Re: theory (was: Re: Greenberg's Word Order Universals)

> X-Accept-Language: en
> Date:         Fri, 15 Sep 2000 12:33:12 -0700
> From:         J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...>
>
> Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> > Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> >
> > > Never fear, your friendly neighbourhod theorist will tell you that the
> > > singular is the underlying form --- which he knows because he writes
> > > it as -plural --- and thus unmarked, so that the universal holds.
> >
> > Good ol' theorists. Always proving their theories by using the theories
> > in question.
>
> What's with all this bashing of theorists?  As a theorist myself, should I take
> offense at this?
Well, I know I committed a stereotype there, but I have in fact been
told very similar things when I tried asking some theorists why they
chose to describe certain phenomena in a specific way.

I'm all for building elegant, concise, parsimonious and beautiful
theories. And if you're doing mathematics, that's the end of it.

But if someone goes on to let their theory guide their analysis of
further data, and then claim that that analysis represents some sort
of fact, they tend to lose my sympathy and interest.

However, I don't think all theorists are like that.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)