It led off with this:
First, a sociological/tautological non-definition:
What is mathematics? One proposal, made in desperation, is
‘what mathematicians do’.
-- -- Ian Stewart, How to Cut a Cake (2006), p. 27
That stab in fact fails to offer even the virtue of a
tautology, since it isn’t even true, without
the further qualification that it is what mathematicians do… when they are doing mathematics. -- If you’d tried similarly, without
qualification, to define linguistics based simply on the
activities of linguists (ex officio: faculty and students in the Linguistics
Department) at Berkeley during the years I was there, you would conclude that
the field consisted of: fixing
your Volkswagens[**]; eating Chinese
food; and dabbling in neighboring
fields like psychology and philosophy (later all these fields hopped into the
hot-tub together and were newly baptised as Cognitive Science) -- all this
while studiously ignoring most of the work done in the previous centuries of
philology and language-sciences.
[**] Sprawling supine beneath one's VW Beetle or Bus was known locally as the "Berkeley lotus position".
[Note: The title of this post alludes to an insightful, delightful sociohistory of the era,
Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (1993)]
[For further reflections on Berkeleyana, click here.
For the place of linguistics among the sciences, here.
For sociohistorical reflections on other sciences, here.]
[**] Sprawling supine beneath one's VW Beetle or Bus was known locally as the "Berkeley lotus position".
[Note: The title of this post alludes to an insightful, delightful sociohistory of the era,
Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (1993)]
[For further reflections on Berkeleyana, click here.
For the place of linguistics among the sciences, here.
For sociohistorical reflections on other sciences, here.]
Thank you! is the constant quest to reinvent the wheel unique to linguistics?
ReplyDeleteYup, this definitely sounds like my time in the Linguistics Dept. at UMass.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, from a lexicographical perspective, "what mathematicians/linguists do when they are at work" are reasonable enough definitions.