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

At 2:50 pm -0700 15/9/00, SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY wrote:
[....]
>
>I stand somewhere in the middle, I guess.
I guess I'm somwhere around there also.

>Some theorists make me laugh
>hysterically at times (Chomsky, Kayne, and Baker come to mind -- though
>Kayne isn't as bad as the other two).
Actually it's not so much the theorists that make me laugh as their
self-styled followers who idolize their favorite theorist, while often only
half-understanding the theory.

>On the other hand, I sometimes feel
>like slapping some sense into fieldworkers who reject a theory that works
>on innumerable cases across many languages, just because of a couple
>counter-examples.
Quite - one should be looking at the counter-examples to see why there are
apparent counter examples.

>All a counter-example means (if there are only a few of
>them), is that the full system is not completely understood yet -- hardly
>a surprise.
Quite - and I don't suppose a _full_ system will ever be _completely_
understood.  But this argument between theorists and empiricists has been
been going on for more than two & half thousand years at least in the west
- and maybe longer in other cultures.  We read much the same arguments in
the writing of the 'philosophoi' of 6th & 5th cent. BC Greece.

IMHO no human theory in any of the sciences are ever likely to be full &
complete; counter examples will keep on occuring.  We have to examine the
counter examples: some may be found not, in fact, to be counter examples
because other, previously overlooked, factors have been taken into account,
but these examples give us better understanding of the theory; some may be
found to be valid and cause us to modify the theory thus, we hope, making
the theory "truer"; other may provide such overwhelmingly counter-evidence
that the theory cannot be modified without collapsing complete - in this
case we must abandon the theory & come up with a better on (one is reminded
here how, eventually, scientists had to abandon the phlogiston theory).

If I have not misunderstood the ancients, this is the process of dialectic
and, hopefully, leads us towards a truer understanding.

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At 1:09 am -0400 16/9/00, Roger Mills wrote:
[....]
>In the early-mid 60s, in the first flush of fame, Chomskians were in the
>habit of dismissing your 3 years of fieldwork in the Amazon with, "But
>that's trivial.  Now, in English...."
Yes, what's concerned me the Chomskians & the 'deep structure' brigade is
that all their theorizing seems to derive from English.  Now if we all have
the deep structure within us, then _in theory_ it doesn't matter what
language we start from.  But it seems to me that to test the theory we
ought to assume that, maybe, there is no 'deep structure' and that it might
be a good idea to start from a few other languages, especially non-IE ones,
to test the theory; thus IMHO the 3 years of fieldwork in the Amazon are
very important.

(SIL folks, especially, got dumped
>on.)  Attitude like that produced hard feelings at Michigan, home of Kenneth
>Pike......
That's the first time I recalling seeing Kenneth Pike's name on this list
since Mark Line ceased to contribute here.  It's made my day  :)

Ray.



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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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