Re: principles of collective organization
On Friday 13 January 2006 18:28, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Rob,
>
> OK. That's a different point:
> > I'm talking about his "loss of generality" argument
> > presented in "The logical basis of linguistic theory",
> > 1962?
> >
> > In that argument Chomsky rejected empirical methods
> > exactly because they found no consistent primitives.
>
> In any case, there's an open-ended number of different
> "empirical methods", and it seems to be unreasonable
> to reject all such methods just because the ones that
> had been tried didn't give the desired results.
I'll let the philosophers argue whether we can always reject the result of an
experiment on the basis that there are other experiments which could be done.
Either way, Chomsky's argument can hardly be considered slam-dunk, while it
may be common (Kuhn?), I don't think it is universal scientific method to
throw out your experimental methods just because you don't like the results.
Though there is an interesting parallel to be drawn with the Michelson-Morley
experiment, which was repeated with endless refinements for decades while
researchers tried to get the result they expected.
What amazes me is that no-one considered the other possibility. The
experimental methods might have been fine, it might just be that the result
(no primitives) was correct.
To his credit Chomsky did draw attention to the issue, and it was enough to
shake the orthodoxy of the day. The results he presented were old. Everyone
else was just ignoring them.
Now a respectful interval has passed we are ignoring them again.
-Rob