Course Overview
Course Description
Content
This course is about the philosophy of science, and what a better understanding of the philosophy of science can do for us as linguists, and as people interested in linguistics. The world of linguistics is filled with people telling us how we should do linguistics. Sometimes they tell us what we should be doing if we want to be rational, or be scientists. How far should we take their advice?
Jim McCawley used to offer a course which he described as a self-defense course for practicing linguists on philosophy of science, and the course served as the basis for a book he was writing on the subject. We will read Jim's unpublished book, and read literature both in linguistics and philosophy of science that every linguist really should have read. Linguists all operate with a working philosophy of science that they have absorbed from the discipline, more often than not without a clear sense of where the ideas came from and how they fit together (or if they can be made to).
Objectives and Structure
The structure of this class will consist of whatever we need to do to encourage long conversations with universal participation. The point of the course is to read things that amaze and astonish us, both by what they say and by the fresh light they shine on what we have learned about linguistics. To make that happen, we have to talk about these ideas and make explicit assumptions that we have always made but which we all of a sudden realize were nothing but assumptions--rebuttable assumptions. In this way, we help each other learn.
Some generally useful materials
Assignments
Presentations
Students will participate in the presentation and discussion of the readings.Other Assignments
I will ask each student to write up thoughts and ideas each week based on what s/he is reading for the course: either things I've specifically assigned, or other things that the student has been incited to read based on what we have done and read. I'd like each student to create a document (.doc or .tex) which will grow, diary-like, by 500 to 1,000 words each week, in which ideas, questions, summaries and responses to our readings and discussions will take form. Each Friday it will get sent to me, and I'll send it back with comments. In this way, a term paper will emerge by the end of the quarter.
Course Policies & Grading
Grading
-
Grading will be based primarily on written assignments, but also on class presentation and participation.
Bertrand Russell offered a wise comment that we should bear constantly in mind:
In studying a philosopher the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude...Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second...When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking..
Bertrand Russell The History of Western Philosophy
What is science (and why should we care?)
Let's begin by asking ourselves, before we do much reading, what we think science is, and why we might even care about how to define, or identify, it. What characteristics does science typically, or always, have? What characteristics are tell-tale indicators that a discipline is not a science? Why should we care about this question? or to put it another way, is there a more interesting question here than simply how the label "science" is or isn't (or should or shouldn't be) applied?And what about the Scientific Revolution?
Following up on last week's discussion about what science is, it seems pretty clear that we need to look at science as it has actually been practiced to understand what it is---and it seems reasonable to think that a good way for the science/not-science distinction to come into focus is to look at how science emerged historically. To do that, the natural place to look is at the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries: what is it that emerged during that period from Galileo through Newton?Earlier 20th century views on science
On defining "science." A. Cornelius Benjamin.Karl Popper
Reading:- The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Pp. 15-56 for a concise overview of the early Popper.
- Chapter One of McCawley's book (the chapter is entitled: Karl Popper).
Thomas Kuhn
The structure of scientific revolutions
- Traditional discussions of scientific method have sought a set of rules that would permit any individual who followed them to produce sound knowledge. I have tried to insist, instead, that, though science is practiced by individuals, scientific knowledge is intrinsically a group product and that neither its peculiar efficacy or the manner in which it develops will be understood without reference to the special nature of the groups that produce it. p. xx.
- When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, ...when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning. p. xii
- If [scientists] accepted a sufficient set of these standard examples,
they could model their own subsequent research on them without needing to
agree about which set of characteristics of these examples made them standard,
justified their acceptance. That procedure seemed very close to the one
by which students of language learn to conjugate verbs and to decline
nouns and adjectives. They learn, for example, to recite amo, amas, amat,
amamus, amatis, amant, and they then use that standard form to produce the
present active tense of other first conjugation Latin verbs. The usual
English word for the standard examples employed in language teaching is “paradigms,”and
my extension of that term to standard scientific problems like the inclined
plane and conical pendulum did it no apparent violence. p. xix.
-- Thomas Kuhn The Essential Tension (1979)
Reading:
- Thomas Kuhn. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
- Kuhn to Popper: Logic of discovery or psychology of research? In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave.
-
Chapter 27, on Thomas Kuhn in Battle in the Mind Fields (Goldsmith and Laks, ms.) - Chapter Two of McCawley's book (the chapter is entitled: Thomas Kuhn).
- Frederick J. Newmeyer. Has There Been a 'Chomskyan Revolution' in Linguistics? Language, Vol. 62, No. 1. (Mar., 1986), pp. 1-18. link
- The structure of unscientific revolutions. Shalom Lappin, Robert D. Levine, and David E. Johnson. NLLT, Vol. 18, (2000), pp. 665-671.
- The revolution maximally confused. Shalom Lappin, Robert D. Levine, and David E. Johnson. NLLT, Vol. 19, (2001), pp. 901-919.
- The Anatomy of a Revolution in the Social Sciences: Chomsky in 1962 E. F. Konrad Koerner.
- LINGUISTICS AND REVOLUTION WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ E. F. K. KOERNER
- The Structure of Unscientific Revolutions. Lapin, Levine, and Johnson. And Part 2 of same.
- Did a (Kuhnian) Revolution occur in linguistics? Morton Winston.
Imre Lakatos
Reading:Paul Feyerabend
I Bernard Cohen. Orthodoxy and Scientific Progress. 1952.