I had an hour free time on the University of Chicago campus, so after strolling the quad and gawking at the Robie house, I toddled into the university bookstore. After marveling at the number of X and Philosophy titles*, I wandered over to the linguistics section, where I found:
- Richard Larson. 2010. Grammar as Science. MIT Press.
I was struck by the beginning of the back-cover blurb:
This introductory text takes a novel approach to the study of syntax. Grammar as Science offers an introduction to syntax as an exercise in scientific theory construction.
If I’m not mistaken, this is implying that other introductions to syntax are exercises in something other than science. I’ll buy that. But I’m not sure I buy the next bit:
Syntax provides an excellent instrument for introducing students from a wide variety of backgrounds to the principles of scientific theorizing and scientific thought; it engages general intellectual themes present in all scientific theorizing as well as those arising specifically within the modern cognitive sciences. …
This book aside, I doubt Chomskyan linguistics is a good exemplar of science for reasons that (part of) Peggy Speas’s endorsement illuminates:
[Grammar as Science] shows students explicitly how to ‘think like a linguist.’ Students who use this book will come away with an extraordinarily strong grasp of the real underpinnings of linguistics.
The key here is “think like a linguist”. If you’ve ever tried to take Chomsky’s conception of grammar from Aspects and explain it to students (which I’m embarrassed to admit that I have done in the past), you’d have your doubts about the relation between “think like a scientist” and “think like a linguist”, too.
I was further amused by (the beginning of) Norbert Hornstein’s endorsement, also on the back cover:
What makes modern generative linguistics a science, and an interesting one at that, is a subtle interaction among several factors: the questions that it asks, the abstractions that it makes to answer these questions, the technical apparatus it uses to make these questions precise, the evidence it uses to adjudicate between different answers, and the aesthetic that animates it when putting all these ingredients together.
Silly me. Here I was thinking what makes something interesting science is predictive power.
Show, Don’t Tell
One piece of very good advice for writers in any genre is show, don’t tell.
Sci-fi writers and linguists seem to have a particularly hard time following this advice. I’m afraid the newbie/off-worlder/woken-up-from-cryosleep listener who has everything explained to him obeys the letter but not the spirt of the dictum. That’s similar to “serious” texts where thin characters have a “dialogue” that’s a proxy for the author explaining to the reader. Examples include Gödel, Escher, Bach in logic/AI (which I loved when I was in high school when it came out) and Rhyme and Reason in linguistics, which covers very similar “philosophy of science” ground as Grammar as Science.
I’ve never seen a physics or chemistry or even a biology book start off by asserting that what follows is really science. Most scientists, and most scientific texts, just do science.
Methinks the linguists do protest too much.
Been There, Done That
If you look at the first chapter of the second HPSG book, Carl Pollard (this was his axe to grind) preaches the same gospel, as in this excerpt from page 7:
* The following are real, though I’m too lazy to link past the first: Anime and Philosophy, Star Wars and Philosophy, Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy, The Matrix and Philosophy, Facebook and Philosophy, Transformers and Philosophy, Batman and Philosophy, The Undead and Philosophy and so on (and on and on). Is this some kind of works project for philosophers?