To answer the original question. Melbourne has a degree in ‘Ufology’. While some colleges in the UK have degrees in ‘parapsychology’ (ghost busting).
Have you ever disagreed with somebody, but not thought that they were confused?
I have no idea what you are talking about. (You didn’t define those terms.)
I don’t think that you understood what I meant, but I also don’t think that it is your fault. I don’t think that I explained my argument well enough, so I will try to do that right here.
I didn’t mean that the mainstream linguists treat speakers like we say that the mainstream economists treat actors, in a confused and psuedo-empirical way. I meant that they treat the natural languages like that. They see the natural languages as the ultimate givens, and go from there, just like the astronomers see the movements of the planets, asteroids, and so on, as the ultimate givens, and go from there.
We can see that attitude in the fact that the mainstream linguists often say something like that no language is better than any other language, and that saying that a part of a language used to be better, or even saying that it used to be worse, is just the idle, confused talk of laymen. They say that it doesn’t make sense to say that our language is better or worse than any other language, or even better or worse than any other possible language, simply because languages are just adjusted to our way of life, nothing more, nothing less. The “primitive” language of a group of hunter-gatherers isn’t any less sophisticated than that of businessmen in a developed country; they are just suited to different purposes; they just developed differently for different ways of living. We in fact might have a tiny fraction of the amount of categories that they do for plants and animals, because we don’t care about it, where they do, because they are hunter-gatherers, where a huge part of their way of life is distinguishing between different plants and animals. Their language is suited to hunter-gathering, and our language is suited to other things. Neither is better; neither is worse. They are just there. We can’t criticize them, just like we can’t say whether the orbit of a planet is “correct” or not. They are just given to us. They are unquestionable, and are the foundation of our science.
Okay, well, let’s see what that means.
Which is exactly what I think the problem is.
They use text from natural languages as the data to develop their theories, but doing that is sterile. Text from natural languages are just history. Just like in economics, you need the theory before you can interpret the history. Everything that Ludwig von Mises said in Human Action about economics applies to linguistics. We need a theory, which we get “a priori”, before we can interpret history, which, for economics, are prices, business cycles, and so on, and, for linguistics, are natural languages.
I don’t see how this follows from anything else that you said.
I don’t know where that is supposed to fit into your argument against me.
I still stand by my 99%, since everything that even resembles real economics in the main stream is usually methodologically wrong, defined crazy and used to come to ridiculous and unsupportable conclusions that anyone with a brain and eyes could see (except for University graduates, because they are trained to be ignorant).
Modern ‘higher learning’ is a joke. You’re better off going to Barnes and Noble and talking to people on blogs.
Ufology, parapsychology, and other quack sciences like cryptozoology don’t conform to my caveat: there needs to be a consensus among thinkers that the field should be taken seriously.
P.S. I seriously don’t believe Cultural Studies, or any offshoot of postmodernism, was ever wholly-accepted by a consensus of thinkers in a multidisciplinary sense, and that’s long before joke articles were submitted to trendy pomo journals. Chomsky fueded with these fools decades ago, for instance.
Chomsky is bogus, too.
Are you talking about his linguistics?
I’m talking about his everything, baby.
Well of course. Let’s hear your argument against his linguistics.
His whole theory is built on syntax; language isn’t syntax, it’s semantics. He also has wonky views on evolution which seem to stem from his egalitarian fantasies.
I don’t know, besides the whole socialist thing (which like ancap views is intertwined in his politics), his political views aren’t too bad either.
Steven Pinker offered a high-profile challenge to Chomsky’s evolutionary theories. Here’s a post someone wrote about it.
Isn’t it both?
I’m not saying language doesn’t have syntax, but the syntax is a product of the semantic function. Chomsky argues for a universal syntax, which any child who’s made up a language consisting of whistles can tell you isn’t true.
Steven Pinker offered a high-profile challenge to Chomsky’s evolutionary theories. Here’s a post someone wrote about it.
Thanks, Lilburne!
I don’t know, besides the whole socialist thing (which like ancap views is intertwined in his politics), his political views aren’t too bad either.
Chomsky does make criticisms of modern states, but he also fails to criticize others and his ‘libertarianism’ is just communitarian statism - he’s not even outside-the-box enough to posit something like Bakunin federalism or feudalism, which at least isn’t a central state. His explanations for and theories of political action are crazy, he’s worse than the libertarian left.
I think semantics is a function of syntax, actually.
I think semantics is a function of syntax, actually.
Then why can some nerds communicate in machine language?
Have you ever disagreed with somebody, but not thought that they were confused?
I have no idea what you are talking about. (You didn’t define those terms.)
I don’t think that you understood what I meant, but I also don’t think that it is your fault. I don’t think that I explained my argument well enough, so I will try to do that right here.
I didn’t mean that the mainstream linguists treat speakers like we say that the mainstream economists treat actors, in a confused and psuedo-empirical way. I meant that they treat the natural languages like that. They see the natural languages as the ultimate givens, and go from there, just like the astronomers see the movements of the planets, asteroids, and so on, as the ultimate givens, and go from there.
We can see that attitude in the fact that the mainstream linguists often say something like that no language is better than any other language, and that saying that a part of a language used to be better, or even saying that it used to be worse, is just the idle, confused talk of laymen. They say that it doesn’t make sense to say that our language is better or worse than any other language, or even any other possible language, simply because languages are just adjusted to our way of life, nothing more, nothing less. The “primitive” language of a group of hunter-gatherers isn’t any less sophisticated than that of businessmen in a developed country; they are just suited to different purposes; they just developed differently for different ways of living. We in fact might have a tiny fraction of the amount of categories that they do for plants and animals, because we don’t care about it, where they do, because they are hunter-gatherers, where a huge part of their way of life is distinguishing between different plants and animals. Their language is suited to hunter-gathering, and our language is suited to other things. Neither is better; neither is worse. They are just there.
Okay, well, let’s see what that means.
Which is exactly what I think the problem is.
They use text from natural languages as the data to develop their theories, but doing that is sterile. Text from natural languages are just history. Just like in economics, you need the theory before you can interpret the history. Everything that Ludwig von Mises said in Human Action about the meeconomics applies to linguistics. We need a theory, which we get “a priori”, before we can interpret history, which, for economics, are prices, business cycles, and so on, and, for linguistics, are natural languages.
I don’t see how this follows.
I don’t know where that is supposed to fit into your argument against me.
I am merely addressing that I think you have misunderstood the goals in linguistics; this I think is the innocent confusion. This is all I mean to say.
By mental/rational, I mean that Chomsky owes much to Descartes’s views about language and rationality: that it is not mechanical and that it is a characteristic of man to use creative language (that distinguishes them from other animals’ language). Pre-Chomsky, people believed language was merely knowing a set of kernel sentences that were built for all possible expressions. So research was built on documenting example sentences (along with sounds, alphabet, words, etc.) and teaching example sentences.
And it was believed that these were mastered explicitly. Chomsky posits combinatoriality which humans are born with and animals are not (being able to combine finite units into infinite creative; but while also limiting to syntactic structures we know as being possible, taking out those that we know are impossible in a language). For instance, children know to say
the dog bites the man
or maybe even a broken version:
the dog bite man (which they can then self-correct after a given period of mental development; the same way they go through periods of learning more and more phonemes to pronounce more complicated words).
but never:
the bite dog man the
(this order of ‘determiner, verb, object, subject, and another determiner’ never shows up in any language). This is just a simple version of what is being looked at. And this is what I mean by how they go about corpus data. They are assuming a priori assumptions. They are not using the methodology of the structuralists (whom I mention as describing languages based on documentation of sentences). These structuralists and the sociolinguists tend to go through ‘sterile’ data and make records, but they are not doing the same as the Chomskyans and the current paradigm. In fact, structuralists thought that all linguistics was done by the 1950s; having documented everything. While sociolinguists study more data because new cultural developments arise. Trust me, the linguists go through as much misunderstanding about the testability of their hypotheses as Mises did/does. Their a priori rules are plenty: that stimuli can’t account for the creative nature of language, that there are limitations to language (in syntax and other things like phonology) which are universal, that combinatorality is true in every language, and that recursion (the ability to embed sentences within sentences) is also universal. There are more technical ones (see: Mark C. Baker’s The Atoms of Language), but these are the basic overall ones. The data comes in when there seem to be an overreaching in talking about universals; some of which have been proven wrong over time. But the research seems to be working towards finding a priori ‘principles and parameters’ that explain how people mentally construct their language.
As for one language being better than another language. It doesn’t seem to follow from linguistics, necessarily. But it is probably as relevant to linguists as say ‘tulips are better than oak trees’ to a plant biologist. Mostly linguists look to primitive cultures as ‘extreme examples’; to see if universals exist even in those communities. They do this less to say that all are good, and more to say that what we believe about language is less relativistic and culturally-constructed than we once thought. And we turn out to be right about them. Chomsky is afterall the bete noir of the postmodernists, primitivists, etc. For the reason that he believes in human nature and the rational mind.
In many cases we turn out to be absolutely correct: they have all the same complexity in many of the universal aspects of language that I mentioned. Modern linguistics doesn’t focus as much on semantics as syntax, so few people are going to say that primitive cultures can right-away work on the human genome project or cure cancer. And few linguists care about which language sounds better in poetry, has the best philosophy, or can most faithfully translate the Bible.
It’s implications for other fields means that it is more scientifically relevant (than for instance the other aspects of linguistics you think are useful); it is not useless.
It should be noted that modern linguistics acknowledges other types of languages than natural languages. And delineates its work in natural language as a project, but not the only project possible, of course.
For instance, you may have thought that Chomsky was against evil hierarchy. But not in his work on computer science:
What is the goal of linguistics? (Forgive me if you already explained it; I don’t see it.)
What does that mean? Does that mean that he doesn’t think that we could come up with formation rules for any natural languages or even any possible languages? What else could “not mechanical” mean?
I understand that; and that isn’t what I disagree with. It isn’t psuedo-empiricism to observe a group of people speaking a natural language, and to say that they don’t ever use a certain word order. That is history. The problem is that the categories of “determiner”, “verb”, “object”, and “subject” are confused and almost useless. They are relics of when people just looked at sentences and tried to come up with regularities. It isn’t useless to try to see whether we see certain word orders in history, just like it isn’t useless to try to see whether we see certain market conditions in history. The problem is that, just like if we have confused categories referring to the parts of market conditions, like a confused definition of money, buying, or whatever, if we have confused categories referring to the parts of word orders, we end up with something useless. It might be a historical fact, but it doesn’t tell us anything unless the categories make sense.
I don’t want to talk about those categories, because I wouldn’t be able to explain them as well as some of the other ones, so I will instead ask you about the other ones. How would you define nouns, adjectives, and prepositions? How would you define tense? And how would you define grammatical voice? What would be your definitions for each of those five categories? And could you define them without giving me examples of natural languages?
Can you give me some examples of books or articles on that?
I wasn’t talking about how people used the language, such as how good the philosophy is or something. I was talking about how ambiguous, efficient, and so on it is. I was talking about “better” and “worse” in terms of using it as a tool.
Which is because they look at the natural languages, which are just history, as the ultimate givens. I on the other hand think that we should go a lot lower than that. The ultimate givens of linguistics are the same as the ultimate givens of economics.
If they were to not see natural languages as ultimate givens, they would be in a position to say whether a language is better or worse at something than an other one, and they might even give some thought to trying to figure out how to improve our means of communication, which I think is an overcomplicated mess.
Did we have to look at them to know that they would?
I’m not sure if it is analogous to Austrian economics or even if it should be. I’m not even sure if you or I understand Austrian economics properly. So I can’t comment on this.
It doesn’t rely on history or all languages. Since there is too much history and too many languages.
That that order never occurs is not a fact unto its own. But an example of a greater fact: that not everything in language is equally likely. ‘the bite dog man the’ is not history, but a sentence, in every utterance of it nonsensical and ungrammatical, in English which can never be; under the rules of English. It’s not even important about determiners or adjectives, in this case.
I could easily have said, this could never be used in English:
“fdajiudasuif9fdsuafudsafdsfdsafj …fd’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’'ooooooofsa”
Or this could never be used in Arabic:
بيسشتنستشنبنستشبيش99شبيسشتبتبتبتبت
Or this in Modern Greek:
Η ιγνοστικ ειναι ποοπζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζζ
The fact that I know a thing or two about these languages becomes irrelevant. You’d not be able to convince either of us that these utterances occur. They both betray a fact about language: that there are rules about strings of letters, combinations of letters, spaces, the order, etc. The difference between the above and what I explain in ‘the bite dog man the’ is that native speakers can make better predictions than non-native speakers about what can be grammatical (without having heard the expression before).
You don’t have to look at corpus data to know you’re not going to find it spoken or written. Somehow things always fall outside, and one job of linguistics is explain this phenomenon to describe as many circumstances as possible; not just obvious or very small particular ones.
The search for ‘exceptions’ to rules is really the work of contrarians and competing theories. For instance, Dan Everett believes he has found an exception to recursion in the Piraha Indians. Usually people make the claim that theories are language bias (for instance, English bias in Chomsky). But it is their responsibility to prove this or to explain what they mean.
What Chomsky means by non-mechanical can be read about more thoroughly in his work Cartesian Linguistics. But basically the same as saying we don’t live in a mechanistic universe (the destruction of the mechanistic universe was necessary to the rationalism of Descartes and later philosophers). The mind is capable of creating new things on its own without outside interference causing it (it’s for the individual’s purpose that an utterance occurs), future utterances can transcend all past utterances. For this reason, we can formulate rules. But we form them based on mental rules. And deduce things about the nature of the brain. It really isn’t about the individual languages themselves, but the higher goal of explaining cognition and what might be unique to just humans.
As for telling people how to use language and comparing languages, that is an enterprise taken up by applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and language pedagogy. For reasons of different interests, they sometimes have no interest in Chomsky’s work. Some people who think linguistics means ‘learning lots of languages’ also do not care about academic linguistics either.
Mark C. Baker’s The Atoms of Language is a good place to start. An introduction to more technical work and explaining principles and parameters might be Syntax: a Minimalist Introduction by Andrew Radford.