For Whom the Bell Tollens

Miscellaneous additions to our essay on the logic and rhetoric of modus tollens,

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/12/modus-tollens-tollendus-est-iterum-re.html

(1) Psychological observations

People seldom intuit what is unpalatable to them.  [Moreover, one can] eliminate any undesirable indirect implication of their special insight  by means of an additional hilfs-intuition, liquidating the embassassing logical relation.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974), p. 95

In short, one ‘answers’ the sceptic  by striding across logical gaps  to conclusions inconsistent with premises that one does not contest.

-- John Watkins, Science and Scepticism (1984), p. 34

(2) The reductio ad absurdum /”self-mate” gambit:

The traditional argument for the primacy of acceleration-retardation  rests on the absurdity of denying it.

-- Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 216

Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures, which is regarded by some as a foundation-stone for this kind of activity, has been described by no less an authority than Roman Jakobson  as an argumentum a contrario (Jakobson, 1959), showing the impossibility of the whole enterprise.

-- Hilary Putnam, “Some Issues in the Theory of Grammar”, in  Mind, Language, and Reality (1975), p. 85

Consilience in Linguistics (neu bearbeitet)

[This note is a spin-off from our initial essay, Consilience, along with its sidekick Consilient Connections (distinguishing vertical from horizontal consilience);  and is sibling to such other special mini-studies as Consilience in Psychology, Consilience in Mathematics [currently closed for reconstruction], and the purely satirical Consilience and Cognitive Science.]

The whole notion of “Consilience [with]in …” a specific field  is skew to the Wilsonian/vertical-reductionist conception of the grand principle.  Instead we are noticing similarities in various regions of a field, which may have no analogues outside that field, nor follow synthetically as consequences of other principles outside that field.  Accordingly, the various discipline-specific mini-essays may have little in common, let alone contribute to a grand TOE of the sciences.  They are more in the spirit of the various volumes of the “Bobbsey Twins”.   I do plan to stop, though, somewhere short of “Consilience in Stamp-Collecting” and “So!  You Want 2 B a  Consilientist ”.

~

First:  Where does linguistics stand in the disciplinary matrix of the sciences?  Its status has often been fragile:

Finck and Wundt tried to rob linguistics of its autonomy  by incorporating it into psychology … Croce and Vossler tried to incorporate it into aesthetics.

-- Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras:  Europe in 1900 (1967, Eng. transl. 1978), p. 443

Later, much of the thrust of linguistics, over the past nigh-on one hundred years, especially in America, has been an assertion of its disciplinary autonomy -- not a branch of sociology, or history, or language studies -- even with respect to its ancestor philology, and further with regard to various components of linguistics itself, which one hoped  neatly to delineate.

Cf.

… the need felt by many  to keep linguistics an autonomous discipline, to prevent it from slopping over  into psychology, sociology, neurophysiology, etc.

-- Roger Lass, On explaining language change (1980), p. 121

This depreciatory rhetoric of “slopping over” is diametrically at variance with Wilson’s utopian holistic vision for Unified Science.

Indeed, over the past  close-on to a century, or at any rate  over a good fifty years during the heyday of the growing prestige of the field, other disciplines have looked to linguistics more than it to them.  As:

The appeal of linguistics methodologically  to anthropology  is in part because of its achievement of units at once concrete and universal.

-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American Structuralism (1975), p. 153.

In terms of the sociology of science, this influence is reminiscent of the Physics Mesmerism earlier spawned by the pizazz of the field that invented The Bomb.

That, in fact, may explain a lot.   For the study of syntactic and semantics structures plainly finds nothing of ready use for it from current physics (“The Propositional Island Condition:  a String-Theoretic Approach”), whereas the neighboring scholarly fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc., have been -- not to put it too unkindly -- not especially successful of late.  They do not, so to speak, have The Bomb;  so linguistics has been free to go its own way.

~

The linguistic scene in Europe during the nineteenth century, and up to about Weimar, had a decidedly less isolated or self-sufficient feel, with the same Grimm brothers who wrote straight sound-law Germanistik and who launched the massive Wörterbuch, likewise collecting their equally-celebrated work of folklore,  Kinder- und Hausmärchen.   Saussure, with his penchant for dichotomies and abstractions, culminating in his purely cerebral reconstruction of the Indo-European laryngeals  not visible in the extant texts (a ghostly forerunner of the key notion of “empty categories” in the Chomskyan school), were atypical (notice that he published precious little in his own lifetime, his main influence being posthumous, his penchants  more to the liking of a later time).   There were, to be sure, occasional Declarations of Linguistic Independence similar to those which later characterized American structuralism and its progeny --

Linguistics must be regarded as an independent science, not to be confused with either physiology or psychology.

--  Baudouin de Courtenay (1871)

but more characteristic were the plumbing of ancient literatures, the quasi-folkloristic dialectological spelunkings in the hills and hamlets of the hinterland, and so concrete, sleeves-rolled-up a tendency as that of Wörter und Sachen.   As a Romance philologist once put it, emphasizing the Unentbehrlichkeit of the sister-disciplines for linguistics,

Man komme also nicht mit dem beliebten « ne supra crepidam »;  das gilt wirklich nur für Schuster.

-- Hugo Schuchardt, (1892), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 105

These humanistic traditions were carried on at Berkeley by my Doktorvater Yakov Malkiel, a White Russian refugee and time-capsule of Mitteleuropäische Kultur, whose journal Romance Philology (and it really was as deeply his, as The Rambler was Doctor Johnson’s) featured both linguistic and literary articles side by side.   It was this tradition I relished, and which informed my dissertation (later published as The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages).   It is a Kulturgut deeply to be savored, in centuries to come, long after the squabbles of Amerian Vietnam-era linguistics shall have faded into the mists of history.

~

The fiercest assertion of linguistic independence -- what we might dub the thesis of the Idiosyncrasy of Human Language (it obeys principles peculiar to itself, not generally shared among other features of animate beings) -- has come from the Chomsky camp (that bastion of the intellectually fierce and rhetorically ferocious)

The proper perspective of linguistic independence is given a trenchant formulation by Chomsky:

How can a system such as human language arise in the mind/brain, or for that matter in the organic world, in which one seems not to find anything like the basic properties of human language?  That problem has sometimes been posed as a crisit for the cognitive sciences.   The concerns are appropriate, but their locus is misplaced:  they are primarily a problem for biology  and the brain sciencies, which, as currently understood, do not provide any basis for what appear to be fairly well-established conclusions about language.

-- Noam Chomsky,  The Minimalist Program (1995), p. 2

[Sidenote:  This stance exactly parallels our own with respect to the (possibly not entirely unrelated) question of Free Will, in our diatribes against the eliminative materialists, who, failing to discover Free Will in a test-tube, declare that it must therefore not exist.  Morality they seem to have discerned cringing at the bottom of  an Erlenmeyer flask, and identify it with oxytocin, or oxycontin, or some damn thing.   Our retort:  Free Will (and with it,  possible prolegomena to morality) stands unspattered;  good luck with whatever it is you’re doing, and ever saying anything useful about these.]

Similar American declarations of disciplinary independence go back a ways:

The history of structural linguistics in the United States  can be readily interpreted in terms of three successive (and overlapping) movements:

(1) the movement for autonomous study of language, i.e., for a profession of linguistics;

(2)  the movement for autonomous study of linguistic structure;

(3) the movement for autonomous study of grammar (syntactic structure)

Chomsky’s classification of linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology, like Hockett’s classification of linguistics as a branch of cultural anthropology, does not imply any less of autonomy.

-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American Structuralism (1975), p. 227-8

Back when I began at university,  linguistics as a discipline  was still largely at stage (1).  At Harvard College, they didn’t allow you to major in Linguistics simpliciter -- that was apparently perceived as being too narrow, like majoring in sausages or non-Abelian groups.  It had to be a combined major, say, Linguistics and Math.  (That is not necessarily a bad thing:  such disciplinary spread virtually forces you to think ‘consiliently’.)  I actually did briefly consider doing that, owing to the personal magnetism of two visiting luminaries:  George Lakoff and Noam Chomsky.  And while this-all takes us right off the topic of Consilience,  and back to the sociology of the wacky Sixties, perhaps the anecdotes may be worth retailing for their own sake.

It was my sophomore year (in many ways, my sophomoric year).  The campus was in turmoil, partially and fitfully shut-down.  The center had not held,  and we were whirling.

            Into this maelstrom  stepped  Noam Chomsky, meeting with Harvard undergraduates,  not to lecture, but to hear us out.   Already he was better known as a political commentator than as a linguist (I had eagerly read his foresightful American Power and the New Mandarins);  a small but respectful student audience  gathered at his feet -- or rather, he at ours:  for the students had occupied the available sofas and chairs,  and he himself sat down on the floor with the rest of the overflow.  He spoke softly, when he spoke at all;  listening, thinking, listening …

What he said that day, I don’t remember (how often are our memories  wordless, alas!)  but his sense or essence of open-mindedness, yet centeredness (most of us  were neither)  powerfully remains.    I left the meeting  feeling  that we student activists were truly juvenile, even if  largely right on the central issue of the Vietnam War;  and have him to thank that, thenceforward, I may have been  marginally less of an imbecile  than would otherwise have been the case.

Where Chomsky was all calm -- Jovian -- Lakoff was all energy -- Mercurial -- and tended to create a fevered atmosphere wherever he bustled -- not unlike that at campus protests and SDS meetings.  It was attractive, in a way, to an undergraduate whose veins flowed full with the sap of the Zeitgeist. 

However, I had, before my freshman year, renounced my original intention of majoring and English with a view to becoming a writer, penitentially donning the sackclothlike labcoat of a chemistry major,  in part because I knew myself to be subject to the Siren-calls of pride and cliqueishness  that went with the literary life.  And in Lakoff and his entourage (for there is no other word for the cloud of virtual particles that surrounded him), that factor was much in evidence.  So I drew back.  (Years later, at Berkeley, our paths would once again anastomose.)

What really settled it, though, was the practical reality of what it would mean to take courses from the permanent Harvard faculty (Lakoff was just passing through, and Chomsky taught over at M.I.T.)  I lasted just two meetings of the introductory course taught by droning Professor Undertaker (as I thought of him;  the real surname lies not too distant in phonological space).

Senior year, I applied to graduate school in math at Stanford and Berkeley.   When both accepted, I asked Lynn Loomis which he would recommend.   He was very practical:  no finicky attempts at comparing this professor with that, just:  Berkeley is bigger.  That proved wise advice, for exactly the same meta-reason for which I turned down Yale (whose English department had been making beckoning advances) and chose Harvard because, well, what the hell.  Once again, I wound up pursuing a course of studies entirely different from that in which I had applied.  After dropping out of math from impecunity, I stumbled upon a much more inviting introductory lecture-series by Charles Fillmore of Berkeley linguistics, and there was a thriving department ready to take me on;  whereas Stanford, at that time, didn’t even have a full-fledged Linguistics Department, just a Program within English.   So it looked as though, providentially, I had landed in the right place.

Yet how often have I dwelt in retrospect, how different my intellectual life (and with it, life tout court) might have been, had I instead found myself across the bay at Stanford.  For, despite its shoestring beginnings, by the time I received the doctorate (1981), Stanford had burgeoned into the M.I.T. of the West, whereas the Berkely department -- like the surrounding town -- was falling victim to centrifugal forces, partly political, and partly personality-driven, but more particularly, in the case of Linguistics, because the Rota Fortunae had made another half-turn, resurrecting MIT-style linguistics to a second run of pre-eminence, and sending the fortunes of Berkeley-style Generative Semantics down, down, down…   Fuit Ilium!

~ ~ ~

Below, a miscellany of consilient influences.

~

The syntactic cycle (cyclic ordering of rules in syntax) has been called “analogous” to the phonological cycle (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (1968), p. 39).   This, however, is  from a disciplinary standpoint  quite a domestic affair, and need not be ‘consilient’ with anything outside linguistics.   And indeed, as Chomsky remarks later in the same pamphlet (p. 66), “One cannot expect structuralist phonology, in itself, to provide a useful model for investigation of other cultural and social systems.

A word of caution.  By saying that a theory of sense ‘breaks down’ the complex ability of linguistic productivity,  I do not mean to suggest that the explanation must be reductive, but only that the theory of sense must articulate [unpack, make plain] the structure of complex ability.  If the ability is best explained by reducing it to other abilities, the theory of sense says what these are … If the ability is best explained holistically, … then it explains how the ability functions holistically …

-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (1984), p. 127

~

The whole thrust of modularity is that, while tout might more or less se tenir , within  a given module, the modules themselves are connected, in some cases, only the way the wheels and the engine and the windshield of a car are connected, in subserving a larger whole.

Ctr. a sort of ideological purity:

By strongly syntactic, I mean  not only that the theory is developed using syntactic notions,  but also that the principles invoked, and the distinctions advocated, have no natural semantic analogues.

… In fact, a stronger point can be made:  the natural distinctions and generalizations that a natural semantic theory of interpretation would [consiliently] make available  lead us to expect configurations of data that are simply not attested.

-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (1984), p. 102, 4

And,  more polemically, emphatically rejecting any extradisciplinary aid:

An extreme position was taken by Kurylowicz:  “One must explain linguistic facts by other linguistic facts, not by heterogeneous facts. … Explanation by means of social facts is a methodological derailment.” (1948).  For Kurylowicz, even the influence of other languages was irrelevant:  “the substratum theory has no importance for the linguist”.

-- U. Weinreich et al.  in W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel, Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968), p. 177

All of this -- taken as  a program rather than a description -- is strictly unexceptionable, apart from the final “the” in front of the word “linguist”.  With that restrictive article, the passus passes over into the overweening;  as who should say,  “The wearyingly multifarious  and mostly insensate behaviors  of non-penguin species  is of no concern to The Zoologist.”

Contrast, indeed, in the very same volume, the opinion of one of its editors (Y. Malkiel, p. 28): 

In languages where “progressive” and “conservative”, “aristocratic” and “rustic” variants are suggested by differences in form, no truly satisfactory interpretation is conceivable  without an equal share of attention  granted to the social matrix.”

Along with many other stances that could be cited. (“Pike’s tagmemics  expressly linked to an analysis of cultural behavior as a whole”).

~

In post-Chomskyan linguistics, hardcore practitioners have usually been at pains to distinguish concepts and processes peculiar to the human language faculty, from those obtaining elsewhere, be it in bee-langue, or the “language of flowers” or “the Brain’s Inner Language” (this, from an article in this morning’s New York Times), or neuranatomy or chemistry or physics or -- horrendo referens -- Psychology with its “general learning strategies.”  By contrast, generativists revel in any apparent structural or procedural harmony within their discipline -- striving, for example, to see how much material can be gleichgeschaltet under the sway of the Empty Category Principle -- the awe-inspiring ECP (the Great and Powerful).

~

Rules relating S-Structure to LF are of the same kind that operate in the Syntax:  Move alpha.

-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (1984)

Outsiders are unlikely to gasp at this last, nor to marvel about the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Move-alpha.  (“alpha” here stands for:  anything at all.  A slightly more general formulation  would be Stephenson’s Rule:  Do Stuff.)

~

It is desireable for the overall theory to be articulated into strata, and for certain general notions or procedures to recur at different strata, at least masking their differences in basic material, and perhaps providing a genuine generalization.    Thus:  segmentation;  compositionality; and projection.  E.g. (Hornstein):  The Projection Principle:  the Theta Criterion applies at D-structure, ((S-structure)), and LF  (these being the antiseptic rechristening of the old deep structure, surface structure, and logical form, which proved too exciting for the peasantry and had to be withdrawn from general circulation).

~

The technical tools for dealing with “rule-governed creativity” [basically, a synchronic system of limitless productivity] as distinct from “rule-changing creativity” [diachronic evolution] have only become readily available during the past few decades, in the course of work in logic and foundations of mathematics.

-- Noam Chomsky, “Current Issues in Linguistic Theory”, repr. in Jerry Fodor & Jerrold Katz, eds., The Structure of Language (1964), p. 59

~

There are books and papers that speculate about the evolution of human language while studiously ignoring all of linguistic research

-- Paul Bloom, reviewing LINGUA EX MACHINA:

Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky With the Human Brain.

By William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton.

~

Appendix: Historical references to collaboration or lack of it, between linguistics and neighboring fields:

Summing up the wide-ranging work of the philologist and etymologist Hugo Schuchardt (floruit 1864 - 1927, magnum jubilaeum), Leo Spitzer writes:

Schuchardt hat nicht nur über fast alle allgemeinen Probleme der Sprachwissenschaft  nachgedacht, sondern alle irgendwie zur Linguistik peripherisch gelegenen Gebiete des Lebens  abgesucht, von der Sprachwissenschaft als Zentrum aus  seinen Beitrag der Lösung der drängenden Lebensprobleme  gegeben.

-- Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p.

Schuchardt himself, however, in places posits the wisdom of keeping linguistics sauber getrennt:

Hamitische Sprachen sind solche die von Hamiten gesprochen werden, oder Hamiten sind die  welche hamitische Sprachen reden.  Jenes ist die anthropologische Erklärung, dieses die linguistische … Mißverständnissen kann nur dadurch vorgebeugt werden, daß Linguistisches und Anthropologisches strengstens auseinandergehalten werde.

-- review (1912) of  C. Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten; repr. Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 334

~

Referring to the theoretical-semantic efforts of the pre-eminent 19^th-century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt:

Wundt’s failure seems to have discouraged others from taking up the matter in earnest, for during the last 30 years, no one has made public any system of semasiology worthy of serious consideration.  Semantic work from 1900 to 1930  has been characterized by an astonishing and highly regrettable lack of contact and collaboration between psychologists and philologists.

-- Gustav Stern, Meaning and Change of Meaning (1931)

~

Contra sociological-anthropological structuralisme:

… eager souls who think they can easily borrow  and fruitfully adapt  a formal model  from simpler and perhaps more fortunate fields such as linguistics  or even phonetics.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 122

(Here he means rather phonology;  it is phonology, and not phonetics, that is structuralist.)

~

Where does linguistics fit in -- among the humanties, or the sciences?

Um die Sprachwissenschaft   haben sich bekanntlich  die Natur- und die Geistes- (order Geschichts-)wissenschaften gerissen,  wie in der mittelalterlichen Legende  die Teufel und die Engle  um die Seele des Menschen.  Jetzt pflegt man sie  ihrem Inhalt nach  zu den Geisteswissenschaften,  ihrer Methode nach  zu den Naturwissenschaften zu zählen;  mit fast dem gleichen Rechte  könnte man das Umgekehrte tun.

Ich halte an der Einheit der Wissenschaft  fest,  und vermag  beispiesweise  zwischen Biologie  und Sprachwissenschaft  keine tiefere Kluft wahrzunehmen  als zwischen Chemie und Biologie.

-- Hugo Schuchardt, (1892), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 105

.

Pop ! goes the Positivist

 [This is a continuation of a thread begun here.]

Another example of fetishizing the visible (cf. now also this)  occurs in Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1962; page refs. to the Harper paperback reprint), p. 284:

In the last pages of Testability, Carnap discussed the sentence ‘If all minds should disappear from the universe, the stars would still go on in their courses.’  Lewis and Schlick asserted, correctly, that this sentence was not verifiable.

They so asserted incorrectly.  After all, we have a pretty good handle on those stars in their courses, beginning from not long after the Big Bang  through the present, during most of which there were no human minds.

And here’s a simpler experiment:  Let’s all just refrain from observing the moon for the next two weeks.  Now we open our eyes.  Surpri-ise!  Right where we expected to find it, and at a phase two weeks more mature than when we last checked (rather than the phase as last seen).

One occasionally observes a very young child shut her eyes and announce in a sing-song: “Youuu ca-han’t seee mee….!”  I doubt the child actually believes that, it’s just fun to say.  But suppose she did. She is then entertaining an erroneous optical theory, but not an erroneous ontological one.  She imagines that the lights went out for you as well; but she never entertains the thought that you yourself have been extinguished, or been transfixed into some mute deaf motionless limbo until such time as she shall be pleased to gaze again – after all, she has just shown this, by addressing you.

Incidentally, the whole Schlick-shop with its merry/morose band of logical positivists, appear to have created enormous problems for themselves, and come up with completely counter-intuitive results, from the basic motivation of wishing to exclude all metaphysical propositions from the outset as strictly meaningless.   (The story here is in line with our overarching defense of theism.)  In other words, it wasn’t enough to denounce as wholly unconvincing,  all purported metaphysical statements hitherto; nor to brand it a particularly uninteresting language-game; nor to marginalize the enterprise with the derision usually reserved for circle-squarers.  Metaphysics as such, and for all time, had to have a stake driven through its heart, the stake itself consisting in pure reasoning from selbstverständlich  (metaphysically a-priori? God-given? -- oops, NOT) first principles.  For a demonstration of the absurdities that apparently resulted, cf. Popper, passim.  As (p. 281, op.cit.)

My criticism of the verifiability criterion has always been this: against the intention of its defenders, it did not exclude obvious metaphysical statements, but it did exclude the most important … of all scientific statements … the universal laws of nature.

Why even go near such a disaster, for the sake of excluding-in-principle all metaphysical statements – which they were ignoring anyway?  Popper goes so far as to hazard a guess in a footnote to p. 175:  “One not need believe in the ‘scientific’ character of psycho-analysis (which, I think, is in a metaphysical phase) in order to diagnose the anti-metaphysical fervour of positivism as a form of Father-killing.”  (Note, b.t.w., the capital initial of “Father”.)

*

Since we were obliged, a moment ago, to deprecate Popper, let us hasten to another example, in which we find him on the side of the angels.  First let us note:

             * Our conduct is guided by moral laws.

             * Our scientific activity is guided by metaphysical principles.

             * Both categories are philosophically vexed, and any concrete application of these laws and principles may prove problematic; but we cannot do without them.

            Here is Popper (p. 287) characterizing the logical positivists: “They implicitly accept the rule: ‘Always chose the most probable hypothesis!’  He goes on:

Now it can be easily shown that this rule is equivalent to…’Always choose the hypothesis which goes as little beyond the evidence as possible!’  And this, in turn [amounts to] ‘Always choose the hypothesis which has the highest degree of ad hoc character!’

an undesirable result for science.   (Cf. Chomsky, passim, re the extraordinarily abstract and roundabout way you may have to proceed  to get valid results, by no means simply tip-toeing a bit beyond “the evidence”.)

            The principles which we require instead  may be best illustrated by an old joke (presented here in a slightly revised form):

     A zoologist, a mathematician, and a positivist  are touring the hinterlands of Bohemia by train.  Through the window they spot, standing motionless at some distance, a purple cow.

     “Fancy that!” exclaims the zoologist. “There are purple cows in Bohemia.”

     The mathematician, in a low voice, amends: “There is at least one purple cow in Bohemia.”

     The positivist, raising his finger, crisply corrects to:  “In Bohemia there is at least one cow, purple on one side.”

            The joke is that the positivist has the most precise view of the evidence; and of the three statements, only his own is certainly true (interpreting an unmodified “purple cow” in the natural way, as “purple more or less all over”); yet his scruples are absurd.  Science would not progress, were it bound by such fragmented literalism.  (Indeed, we should have to replace “cow” with “an apparently bovine organism”, and always assuming that we can rule out a mirage, or a collective hallucination, or some effect of swamp gas; or for that matter an analogue to one of Hilary Putnam’s pet entities, the Mechanical Cat from Mars.)  And we would have to gloss Quine’s celebrated interjection, gavagai!, as possibly:  “Lo, a rabbit-stage, seen from the east.”

(For more on bovine mathematics, see "How Now, Round Cow".)

A gathering of Positivists

Note:  Occasionally one meets with such unilateral positivist agnosticism  in a non-jocular context:

Franz Ferdinand rode erect, his visible foot deep in the stirrup, a saber at his side.

-- Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (1993), p. xxvi

The above scenario has been much discussed among epistemologists, under the rubric “Henry and the barn façades”.   However, the cow version is much funnier.

Ceci n’est pas une grange 

~

To move from this to an outlook useful for science, we need these metaphysical principles:

   (1) a certain uniformity or self-cohesion to nature

   (2) the reliability (not in a logical, but in a practical sense) of induction.

(There are others, of course, such as the usefulness of deduction;  but that applies in every world, not just in this contingent one.)

            Now, both these principles are of vexed and delicate application; as are, indeed, the Commandments.   Just as it is difficult to avoid situation ethics, I see no way around a kind of “situation metaphysics”.   The zoologist, using these principles, together with his discipline-specific knowledge (to the effect that animals generally come in species, not as singletons), concludes the presence of purple cows.  But here I must side with the formulation of the mathematician: there is at least one such cow, but perhaps no more.  For, nature’s uniformity depends on the domain.  Were an experiment ever to identify, say, a Higgs boson, we should conclude the existence of an emphatic plurality of Higgs bosons; that there should only be one in the universe, is inconceivable.  But biology is more mottled than that.  Given our collective prior acquaintance with hundreds of thousands of cows, none of which was ever purple, we would hypothesize here an extremely rare mutation for (bilateral) purple (bilateral because bilaterally symmetric animals generally continue to evolve with bilateral symmetry, pace the occasional narwhal).  Since a cow delivers but a single calf at a time, this one has no identical siblings, so it is probably unique.  Moreover, the bulls will likely shun her for her color, and she shall have no offspring.  The mutation dies with her.

Carnap attempts to avoid the assumption of a metaphysical principle, by declaring (1) to be “analytic” (i.e., more like “2+2 = 4” than like “animals tend to come in species” or “each elementary particle is invariable within its class”).  Popper comments (p.289) that “no such principle of uniformity can be analytic (except in a Pickwickian sense of ‘analytic’)."  In fact, we noticed, the principle is nothing remotely like analytic, having always constraints on its application, which in some domains may be severe.  And as for (2), I concur with Popper (p.292) that it is “a principle of a priori metaphysics.”  And none the worse for that.

[For further notes on ineluctable metaphysical underpinnings of the scientific enterprise, see here.]

Genetics Porn

The reliably acute H. Allen Orr has published a trenchant review of A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, by Nicholas Wade, which we link to without comment:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/05/stretch-genes/?insrc=hpma

Longtime readers of this blog will know that our salute of this article (in the still-solid New York Review of Books) owes nothing to political correctness.  We are perfectly open to the possibility that the thesis championed by Wade in the second part of his book, may have some validity.   But, being explosive, it needs much more backing than he has given it.  (Such is the identical reason for our chiding the "Universe as simulation" hypothesis.)

For our own polemic against ultra-Darwinist excess (well, "polemic";  actually it's pretty funny), try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-urysohn-metrization-theorem.html

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Another recent example of Darwinian academic overreach, though much less incendiary as its implications are confined within linguistics, is Language in a Darwinian perspective, by Bernard Bichakjian, which maintains that “every linguistics feature, be it a speech sound, a grammatical marker, or a syntactic strategy, interfaces with a neuro-muscular algorithm, and that selection pressures have steadily guided languages …”.   (Credit where credit is due, though:  the man gets full marks from a Popperian perspective, in which “a theory needs to stick its neck out.”   This one sticks out like an ostrich.)  The level-headed Fred Newmeyer dismisses it as “bizarre” (his one-word summary) in the Sept 2003 issue of Language, p. 583ff.   And since, unlike a potential best-seller by a New York Times science writer, which could well influence public debate on sensitive issues, along with such semipopular works as On Aggression, African Genesis, and The Naked Ape, Bichakjian’s influence if any  will remain confined to pockets of academia, there is no need to comment further in this place, other than to quote Newmeyer’s witticism (one of several in the review):

A lot can be said against Chinese writing [he means, the writing system -- the logograms] as ‘evolutionarily primitive’, but one must agree that it has allowed its users to develop at least as vibrant an intellectual and creative life  as that of their alphabetic neighbors.

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Orr remarks in a footnote, citing just one example from a fund of hundreds,

Geneticists have had an extraordinarily hard time finding genes that make substantive contributions to complex diseases like Type 2 diabetes. This doesn’t bode well, to put it mildly, for finding the genes that allegedly underlie subtle differences in predisposition to middle-class behavioral traits.

Such overreach is bad enough;  worse, is when the nihilistically inclined among neurophilosophers, conclude from a bit of petri-dish handwaving, that free will is an illusion, and morality with it.   Such views have the potential to wreak real mischief;  and we have polemicized against them here:  Eliminative Materialism

Note:  That essay does not specifically address linguistics, though the problems with reductionism of minds to neurons  are similar in several disciplines, and go back a ways in each.  Thus, Uriel Weinreich, contra the behaviorist simplifications of Leonard Bloomfield: 

Bloomfield’s neurological reductionism  depends on discoveries  that may never be made.

Bloomfield was the dean of American linguistics before WWII;  his introductory textbook Language (1933) was long standard, and contains much of lasting value; yet the early, pseudo-foundational chapter about Stimulus-and-Response, with its feeble fable about Jack and Jill, falls far below the standards of the rest of the book, and indeed feels perfunctory, contributing nothing even on its own terms:  like those Stalin-era exordiums in praise of the great leader, in Soviet texts about physics or what have you;  having made the needful obeissance, we move right along.

Rulon Wells had a nice line about all this (in “Meaning and Use”, in Word 1954):

In diagnosing the conflict between mentalism and mechanism, [Bloomfield] mislocates the issue, and thus plants his germ of truth  in the sand of confusion.

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The situation in genetics has an analogue in the field of linguistics:  quite apart from the difficulty of accounting for language development, or for the sort of intricate syntactic phenomena highlighted by Chomsky and his successors, from outside linguistics proper (height of the ancestral esophagus inferred from shards of crania; Bloomfieldian behaviorism; connectionism; …), progress has been discouraging even within the field, and the Chomsky current in particular.  In that same Review Article, discussing On Nature and Language by Chomsky (et, actually, alia, as Newmeyer points out), the one-word summary is:  “disappointing”.  The reviewer reluctantly concludes that, if anything, the Minimalist Program represents a step backward.

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Just a final word on the project of reducing genius to genes, or spirit to spit:
The eliminativists may prove  to their own satisfaction  that (say)  literature, and literary criticism, are nothing but secretions of the pineal gland (or however that hoary idea is tricked-out nowadays, in the latest scientific raiments), or that it evolved in the Jurassic for the purposes of attracting a mate (or more subtly -- like those initial pre-weight-bearing nubbins of wings -- simply to regulate body temperature),

but they will never produce any literature or criticism worth reading.