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Studium GeneraleSection for linguistics students

Lecture 5: The culture of science

Outline• Overview of last lecture

– Let’s hear it

• The culture of science

– Introduction– The structure of scientific revolutions

• Incommensurability of paradigms• Theory-ladenness of data• Concluding remarks

– The Chomskyan revolution?– Conclusions

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• Recursion – and/or infinite regress

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!” 3

• I asked for comments on the following quotes:

– To become a professional in any field one has to undertake the appropriate training, and then serve an apprenticeship. A surgeon attends medical school and then does routine operations before going on to do innovative work in, say, heart transplantation or plastic surgery … A linguist must be taught the principles of Basic Linguistic Theory, and also receive instruction in how to describe languages (through Field Methods courses). The ideal plan is then to undertake original field work on a previously undescribed language, and write a comprehensive grammar of it as a Ph.D. dissertation. Every language poses some kind of theoretical challenge, and solving this is likely to lead to feedback into theory, helping to enlarge and refine it. (Dixon 1997:130)

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– The most important task in linguistics today — indeed, the only really important task — is to get out in the field and describe languages, while this can still be done. Self-admiration in the looking glass of formalist theory can wait; that will always be possible. Linguistic description must be undertaken now. (Dixon 1997:144)

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Introduction• Up to now we have considered science –

including linguistics – as some abstract phenomenon out there somewhere

– That scientists engage in– And that should satisfy certain features in

order to count as science

• Remember, in terms of family resemblances rather than platonic ideals

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• But science is a human endeavour, performed by humans in certain (not all, actually only a very few) cultures

– This time and next our attention goes to the human side of things

• Science as a human endeavour – the culture of science

– Science is a collective activity, not an individual one– The cultures of science are located in times and places

» They have a history, which cannot be ignored

• Science in human culture – the cultural relevance and significance of the phenomenon

– What – if any – good is science to human society?7

• In other words:

– Our attention turns from how scientists should behave (when doing science) to

• How do scientists behave (when doing science)?• What is the nature of the scientific community as a

human institution?

– As a cultural institution

• And how and why does it change?

– Like all human institutions– Though change in science is perhaps rapid compared to other

human phenomena 8

• One of the most important and influential books on the history and philosophy of science in C20:

– Thomas Kuhn’s The structure of scientific revolutions – first published 1963, revised version 1970 (including a postscript responding to criticisms)

• Concerned with science as a dynamic human endeavour

– Highly influential on the human sciences as well as the hard sciences – including anthropology and linguistics

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The structure of scientific revolutions

• Logical positivist movement – the dominant paradigm in English-speaking world in first half of C20

– Associated with group of scientists and philosophers in Vienna 1920s-1930s

• Included Karl Popper and Carl Hempel

– Influence in America from WW2

• Result of emigration to USA, fleeing Nazi persecution• Until 1960s

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• Logical positivists were impressed by the scientific advances of early C20

– Wanted to make philosophy more “scientific” in the hope of stimulating similar advances

• Were impressed by:

– Apparent objectivity of science

• Questions could be settled in a fully objective way, by comparison of predictions of theory with facts derived by experiments

• Science was regarded as entirely rational – and the best route to truth 11

• Little interest in history of science – considered irrelevant to doing it

• Drew a sharp distinction between

– Context of discovery – how a theory was arrived at by scientists, the psychological processes

• Who cares if discovered in dreams, under drugs, …

– Context of justification – how theories are justified

• Governed by objective “logical” procedures

– Comparison of theoretical predictions with theory-neutral observational facts

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• According to the logical positivists, historical processes of scientific change are concerned with the context of discovery, not justification

– So uninteresting to the philosophy of science

• Kuhn was a physicist, then a historian of science

– Argued that the logical positivists paid insufficient attention to the history of science

• Giving a naïve picture of the enterpriseof science and its dynamics 13

• He was particularly interested in scientific revolutions

– Periods of great upheaval of ideas in science

• Where old ideas are replaced by radically novel ones

– Examples:

• Copernican revolution in astronomy• Newtonian and Einsteinium revolutions in physics• Darwinian revolution in biology 14

• Revolutions are rare

– Most of the time scientists do “normal science”

• Normal everyday activities associated with particular theories

• Central concept of scientific paradigm – which unites a scientific community, and allows normal science to happen

– Set of fundamental theoretical assumptions adopted by all members of a scientific community

– Set of exemplars of scientific problems solved by these assumptions – that appear in the textbooks 15

Note the presumption: normal mature

science is governed by a single paradigm

• Scientists working within a paradigm agree on:

– The theory itself – a set of propositions concerning the subject

– How the field should develop– What problems are significant– The appropriate methodologies for attacking

the problems– The nature of acceptable solutions to the

problems

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• Normal science is puzzle solving

– All paradigms run into problems when confronted with reality

• Mismatches between predictions and experimental facts

– Normal science strives to resolve these puzzles with few changes to the architecture of the theory

• Focus is on developing and extending the existing paradigm

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Kuhn: “Normal science does not aim at novelties of

fact or theory, and when successful finds none.”

• The concern of normal science is not to test the paradigm

– But to work within its parameters

• Experimental results that conflict with the paradigm are not assumed to invalidate the paradigm

• Rather, represent problems in the experimental methodology – including existence of confounds

– The paradigm is fine-tuned and extended

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• Over time an increasing number of anomalies are encountered

– That cannot be reconciled with the paradigm– A few anomalies can be ignored – they

always exist – but an accumulation of them leads to crisis in the scientific community

• Loss of confidence in the paradigm• Normal processes of science come to a halt

– This marks the beginning of revolutionary period in the science

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• In the revolutionary period

– Fundamental ideas are no longer adhered to– Various alternatives to the old paradigm may be

proposed– A new paradigm may emerge and become

entrenched

• Usually a generation or so is required for the entire scientific community is won over to the new paradigm

– Essence of scientific revolutions is shift from old paradigm to new one 20

• In short, science is characterised by:

– Long periods of normal science – Punctuated by occasional scientific revolutions

• Example – Ptolemaic astronomy was a shared paradigm, based on the idea of a stationary earth at centre of universe

– Copernican astronomy replaced it over a fairly long period of time

» Fundamental idea replaced by notion of stationary sun at centre of universe

» Subsequently modified21

• Parallels in other fields

– Punctuated equilibrium in biology

• Punctuated equilibrium, bottom, consists of morphological stability and rare bursts of evolutionary change

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• Primarily associated with Stephen Jay Gould – an American palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science

– But he was not the only or first to propose the idea

• Punctuated equilibrium in linguistics

– The notion that linguistic diachrony is similar

• Long periods of stability in languages• Punctuated by brief periods of massive change

– E.g. associated with cultural or social upheavals– Conflicts with the presuppositions of glottochronology and lexicostatistics23

• Does this model account for all scientific revolutions?

– Key revolutions in biology may be non-Khunian in nature– Re Darwinian evolutionary theory, Wilkins 2005:695-696 says:

Darwin’s work was, at best, half a revolution. The evidence compiled in The Origin of Species certainly convinced a majority of scientists that evolution was a fact, but it signally failed to convince most that natural selection, Darwin’s proposed mechanism of evolutionary change, was its chief agent. Furthermore, when the converts are compared to the non-converts, there was no dramatic division by age, contra Kuhn. Nor was there a steady, let alone rapid, increase in the number of the believers in natural selection as the main motor of evolutionary change. (Many believed that natural selection could take place but assigned it a minor role in evolution.) By the end of the 19th century, Darwinism, defined in terms of its emphasis on natural selection, was, to use Julian Huxley’s word, in ‘eclipse’. In fact, Darwinism, in its refurbished form of Neodarwinism, was only to triumph in the 1930s and ‘40s,with the advent of what is known as ‘the evolutionary synthesis’ or ‘the Modern Synthesis’. In its dynamics, if not in its eventual impact, Darwin’s revolution does not fit the Kuhnian picture. 24

Proposes the molecular revolution in biology

likewise was not Khunian. Read the article for

yourself!

• Controversies subsequent to Kuhn’s book:

– The idea that scientists don’t change theories for reasons of objective evidence and argument

• New theory is adopted in large part on faith

– Old paradigm could be abandoned for good reasons, but not by compulsion of rational reasons

– As Kuhn says:

» “The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience which cannot be forced.”

– Peer pressure also plays a significant role in the acceptance of the new paradigm 25

• These notions were clearly a challenge to science as a rational activity as per the logical positivists

• Kuhn also made controversial claims about direction of scientific change

– Not a linear progression in which old incorrect ideas get replaced by new correct ones – the widely held view

– In places Kuhn questioned the viability of concept of objective truth

• The idea that there is a set of facts about the world independent of a particular paradigm

– Thus facts are paradigm relative, and change with paradigms

» Truth is relative

– Recall Darwin here!26

• Two significant arguments for these claims:

– Incommensurability of paradigms– Theory-ladenness of data

• Lets look at these in turn

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Incommensurability of paradigms• Old and new world views are incommensurable

– The entire world view and conceptual framework is different in the two paradigms

– The two paradigms are so different that there is no way in which they can be compared in a straightforward way

• No easy translation between them

– E.g. mass meant something different in Newtonian physics to what it means in relativity

» The concept fits into architecture of both theories – it is not something independent of them

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Recall my comment about formalists and functionalists talking

past each other.

• Incommensurability is one of the reasons for the non-objectivity of switching of allegiances in revolutions

– And the development of science can’t be seen as merely linear progress to truth

• Right and wrong are not independent of the framework

• In response to some criticisms Kuhn moderated his stance, and admitted that incommensurable paradigms could still be partially compared

– It is possible to communicate up to a point between the paradigms

• Though they might not come to agreement as to standards of evaluation, the important problems, nature of acceptable solutions, etc.29

Theory-ladenness of data• Does there (always) exist data that is

independent of the paradigms to the extent that proponents of both theories will accept it?

– Maintained by the logical positivists– Kuhn maintained that all data is contaminated by

theoretical assumptions

• We cannot isolate “pure” data out there, that would be accepted by all scientists regardless of their theoretical perspective

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• Kuhn suggested that:

– Perception is conditioned by beliefs

• What we see depends on what we believe – to some extent at least

• Observational data is generally couched in theoretical language

– Observations – at least interesting ones – can hardly be made without a technical language

– What are some of the theory-internal assumptions of:

» “the planets describe an elliptical orbit around the sun”

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• But some observations may be sufficiently theory neutral that they can be accepted by practitioners of any paradigm

– E.g. the observations made by Arthur Eddington of the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919

• Does this argue for a nihilistic abandonment of the concept of objective truth?

– It is not clear that Kuhn wanted to take this step

• Many things he said indicated that he did not wish to adopt a post-modern stance of relativity of truth

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• Paradox:

– Is the claim that truth is paradigm-relative objectively true or not?

• If “yes”, then objective truth must exist – thus a contradiction

• If “no”, on what grounds can a proponent argue against someone who believes in objective truth?

– None!

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• What about in linguistics?

– What is a piece of linguistic data?– Does any piece of linguistic data have any

existence outside of a paradigm?

• Is there anything like a theory neutral piece of data?

– In some ways, linguistic data is even more obviously paradigm-specific and peculiar than other

» What is a piece of “data” from my fieldwork on Shua or any other language?

» Or any other fieldworker’s “data” on a language 34

• I leave the last word to Max Planck:

– “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

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• Kuhn’s postscript of the 1970 2nd edition of his book suggested that he did not want to cast doubt on science as a rational activity

– He wanted to explain how it actually develops– And as a corrective to the logical positivists

simplistic and idealistic view of how science works

• That he wanted to give a more accurate picture of the nature of scientific rationality

– It is not the sort of logical rationality presumed by the positivists

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Concluding remarks

• A consequence of Kuhn’s ideas is that philosophers of science don’t ignore the history of science

– And don’t see such impenetrable divide between discovery and justification

• The social context of science has emerged as an important consideration

• To sum up, Kuhn’s basic scheme:

pre-science – normal science – crisis – revolution – new normal science – new crisis … 37

• There is a good deal of the plausible in Kuhn’s theory

– Even if it does not account adequately for all cases of scientific revolutions

• Recall the objection to Kuhnian revolutions in biology• In a paper a few years ago I argued that the

development of phonology in Australian Aboriginal linguistics does not represent a Kuhnian revolution even though:

– Understanding of sound patterns started as English-based phonetics; and

– Ended up as modern phonology – something radically different 38

• 1957 saw the publication of Syntactic structures

– Chomsky’s first published book, a short monograph that distilled the concepts presented in Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory – Chapter 9 of which, Transformational Analysis, formed his PhD thesis

– It was published by a Dutch publishing house, Mouton– In 1956, Chomsky showed an editor at Mouton his

lecture notes for MIT undergraduates, and a revised version of these notes were published as Syntactic Structures in the first week of February, 1957

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The Chomskyan revolution?

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It contains the famous sentence, Colourless green ideas sleep

furiously, which Chomsky offered as an example of a sentence that

is completely grammatical, yet completely nonsensical

• Favourable reviews from fellow American linguists, e.g., Robert Lees, made Syntactic Structures visible on the linguistic research landscape

• Shortly thereafter the book created a revolution in the discipline of linguistics

– At least, that is what has been often claimed

» I will say a few words about this claim

– But first a couple of words of contextualisation, regarding the emergence of Chomsky’s ideas to prominence

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• According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992

• He was the eighth most cited source overall

• He is the author of over 100 books

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• Intellectual politics is relevant to the story of the initial success of the generative paradigm

– The working out of historical precedents for the paradigm

– The construal of the paradigm as a revolution

• Significant here is Chomsky’s role as a rhetorician• Note the apparent conflicts between these two things

– Here I base the story largely on work by the historian of linguistics, E.F. Konrad Koerner

» In particular his 2002 book Toward a history of American linguistics

» Also the recent collection Chomskyan (r)evolutions, edited by Kibbee (2010) 44

• The establishing of historical precedents:

– Koerner argues that the primary stimulus for this was the hosting of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962

– At this congress Chomsky – largely unknown to European linguists – presented a paper arguing for roots of his ideas in Port Royal grammarians Claude Lancelot and Antoine Arnauld of the seventeenth century

– Koerner sees this largely as a politically motivated ploy on Chomsky’s part to establish precedents for his ideas – for political advantage

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• The ideas were published in his 1966 book Cartesian linguistics

– This is generally regarded by historians of linguistics as a complete failure intellectually

• That is, Chomsky misrepresented the Port Royal grammarians, giving them an anachronistic reading

– Where does “Cartesian linguistics” come in?

» Links to which philosopher?» And what notions in particular was Chomsky alluding to?

» Perhaps link here to the theme of myth-making? 46

• In brief, 3 major critiques:

1. Salmon 1967 examined relevant works on language from the medieval period to C17, showing that the key Cartesian notions were present in the medieval treatises, and that this was acknowledged by Descartes and others

2. Robin Lakoff 1969 draws similar conclusions about Descartes

3. John Searle objected to the ascription of language to innateness in Cartesian thought, and argued that Descartes really took an arbitrary and acquired position – innate ideas lay elsewhere

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• Enough on that topic• Let’s turn to the Chomskyan revolution

– And the subsequent revolutions, revolts and wars that characterised the development of Chomskyan theory

• Indeed, John Joseph has referred to Chomsky as a “serial revolutionary”

– Was there a revolution?

• Koerner argues not – that there was no significant paradigm change between Chomsky and his predecessors 48

• Problem here is of course with the amount – how much change is required to make a revolution?

– E.g. most linguists ultimately reject many of the ideas and approaches of their teachers

• Without being considered revolutionaries

• It is certainly easy to identify points on which Chomsky’s thought of the 1950s conflicted with that of his predecessors

– The American post-Bloomfieldians

• Including people like Rulon Wells, Zellig Harris (Chomsky’s thesis advisor), George L. Trager, Bernard Bloch, and Charles Hockett49

• The post-Bloomfieldians developed ideas derived from Bloomfield’s, sometimes in an extreme form, including:

– The principle that the distributions of forms should be analysed independently and in advance of their meanings; and

– The notion that a description of a language could be justified by following a rigid hierarchy of procedures

• These have been claimed to caricaturise post-Bloomfieldian thought

– And that meaning was central – e.g. to Hockett

• Such procedures were later characterized by Chomsky as discovery procedures

– And these were strongly rejected by Chomsky 50

Though meaning only ever appeared as an add

on in the generative tradition

• Also objected to were:

– The behaviourist psychology adopted by Bloomfield

• Trashed by Chomsky in his review of Skinner’s behaviourist account of first language acquisition

– The non-universalistic assumptions of the Bloomfieldians – that language is largely arbitrary, and not grounded in innate universal mental principles

– Lack of formalisation in the (post-) Bloomfieldian tradition

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• Other contrasts include:

– Reorientation of linguistics from languages to one language, English – Bloomfieldians were descriptivists interested in other languages, especially languages of North America

– Rationalist approach of Chomsky against the empiricist approach of the Bloomfieldians

– The role of the unacceptable and ungrammatical string, and displacement of the role of corpora

– Notion of language as an algebraic system – deriving from work in mathematical logic current at the time

• Ultimately stemming from the work of putting mathematics on an axiomatic foundation – Hilbert’s program

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• Koerner argues that the continuity with Bloomfieldian and post-Bloomfieldian linguistics is so strong that it is misleading to see Chomsky’s paradigm as revolutionary

– The basic notions of transformation were already in place in Harris’ work

• Which Chomsky knew well – both as a student of Harris, and as a proof reader of Harris 1951 Structural linguistics

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• John Joseph has suggested (2010) that Chomsky primarily reacted against his Bloomfieldian and post-Bloomfieldian predecessors

– Recall my earlier comment that a generation of scientists generally rejects most strongly the notions of their fathers

– That Chomsky did not cast his work as a rejection of earlier paradigms

• Indeed, he construed it as a return to the notions of his intellectual grandparents

– So Joseph suggests that the Chomskian paradigm can be seen as a revolution in the sense of revolving back to an earlier state

– Recall, however, the cautions concerning his construals of Port Royal grammar 54

• Regardless of whether we regard Chomsky’s theories as revolutionary, there is still a concern about how the claim to revolutionary status was successfully deployed to win over many “converts”

– In the 1960s Chomsky’s paradigm was touted as an instance of Kuhnian revolution, with the associated baggage

• Those who disagreed represented the old guard – who once they died would leave the field in the control of the new guard who took over as the leaders of the new “normal” linguistics 55

• But it is notable that structuralism of the first half of C20 focussed on phonology and morphology

– There was no dominant paradigm of syntax in the 1950s or earlier

• There was no paradigm of syntactic analysis to undergo crisis resulting in a revolution

– Stephen Murray (2010) argues that the historical record indicates that Chomsky and his supporters instigated conflict with the older generation of post-Bloomfieldians

• Not that they reacted to rejection by that group• Indeed, Bernard Bloch as editor of Language gave Chomsky

plenty of scope for disseminating his ideas, and space for a review of Syntactic structures by one of Chomsky’s students! 56

Recall Hockett’s comment: Chomskyan linguistics is “a theory

spawned by a generation of vipers.”

• One of the “dangers” inherent in Kuhn’s story is that it can be used for political mileage (recall the similar danger of biological evolutionary theory in the social domain, and ultimately Nazism)

– That the “revolutionary” status will be used to rhetorically support the theory, and advance it in the social context of the science

• Which recalls my initial reaction to Kuhn’s ideas a long time ago – late 1960s

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• Just as in the case of biology, we can question whether Kuhian revolutions are identifiable in linguistics

– It is not entirely clear that they have– Recall the overall picture of Kuhnian

revolutions:

pre-science – normal science – crisis – revolution – new normal science – new crisis …

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Conclusions

• As indicated, normal science is regarded as characterised by a single paradigm

– Not so in linguistics – or anthropology for that matter

– As we saw last time, there are a large number of different linguistic theories

• That overall share rather little• None serve as Kuhnian paradigms

– Perhaps the closest any theory came was the generative paradigm of the 1960s and early 1970

» But that fragmented by the late 1970s and subsequently» And increasingly other theories have become prominent

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• Translated into Kuhn’s scheme, the situation in linguistics might be – and sometimes is – considered to represent the pre-science and pre-paradigm stage

– No paradigm has yet become generally accepted

• Is there any reason to believe that the human sciences will ever follow the natural sciences in the adoption of a single paradigm?

– Perhaps the subject matter does not lend itself to such a treatment

– Perhaps too the paradigm diversity relates to phenomena in the social context of our subject 60