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

On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> Trust me, in physics the experimentalists take exactly the same attitude.
> And in geology, too, as you can see from McPhee's _Basin and Range_.
> The prejudice may be summed up thus:  Theoreticians are people who will
> cheerfully sacrifice inconvenient facts to beautiful theories, and may
> even develop meta-theories about the unimportance of counterexamples.
>
> The contrary prejudice, of course, emanates from theorists: that
> experimentalist (or fieldworkers, as the case may be) are
> anti-intellectual stamp-collecting baboons, who wouldn't know
> a decent generalization if it fell out of a tree on their heads.
I stand somewhere in the middle, I guess.  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).  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.  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.

Marcus