Re: THEORY: OT Syntax (Was: Re: THEORY: phonemes and Optimality Theory tutorial)

John Cowan:
> On Sat, 18 Nov 2000, And Rosta wrote:
> > 'Thou shalt not kill' is a rule, but it is a constraint,
>
> Very well, but then what are we to do with this rule:
>
>         Actions which would normally be treated as "causing
>         accidental death" will, when committed during the
>         perpetration of a felony, be treated as "murder".
>
> (The "felony murder" rule.)  What kind of constraint is that?
> I suppose you can say that it constrains the behavior of
> prosecutors rather than of felons, but that seems rather
> upside down.
The point I meant to make was that constraints are one variety
of rules; rules are not necessarily procedural.

A subsidiary point I made was that procedural rules can be
recast as declarative constraints or principles. E.g. "if X
satisfies the criteria for Causing Accidental Death and if X
was committed during the perpetration of a felony, then X is
murder".

> > Not that I've anything against the idea of ranked constraints; I'm just
> > mystified at how this simple idea burgeoned into the huge industry that
> > is OT (in the USA). The obvious answer is sociopolitical, career-savvyness,
> > bandwagon joining, and then the natural tendency of graduate students to
> > continue doing what their teachers teach. But can such a huge academic
> > juggernaut have such a flimsy intellectual basis, in a discipline that is
> > fundamentally rational and quasiempirical?
>
> Umm, why not?
All those clever people, including some very clever ones?

> Consider Schoolman metaphysics.
What's that?

> Or not to be tendentious,
> the (false) flavor of Darwinism that talks of "survival of the fittest",
> but upon investigation implicitly defines fitness in terms of mere
> differential reproductive success, i.e. survival.
>
> The highly successful calculus was from its invention by Newtonleibnitz
> in the 17th C until the 19th C firmly planted on a foundation of
> absolute rubbish, quite rightly mocked by Bishop Berkeley thus:
>
>         And what are these same evanescent increments?  They are neither
>         finite quantities nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing.
>         May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?
I'm not sure these are analogous. Calculus worked. It might be a bit like
the phoneme, where at times there has been a lot of confusion about the
underlying principles, but broad success in applying the notion to
synchronic and diachronic analysis. As for "survival of the survivors",
as opposed to "survival of the optimally adapted", does that not still
give you a process of selection which, when coupled with variation,
serves to explain evolution?

--And.