I was talking about Ludwig von Mises, not just Austrian School economics in general. If you can’t comment on that, why are you still in this conversation? I am telling you that everything that Ludwig von Mises said about economics applies to linguistics, and that I think that the reason why linguistics is so useless is because they don’t follow that. They are making the same methodological mistakes that he said that the mainstream economists of his time were making. If you can’t comment on that, you can’t be a part of this conversation, because that is what it is about.
I only mean that I think it is irrelevant that people follow Misesian orthodoxy in order to be correct in methodology. I am also not an economist or an expert on Mises, even if I know some of the basics of his works and agree with some of it. I would in no way challenge Mises on his own thinking. And I’m not about to. But it seems you are taking a bit of a overzealous position on Mises and one I don’t suspect is exactly correct – or else his theories probably wouldn’t be what they are. Namely that Mises didn’t factor in his experience or the history of phenomenon when formulating theories, that he created his own methodology and that he thought other types of economics were irrelevant. Or even that if you believe in Misesian economics that you must believe other types of economics are useless.
I don’t even know what “it” is, but I didn’t say that.
- You seem to be saying that “it”, linguistics, relies only on the history of utterances or on existing languages. When that is false. Though, maybe in some ways it does, but only in the same way ‘law of demand’ relies on the fact that people demand things or else it would never have been formulated.
Well, that wasn’t what I was talking about.
- You seemed to be saying that linguistics should tell people how to use language. Well, second-language acquisition linguistics advises people on how to acquire a new language and how to use to effectively.
I don’t think that you put much effort into that paragraph. What are “new things”? What does it mean that “future utterances can transcend all past utterances”? Why does it follow from there that “we can formulate rules”? What are mental rules? Can you give me an example? How do we deduce things about the nature of the brain? Can you give me an example?
- New things = utterances that have never been heard before. You can arrange the finite symbols in a language in order to make an infinite number of expressions. Such as “the cat ran over the dog”, “the cat ran over the dog towards the food”, “the cat ran over the dog towards the food, in order to get it” and so on possibly to make an infinitely long sentence. But at the same time, it seems to be a fact at any given moment, that languages don’t allow certain utterances to make sense. It is a fact that this is a feature of language. A sentence which doesn’t fit into one language, either is a nonsense sentence or it must be a sentence in another language. Hence, ‘the bite dog man the’ is one in the current English vernacular. That this be the case in the future is irrelevant, because the future will have an infinite number of similar sentences that will not work in the English language. The mental rules are the ones that we form in our head to make sense of what things work and what don’t. For instance, that subjects go before verbs and objects in most of our sentences, regardless of the words we plug in. In syntax literature, usually this is shown by tree diagrams that show hierarchical relations of various words in different types of phrases. We know something about the brain from this: that humans have the capacity for this type of mental calculation and arrangement of symbols; something unique to humanity.
Did I say that it was about that?
- Yes, since you seem to believe that linguistics is simply documenting experience of languages. I say to the contrary, it is not about individual languages but Language itself.
Just like people search in vain for exceptions to the law of demand? Such as collectables?
- I am merely describing those who are deemed, like Everett, to be faulty methodologists. And why they try to search for exceptions to the rule. Here Chomsky would be an agreement with you. But maybe not in the same exact way – I don’t know, I am not an economist.
Where does that fit into your response to me? It sounds like it came out of nowhere.
- I’m merely stating that there are other areas of linguistics which are data-driven almost exclusively. You can throw criticism on them, but the ‘mental area’ you talk of (which is namely Syntax and following the work of chomsky) is a whole other bag.
Nonsense; mysticism. Without observing those natural languages, it is just mysticism to say that those would never be said or written. We wouldn’t see anything weird about those pieces of writing if we hadn’t had experience of those language, or languages that we consider similar to them, beforehand. Why couldn’t they just have “dsuafudsafd” mean something? What is wrong with that? How could we rule it out without referring to history?
- Well, implicit in the knowledge that something is a language is also knowledge of what a language is and is not. Namely that meaning emerges from meaningless symbols. That strings of sounds or symbols can be turned into a word or a sentence. And since no one teaches anyone these things, something has to account for how people understand that symbols stand for something. And part of that is tuning out some strings of sound/symbols as noise. And tuning into others as possibly meaningful. Without having seen a language, we can tell that certain symbols probably mean nothing. When we are native speakers of a language, we can hear completely new sentences and understand it perfectly. And also hear other completely new sentences and know that it is ungrammatical. Language may require experience of language itself and to have a working language, but one does not need experience of any and all strings to know which ones are going to be probably meaningful and which not. We make these judgments all the time.
When did I say that it was history? I said that the fact that nobody says it is history.
The actual utterances are not important. What is important is the fact that in all languages there are some strings that work and others that don’t. This is not refutable. Or else there could be no different languages and indeed no possibility for meaning within a language. Again, this is implicit in understanding what language is and in using it.
Which are history. The “rules of English” are history.
- You’re confusing the written rules, explicit rules that are taught, with implicit rules which are too numerous to teach. Most people don’t have a list of rules, but still use the language. It is not a static thing but each person’s mental conception of how their native tongue works. Again, in English – as in all languages – the rules can be deduced from the knowledge that some utterances can work at a given period and others cannot. For instance, those that would be semantically nonsensical or when it becomes a totally different language. Something has account for why ‘the bite dog man the’ doesn’t work at this very moment. And why ‘como estas?’ is Spanish sounding instead of English. If you go to a foreign country and someone is speaking a language you’ve never heard of, you don’t wait around to figure out if they speak your language. You know right away that isn’t just an English sentence you’ve not heard before. That it has other rules, another lexicon, a different syntax, and many things besides.