Re: Non-Explanations (was Moraic codes)

Jim Grossmann:
> Perhaps I can elucidate.   Consider Yehudi, the spirit who turns the light
> on and off when you open and close the refrigerator door.
>
> Now suppose that Yehudi is invoked to explain, not just refrigerator
> lighting, but everything else.
>
> How does language change?   Well, Yehudi goes into everyone's brain and
> changes the dialects in a way that reflects the separation of peoples in
> time, space, and society.   He's a spirit;  he can do that kind of thing.
>
> How did life begin?   Yehudi started it.   How did he do this?   Well, he's
> a spirit;   he can work miracles.
>
> How did the universe begin?   Well, Yehudi made it.  He's a spirit;   he
> make anything by sheer act of will.
>
> In Yehudi, we have an extreme example of a concept that purports to explain
> everything, but in reality explains nothing.   There is no theory of how
> Yehudi does his magic;   no scientific or rational explication of his
> purported powers.
It seems to me that even if Yehudi is used to explain only the fridge
light it is still a crap explanation, and it doesn't get that much
crapper when applied to everything else. The explanation is poor because
it has no predictive value and because we have no model of Yehudi's
caprices, and hence we can't understand why Yehudi does things this
way rather than that way.

John to Jim:
> Just so.
>
> I would also point to early (unconstrained) TG, whose problem was that
> everything could be explained by PS rules and transformations.
That was the criticism levelled at it by its critics, and it's true that
theories' own PR makes claims about the constrainedness of their
representational power, but in fact it is (IMO) probably the case that
pretty much any grammatical theory could come up with some analysis for
pretty much anything, but theories' analyses would differ as to how
'explanatory' (to use the technical linguistics term) the analyses are.
Explanatoriness is a slippery and complex thing, but if one interprets it
as 'insightful' one is not that far off the mark.

Maybe what you both mean that 'everything' includes what doesn't occur
as well as what does occur. In that case, I agree.

That is, it's right and proper that a theory of what the rules of
chess are covers every possible game of chess, but it is also desirable
that they cover no impossible pseudogames.

--And.

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