Science

I’ve more than once heard Chomsky say that linguistics is in a “pre-scientific” stage; I’ll certainly go along with that characterization for his take on the field.

But for almost two centuries, much of what goes under the name of “linguistics” has been “scientific” in the sense of being falsifiable — and often falsified as well as confirmed.

Other kinds of “linguistic” work are “scientific” in the sense of using mathematical models to explore the phenomena of interest.

And there are corners of “linguistics” that connect directly to applications in engineering or in medicine.

Overall, though, I don’t think that the question of whether some work is “science” or not is a very interesting one. My point about Barthes, Foucault and so on was not that linguistics is science and they were/are not. What I tried to say was that there was a certain period of time during which they tried to copy what they perceived as the successes of linguistics, but without really understanding the field at all, as far as I can tell. Their efforts, by their own testimony, failed; though it seems that there is a considerable residue of terminology and conceptual bric-a-brac still in play in the thought and writing of the tradition that followed them.

I once heard someone say that while Isaac Newton invented calculus to explain physics, economics was invented to use calculus. I feel this way bout linguistics. It uses scientific tools and methods because they are there and they are useful. There is nothing wrong with this, and I’ll grant you that most linguists probably understand the tools and methods they are appropriating from science better than many of the people you cite understood what was happening in linguistics at the time. But, as with economics, what bothers me is the reductionism that can follow from restricting your discipline to what can be explored using certain tools.

It is arguable in economics, for instance, that many of their models are flawed because they are based on a reductionist model of human nature that fails to consider the role of social norms and power relations in shaping economic life. But if you suggest that economists incorporate such things, they will argue that to do so would force them to abandon their calculus, and therefore would be bad science. This doesn’t mean that much useful knowledge isn’t produced by economics, just that we should be aware of its limits. Similarly, I feel that linguistics works with a very limited notion of linguistic behavior because of its “euphoric dreams of being scientific.” This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a value to producing falsifiable knowledge about language, or using mathematical models - I fully appreciate both. However, it does strike me that limiting the definition of linguistics to only what can be understood with those scientific tools does a disservice to our understanding of the object of our study.

Interestingly, I think social scientists are more willing to concede the utility of science than linguists are willing to concede the utility of social science and philosophy in our common pursuit. But I agree with you that linguists are much more honest about saying that they don’t understand the social science or the philosophy (although I often feel that the subtext of such statements is that there is nothing there worth understanding), while the social scientists and the philosophers tend to appropriate the “science” for their own uses whether or not they fully understand it.

[…] Do socio-cultural anthropologists need the other disciplines? Considering some of the misconceptions about language upon which much contemporary social theory is based, it might be a good idea to have some more training in the area. (For a more complicated discussion of this last point, see my exchange with Mark Liberman.) […]