Progressivism
Progressivism
Progressivism
Philosophy of Linguistics
First published Wed Sep 21, 2011; substantive revision Thu Jan 1, 2015
Philosophy of linguistics is the philosophy of science as applied to linguistics.
This differentiates it sharply from the philosophy of language, traditionally
concerned with matters of meaning and reference.
As with the philosophy of other special sciences, there are general topics
relating to matters like methodology and explanation (e.g., the status of
statistical explanations in psychology and sociology, or the physics-chemistry
relation in philosophy of chemistry), and more specific philosophical issues
that come up in the special science at issue (simultaneity for philosophy of
physics; individuation of species and ecosystems for the philosophy of
biology). General topics of the first type in the philosophy of linguistics
include:
Theorizing:
Externalism,
The issues we discuss have been debated with vigor and sometimes venom.
Some of the people involved have had famous exchanges in the linguistics
journals, in the popular press, and in public forums. To understand the sharp
disagreements between advocates of the approaches it may be useful to
EMERGENTISTS
ESSENTIALISTS
Primary
Actual utterances as Facts
of
social Intuitions
phenome produced
by cognition, interaction, grammaticality
na
language users
and communication literal meaning
of
and
Primary
subject
matter
Language
use;
structural properties
of expressions and
languages
Abstract
universal
Linguistic
principles
that
communication,
explain
the
cognition, variation,
properties of specific
and change
languages
Aim
To describe attested
expression structure
and
interrelations,
and
predicting
properties
of
unattested
expressions
To explain structural
properties
of
languages in terms of
general
cognitive
mechanisms
and
communicative
functions
To
articulate
universal principles
and
provide
explanations
for
deep
and
crosslinguistically
constant
linguistic
properties
A
system
of
patterns, inferrable
Linguistic from
generally
structure accessible, objective
features of language
use
A
system
of
constructions
that
range
from
fixed
idiomatic phrases to
highly
abstract
productive types
A system of abstract
conditions that may
not be evident from
the experience of
typical
language
users
Accurate modeling
of linguistic form
that accords with
empirical data and
permits
prediction
concerning
unconsidered cases
Cognitive,
cultural,
historical,
and
evolutionary
explanations
of
phenomena found in
linguistic
communication
systems
Highly
abstract,
covering-law
explanations
for
properties
of
language as inferred
from
linguistic
intuitions
Values
linguistic
competence
obscured
adult communicative cognitive,
competence
articulatory,
lexical limits
A grasp of the
A
mainly
distributional
conventional
and
What
is properties of the
culturally transmitted
acquired constituents
of
system for linguistic
expressions
of
a
communication
language
by
and
An
internalized
generative
device
that characterizes an
infinite
set
of
expressions
A broad and varied range of distinct research projects can be pursued within
any of these approaches; one advocate may be more motivated by some
parts of the overall project than others are. So the tendencies should not be
taken as sharply honed, well-developed research programs or theories.
Rather, they provide background biases for the development of specific
research programsbiases which sometimes develop into ideological
stances or polemical programs or lead to the branching off of new
specialisms with separate journals. In the judgment of Phillips (2010), Dialog
between adherents of different approaches is alarmingly rare.
The names we have given these approaches are just mnemonic tags, not
descriptions. The Externalists, for example, might well have been called
structural descriptivists instead, since they tend to be especially concerned
to develop models that can be used to predict the structure of natural
language expressions. The Externalists have long been referred to by
Essentialists as empiricists (and sometimes Externalists apply that term to
themselves), though this is misleading (see Scholz and Pullum 2006: 6063):
the empiricist tag comes with an accusation of denying the role of learning
biases in language acquisition (see Matthews 1984, Laurence and Margolis
2001), but that is no part of the Externalists' creed (see e.g. Elman 1993,
Lappin and Shieber 2007).
Emergentists are also sometimes referred to by Essentialists as empiricists,
but they either use the Emergentist label for themselves (Bates et al. 1998,
O'Grady 2008, MacWhinney 2005) or call themselves usage-based linguists
(Barlow and Kemmer 2002, Tomasello 2003) or construction grammarians
(Goldberg 1995). Newmeyer (1991), like Tomasello, refers to the Essentialists
as formalists, because of their tendency to employ abstractions, and to use
tools from mathematics and logic. Despite these terminological
inconsistencies, we can look at what typical members of each approach
would say about their vision of linguistic science, and what they say about
the alternatives. Many of the central differences between these approaches
depend on what proponents consider to be the main project of linguistic
theorizing, and what they count as a satisfying explanation.