot “see” atoms. Of course, as many pointed out, there is lots to be gained by postulating them (e.g. you can derive the principles of thermodynamics and explain Brownian motion). But this was not good enough for Mach, nor for current day MSers. So how did Mach’s views hold up? Well, it cost Walter Kaufman a Nobel Prize apparently and might have led to Boltzmann’s suicide, but aside from that it did not do any real damage because the scientific community largely ignored Mach’s injunctions.

But isn’t postulating unseen elements unscientific? Well no. Note: even if we all agree that theory must have discernible (aka observable) consequences so that it can be tested/verified, this does not imply that every part of the theory must invoke elements whose properties are directly observable. Of course, it is nice if one can do this. It is always nice to be able to measure. But the idea that the only thing worth doing is relating (perhaps statistically) the magnitudes of observable quantities is something that would sink our best sciences if implemented. And this is a good reason not to do it![3]

One can go further, and AB does. The notion of an observable is itself fundamentally obscure. It cannot mean, observable given “current” technology, for that is too strong. As the history of the neutrino “discovery” indicates, taking this position would have led away from the truth, not towards it. But it cannot mean “observable in principle” for this is irremediably vague. If we mean that it is not “logically possible” to observe what but contradictions will fail. If we mean given current technology or current theory it is too strong. So what then? AB, quotes Grover Maxwell as observing” “There is no a priori or philosophical criteria for separating the observable form the unobservable.” The best we can say is that theories with observable consequences are better situated than those without ceteris paribus. But what goes into the ceteris paribus determination is forever up for grabs, and subject to the inconclusive (yet critically important) vagaries of judgment. No method, just mucking around, always.

AB makes a last observation I’d like to highlight: unlike many, AB emphasizes that part of the scientific enterprise is building “sky-castles.” This is not a scientific aberration, nor an example of science misfiring, but part of the central enterprise. For the scientist (including the linguist see here) “[s]pinning new ideas about how the world could be – or in some cases, how the world definitely isn’t – is central to their work” (2). Explanation leans heavily on the modal ‘could’ in the quote. Not just what you see or mild extensions thereof, but what could be and couldn’t. That’s the stuff of understanding and as AB notes, again rightly, “[the] goal of scientific theory is to understand [my emphasis, NH] the nature of the world with increasing accuracy over time.”

Methodological sadists, if given power, would sink scientific inquiry. They would make it nearly impossible to uncover unobservable mechanisms for they are an inherent part of all decent explanation in the sciences. MSers undervalue explanation and hence distrust the speculation required to get any. As AB notes, their dicta are at odds with the history of science. They are also deeply obscure. So historically misguided and irredeemably obscure? Yes, but also sadistically useful. MSers sound tough minded (just the facts kinda people) but really they are hopeless romantics, stuck with a view of method and inquiry that successful inquiry has largely ignored, as linguists should as well, at least if they want to get anywhere.

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[1] Pullum, Haspelmath, Tomasello and Everett are prominent examples of such in my own little world.

[2] The strong form would say that no theory should, not only new ones. However, MSers generally aspire to be gatekeepers and, in practice, this means keeping out the new. Facing out, rather than in, also has one important advantage. It is pretty hard to argue that accepted results are suspect without making one’s methodological injunctions sound dumb (recall, that every modus ponens comes with an equally powerful modus tolens). Consequently, fire is reserved for the novel, which is always deemed to differ from the accepted in being methodologically deficient. Note that being methodologically deficient has its virtues in argument. It relieves the critic of actually having to go into details, of having to do the hard work of arguing against actual results. MSers generally paint with a broad methodological brush, and I would argue that this is the reason why.

[3] Linguists here should be thinking of those that take Greenberg universals to be the only kinds that are legit (e.g. the crowd in note 1). Why do this? Well because as MSers they demand that science eschew the unobservable. Greenberg universals just are estimates of co-occurrence (either categorical or probabilistic) among surface visible language properties. Chomsky universals are not, and this is why for MSers Chomsky Universals are verboten.

Is linguistics a science?

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.

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[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.

[3] John Collins has an exhaustive and definitive discussion of this point in his excellent book (here). Read it and then forget about methodological dualism evermore.

More on Falsification

To add fuel to the fire, here's a snippet from a larger piece on falsifiability from Sean Carroll (Cal Tech cosmologist). The whole post is here. I find lots to disagree with in the larger post, but I find the tone about Popper (or naive Popperians) quite congenial. Note his use of 'cudgel,' 'charge,' and the 'don't have to think too hard.' 

"The falsifiability question is a trickier one, to which I will not do justice here. It’s a charge that is frequently leveled against string theory and the multiverse, as you probably have heard. People who like to wield the falsifiability cudgel often cite Karl Popper, who purportedly solved the demarcation problem by stating that scientific theories are ones that could in principle be falsified. (Lenny Susskind calls these folks the “Popperazzi.”) It’s the kind of simple, robust, don’t-have-to-think-too-hard philosophy that even a scientist can get behind. Of course, string theory and the multiverse aren’t at all the kinds of things Popper had in mind when he criticized “unfalsifiable” ideas. His bugaboos were Marx’s theory of history, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Adlerian psychology. The problem with these theories, he (correctly) pointed out, was that they told stories that could be made to fit literally any collection of data. Not just “data we could realistically acquire,” but absolutely anything you could imagine happening in the world. That’s completely different from the examples of string theory or the multiverse, which clearly are saying something concrete about the world (the ultraviolet completion of quantum gravity, or conditions in the universe far outside our observable region), but to which we have no experimental access (or almost none). Of course, there’s also the issue that the demarcation problem is a lot trickier than naive Popperianism makes it out to be, but that’s another discussion. The right strategy, once again, is to look at what actual scientists would do or are doing. When faced with difficult problems concerning quantum gravity or the early universe, they follow precisely the outlined program: they invent hypotheses and try to see which one is the best explanation for the data. The fact that the data are relatively crude (the existence of gravity and gauge theory, the known cosmological parameters) doesn’t prevent it from being science."

Falsifiability

Minimalism induces falsifiability anxiety in otherwise unflappable people.  I noticed this while auditing a class here at the LSA summer institute (one of the undeniable perks of being on the faculty here): how could one show that Minimalism was false? Is there anything that would show that it is incorrect?  I’m not sure there is, but then I’m not sure that any interesting scientific proposal can be shown to be false. Let me explain.

Scientific theories are very complex objects. Even as regards more mature sciences like physics and chemistry, philosophers of science have long recognized that Popper’s simple version of falsificationism is an inadequate methodological credo. What makes theories hard to refute?  Well, mainly the fact that there is quite a distance between the central concepts that animate a theory, the particular models that incarnate them and the “facts” that test them. Lakatos talked about central belts versus auxilliary hypotheses (Cartwright, a favorite of mine on these topics has good descriptions of how elaborate the testing process in physics can be and how wide is the gap between theory and experiment see here), but now pretty much any account of how the rubber of theory hits the road of experiment highlights the subtle complexities that allow them to make contact. This said, scientists can and do find evidence against particular models (specific combos of theory, auxiliary hypotheses, and experimental set-ups), but how this bears on the higher level theory is a tricky affair precisely because it is never the theory of interest alone that confronts the empirical jury. In other words, when something goes wrong (i.e. when an experiment delivers up evidence that is contrary to the deductions of the model) it is almost always possible to save the day by tinkering with the auxiliary hypotheses (or the details of the experimental set-up or the right description of the “facts”) and leave the basic theory intact. 

The recent discovery of the Higg’s particle offers a fair illustration of this logic.  There was some discussion before the fact of where (i.e. which energy range) to look to find the Higg’s.  The one discovered was one in the lower possible energy ranges. Say the Cernistas had not found anything where they first looked. Would this have falsified the Standard Theory? Nope, there were a whole bunch of other candidates to explore (some at energies that the facility would have strained to achieve). And say that even these proved to be duds, what would have been the rational strategy?  Dump the Standard Theory and assume that it was completely off track?  Maybe for the young and the daring hoping to make their mark in the world, but my hunch is that this would have been chalked up as a puzzle to be explored and explained away until something better came along, rather than as an indication that the whole edifice is rotten and must be thrown out wholesale. Why? Because the reason that people adopt theories is that they do work, and the work that the Standard theory did, even had the Higg’s been left undiscovered, would still remain. Yes, there would be problems, and yes it would be nice to explain these “anomalies” away, but the theory would not have been dumped. There would likely have been ad hoc patches proposed to salve the disappointment and allow work to continue apace.  As Hilary Putnam once observed, ‘ad hoc’ does mean ‘to the point’ and a nice clean local fix would have served quite nicely, I am sure.

So does this mean that theories are not regulated by “the facts”? No. Modulo all the caveats about how facts need massaging to be relevant targets of explanation, empirical success of course plays a role, but the role is not that of falsification. Rather, the facts serve a useful function when they are recruited to distinguish otherwise viable alternatives.  And this is where falsificationism really misleads.  I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to take most of my concocted explanations seriously because they are so obviously inadequate from the get-go. In other words, a candidate theory’s main problem initially concerns not falsification but verification. The pressing and relevant question is not whether there is counter-evidence but whether there is any interesting evidence in its favor!  Most theories plop stillborn from the mind.  Only a few are worth taking seriously. What makes them worth taking seriously? There are interesting facts they would explain were they true (note the ‘interesting’ here: some facts really are more interesting than others, but this is for another time). The first part of any sane research strategy is to find places where the account works, for when one starts there are all too many indications of failure all too quickly and so one needs reasons for taking the hypothesis seriously and the most immediate concern is not whether there are problems with one’s account (of course there are) but what it would buy you were the theory (roughly) on the right track. So, the very first thing one does (again, if one is sane) is to find factual life support for one’s tender creation, nurturing it via verification, and looking for evidence in its favor. In other words, unless one is an enthusiastic masochist, the last thing one does in the initial stages of theory development is look for reasons to discard your newborn proposal. 

Does this mean that looking for contrary evidence is unimportant? No. It is important, but mainly in service of verification. Here’s what I mean. The best kind of evidence in favor of a proposal is the verification of a counter intuitive prediction (especially one that is problematic given current assumptions). So, for example, a very strong argument in favor of Copernicus’ account of a heliocentric solar system is that it predicts the possibility of retrograde planetary motion (viz. that planets rather than moving smoothly forward around the night sky would look like they reversed gear for a while before reversing gear again and moving forward). If Copernicus was right (as we now think he was) then were you to calculate planetary motion using Earth as the center then what you expect to find is the appearance of retrograde motion. Moreover, this motion would “disappear” once one did the calculations using the Sun as center.  So rather than being a problem as it was for the Ptolemaic conceptions, apparent (when viewed from Earth) retrograde planetary motion was predicted. This served to corral an otherwise rather unpleasant anomaly and so was strong evidence in favor of Copernicus’.

Other examples abound: bending light rays, perihelion of mercury, shrinking rulers and slowing clocks, quantum tunneling, “spooky” action at a distance (aka entanglement), the tides, colors in white light, backwards control (hehe!!) a.o.  So, yes looking for empirical trouble is part and parcel of the good theorists armamentarium but mainly in service of finding strong verification.  The strongest evidence in favor of an account lies with the surprising (counterintuitive) predictions that it makes, that turn out to hold. That’s the main reason to go falsificationist and chase potential heartbreak! It’s strategic: new theories need to gain a hearing and the best way to do this is to find a wild unexpected prediction that pans out. So, the smart theorist looks for ways to falsify her account in order to find those that pan out. In other words, the big game here is not the false results, but the predictions that work. If any do, then the theory has earned the right to be taken seriously and then the next stage of serious work begins.

With this as background, let’s return to minimalist syntax.

As with all other theory, minimalism has leading ideas and executions of such.  Chomsky likes to talk of the Minimalist Program. The way I see this is a series of basic conceptions (merge, Probe-Goal, phase locality, minimality, Extension, etc.) that can be packaged in different ways to produce varying minimalist theories or models (a personal favorite e.g.: one can think of control as a Probe-Goal effect with PRO the goal of a higher functional probe or one can think of PRO as the trace like residue of internal merge). These theories are then explored by finding how well they fit the “established” facts (e.g. re control: do they derive the distribution and interpretation of control sentences) and what novel predictions (the more surprising the better) they make (e.g. do they allow for the possibility of backwards control). Models will accrete successes and failures and will be judged over a certain period winning fans and detractors. The success of the program will be a function of the theoretical and empirical suasive powers of the particular theories. None of this is novel to linguistics, nor should it be.

How then does a theory fail, linguistic or otherwise? Actually, mainly by running out of steam. Boredom is more deadly than a couple of false data points. Theories can run out of explanatory steam or, worse, never really develop any.  Such theories and their attendant programs are abandoned. So there is something worse than being wrong, at least if you are a theory, and that’s being BORING! If right, this has a useful practical consequence: if correct, then the Minimalist Program has a very long and bright future, for boring it ain’t!