Problem 2
Right for all the wrong reasons.
Notes
Farmer Field wants to make sure that his favourite cow, Daisy, is safe and sound. It’s not just enough for the dairyman to say that she’s in the field, he wants to be certain. So he goes to the field and sees a black and white shape behind some tree in the distance. All is well with the world, or so it seems.
The dairyman also goes to check and finds Daisy sitting in a hollow out of view of the gate and a large piece of paper caught in a tree.
Thus Daisy really was in the field, but was Farmer Field right to say that he knew she was?
I don’t think there’s probably a satisfactory answer to this question. Even although Daisy was in the field, Farmer Field was wrong to say that he knew she was there because he never confirmed his observation. It looked like a cow; therefore it was a cow. On the other hand, he was right at the time even although what he thought was Daisy was a large piece of black and white paper because he believed he was correct. His situation was like human knowledge. What we think is fact today might turn out to be erroneous tomorrow. Once upon a time, for example, people thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe around which all else revolved. Then Copernicus showed that the planets revolved around the sun and we know today that we’re a long way from the centre of the galaxy let alone the universe. In other words, the dairyman is sort of Copernicus to Farmer Field’s Ptolemy. (Although the analogy is imperfect.)
Knowledge, I suppose, is not the same as fact. My knowledge contains both facts and fictions; some of those fictions I’ll know to be fictions (e.g. Ptolemaic cosmology), but some of those fictions I’ll believe to be facts. And some of my knowledge will encompass matters which might be fact or fiction, but I don’t know the truth of it.
When it comes to my own field, linguistics, I note that knowledge of the subject has evolved and each stage in the evolution bears the hallmarks of the previous stages. The 19th century started with historical and comparative linguistics, and ended with the development of synchronic linguistics in the form of Structuralism. But linguistic rules seem to be a throwback to the historical linguistics of the 19th century even after the development of generative phonology. That started as linear phonology until it was displaced after about 10 years by non-linear phonology, although much of the baggage was inherited from SPE. And although Optimality Theory dispensed with rules, much of the baggage of non-linear phonology was carried over to OT. But has our knowledge of language and its doings actually advanced? Does OT provide a better description of how language behaves? Hasn’t it possibly imported errors from rule-based phonology? Has linguistic theory ever been anything more than a model rather than a definitive statement? I’d have to put linguistics in the third category: descriptive models might be fact or fiction.[1]
The dairyman also goes to check and finds Daisy sitting in a hollow out of view of the gate and a large piece of paper caught in a tree.
Thus Daisy really was in the field, but was Farmer Field right to say that he knew she was?
I don’t think there’s probably a satisfactory answer to this question. Even although Daisy was in the field, Farmer Field was wrong to say that he knew she was there because he never confirmed his observation. It looked like a cow; therefore it was a cow. On the other hand, he was right at the time even although what he thought was Daisy was a large piece of black and white paper because he believed he was correct. His situation was like human knowledge. What we think is fact today might turn out to be erroneous tomorrow. Once upon a time, for example, people thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe around which all else revolved. Then Copernicus showed that the planets revolved around the sun and we know today that we’re a long way from the centre of the galaxy let alone the universe. In other words, the dairyman is sort of Copernicus to Farmer Field’s Ptolemy. (Although the analogy is imperfect.)
Knowledge, I suppose, is not the same as fact. My knowledge contains both facts and fictions; some of those fictions I’ll know to be fictions (e.g. Ptolemaic cosmology), but some of those fictions I’ll believe to be facts. And some of my knowledge will encompass matters which might be fact or fiction, but I don’t know the truth of it.
When it comes to my own field, linguistics, I note that knowledge of the subject has evolved and each stage in the evolution bears the hallmarks of the previous stages. The 19th century started with historical and comparative linguistics, and ended with the development of synchronic linguistics in the form of Structuralism. But linguistic rules seem to be a throwback to the historical linguistics of the 19th century even after the development of generative phonology. That started as linear phonology until it was displaced after about 10 years by non-linear phonology, although much of the baggage was inherited from SPE. And although Optimality Theory dispensed with rules, much of the baggage of non-linear phonology was carried over to OT. But has our knowledge of language and its doings actually advanced? Does OT provide a better description of how language behaves? Hasn’t it possibly imported errors from rule-based phonology? Has linguistic theory ever been anything more than a model rather than a definitive statement? I’d have to put linguistics in the third category: descriptive models might be fact or fiction.[1]
Protagoras finds that lawyers can be slippery devils. He ought to know – he trained Euathlos.
Notes
1. I’m inclined to view OT as a dead end, a powerful fiction that lacks adequate constraint and is just about impossible to falsify. The one area of language where it is a demonstrable failure (at least in its early incarnations) is opacity. Prince, McCarthy and co. resorted to analogy (but rebranded it as correspondence), which seems too random a thing when chronologically we know that the chain was A --> (B) --> C, where B is necessary to account for C, but “disappears”. An alternative is the reintroduction of levels, which were a feature of lexical phonology.
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