Language Module

One of the reasons that I like the “Computational” part better than the “Linguist” part of my job description is that the “computational” part doesn’t give you any bullshit. A program either runs or it doesn’t, it either gets the result it’s supposed to get, or it doesn’t. And while for very complicated programs it’s not always immediately obvious that it’s not doing what it’s supposed to, it eventually not only becomes clear that it isn’t, but it is always possible, with a certain amount of effort, to explain why it’s failed.

In Linguistics, by contrast, it can be frustratingly hard to separate out the assumptions from the conclusions. And indeed, certain Linguists - infamously including Noam Chomsky - actually take advantage of that truth to avoid criticism. The Minimalist Program is a “Program” and not a “theory,” after all, because it wants to adopt certain assumptions without having to justify them.

I’m actually not opposed to this style of research in principle. In fact, I’m not sure how else Syntax is supposed to operate. As van Riemsdijk and Williams put it in the introduction to their excellent syntax primer:

The material in this book constitutes a detailed and specific theory of grammar. As such, it naturally rests on strong assumptions about the domain of phenomena that the theory of grammar is about, and about the role of the theory of grammar in the general theory of language. These assumptions are supported to the extent that the resulting theory of grammar gives satisfying explanations, and to the extent that it supports or “meshes with” theories concerning other aspects of language.

Right. There is no other way to do Syntax - and that’s a fault of the fact that, again using the words of van Riemsdijk and Williams, “It is by no means obvious that the study of grammar is not an arbitrarily defined subdiscipline most properly dissolved in favor of some combination of studies.” Put another way, while it seems obvious to me that there are syntactic phenomena, it is not perfectly obvious, and for that reason people in my line of work often feel the need to apologize for what they do.

They don’t, of course, actually apologize. What they tend to do instead is internalize these feelings behind walls of dogma, perceiving - largely correctly, in my experience - that they are surrounded by people who think what they do is meaningless.

So it’s nice to read in the Briggs Blog today someone who thinks this is a characteristic of any “scientific” field that approaches the humanities. Quoting the man himself:

The closer a field of study is itself to politics or any area which involves human behavior, the more the consensus acts to keep people in line than it does to promote innovation. Non-consensus ideas are not welcome. Professors holding verboten thoughts are not hired, or if they are found out, they are let go, or they even leave voluntarily, tired of the process.

So it’s not just us. It’s Psychology, and Economics, and Sociology, and All that Jazz too. And he gives a possible remedy:

The solution seems to be, because people in areas which involve humans are prone to ill-informed zealousness, that they should all be taught and consistently reminded that they might be wrong. This is the reason, after all, that, on average, people involved in physical areas are humbler: they have seen and verified their failures, and they have seen and acknowledged that their predictions sometimes are a bust.

I would say that’s actually the lesser half of the story. The greater half is that they know their colleagues have experienced similar failures. One of the things that I noticed about Computer Science culture when I started taking classes in that Department is how much failure professors admit compared to students. Which is to say, a lot relative to virtually none at all. And it isn’t too hard to figure out why: professors are tenured and proven, while students are still in competition with each other. So you get these odd situations where the professors come off looking really dumb, admitting to the suboptimal solutions they originally found to the problems they’re writing on the board, or confessing that they can’t read Java code, or whatever - while the students are busy stretching their hands as high in the air as possible to drop comments about having casually done something last night while messing around that’s known to be difficult. In reality, of course, the professors know the subject much, much better - the difference is just that students don’t feel comfortable admitting failure in public yet because they haven’t seen their colleagues do it.

I think the trouble with Linguistics isn’t that we’re not constantly reminded we could be wrong. Au contraire - Linguists are more brutal about this than people in most fields I know. They LOVE pointing out their colleagues’ mistakes. What’s lacking isn’t the Pennance, in other words, it’s the Priest. We’re constantly casting stones and reminding each other just how wrong it’s possible for us to be - the problem is that there isn’t anything forcing anyone to admit that a blow’s been landed. And so we don’t get the critical mass of examples of colleagues publicly admitting failure necessary to create a comfort zone in admiting failure ourselves. It’s an Economics question, really. When a good is scarce, it’s expensive - when it’s ubiquitous, it’s cheap. If you’re in a profession where examples of failure are “a dime a dozen,” to cash in on the pun, then it costs you nothing. But if you’re in a field where people rarely admit it (because they rarely have to), then the cost of a public confession of failure is quite high, and you think twice about it.

So I don’t think the remedy is reminding people that they “could be wrong.” I think the remedy is finding ways to prove people wrong and employing them mercilessly. There’s that oxymoronic military line about how “we had to destroy the village to save it.” In science, I’m not sure it’s an oxymoron. I think a little bloodletting is actually healthy. It’s sort of the way you have to first train a fighter to take punches before you teach him to avoid them. I think the main problem in humanities-adjacent fields like Linguistics is that people don’t take enough punches, and so they’re so scared of them that they curl into little balls in the corner of the ring rather than getting up and having it out. More accurately, what they don’t realize is that it takes more than a single blow to fell a man. Anyone can take a couple of punches - and in fact you don’t generally get in a position to win a fight without getting close enough that many of your opponent’s punches land. Linguists need to get away from the notion that a single counterexample disproves a theory, that any single punch is going to be a knockout blow.

How to accomplish it? My experience is that the laws of Economics may be subtle, but they are laws. So one thing I know isn’t going to work is direct approaches - like reminding people to remind each other to be humble because they may be wrong. The only way to fix it is to change the incentives, to, as it were, lower the price of failure. And the only way I know of to do that is for there to be a lot more failure about for people to see. I can’t solve it - but I think I can make a contribution. A parser-generator for Minimalism along the lines of the LKB for HPSG will at least realize the possibility that there could be a database of sentences that have been used in syntax papers against which people could test their tweaks to the theory - to see just which sentences that were formerly grammatical are no longer predicted to be under the new version of the theory, for example.