[From Rick Marken (01.02.14.0800)]
Bruce Nevin (01.02.13 19:40 EST)--
I have said many times that Generativist Linguistics is a crock,
and I said I was talking about descriptive linguistics.
Sorry. I didn't pick that up. Sounded like you were talking about
language as a self-organizing system.
Me:
I don't think I'll have much chance to read these.
Ye:
Then you don't have time to find out what I'm talking about.
Is it really impossible to discuss it on CSGNet? What's CSGNet
for, anyway?
But if you don't find out what I'm talking about, I don't
think you should tell me what I'm talking about.
I'm sorry you feel like I was telling you what you were
talking about. From my perspective I was just trying to
understand and reply to what you were saying.
Even in this exchange, you are not concerned with what I am
talking about.
If I weren't, then I wouldn't have replied. In a sense you're right,
though. What I am concerned about is the state of the variables I
control. What you said was apparently a disturbance to one of those
variables. So I was not concerned with what you were talking about
so much as its effect on the state of a controlled variable. I think
this is almost always the case when we have discussions on CSGNet.
People are concerned about the state of the variables (beliefs,
mainly) they are controlling for. When other people say things that
are a disturbance to those variables we get discussion. Unfortunately,
we also get in fights because we notice who is the source of the
disturbance (it's usually at the top of every post) and realize that
we wouldn't have to take to trouble to defend our beliefs if we could
just get the source of the disturbance to stop saying those things;-)
You are omitting the point that a side effect that is irrelevant
for control of proximity can be relevant for control of being
perceived by others in an unwanted way...Consequences that are
unintended with respect to control of one variable can disturb
one's control of another variable.
I "omitted" this point, not because I was not concerned about what
you were talking about but because it wasn't a disturbance to
anything I am controlling for. I think it's a good point, though
I don't see it's relevance to my main interest in this conversation,
which is encouraging language research based on the idea that
language behaviors are side effects of the control of perceptions
that may not be anything like the aspects of language described
by "descriptive linguistics".
Me:
But I would like to know what you think constitutes a linguistic
test for a controlled variable.
Ye:
I've done this before. You could search for pair test in the archives.
I still don't quite see this as an actual test for the controlled
variable. I may have agreed that it was at one point. If so, I
don't know why. It seems to be missing some crucial elements of
the test. For example, what is the hypothesized controlled variable?
How are disturbances to this variable introduced? Where is the
observation that the variable is protected from the disturbances?
There are further issues of course, and more is done to identify
just what the controlled variables are (a difficult task because
a great many are controlled at once, with redundancy among them
which enables sometimes very "sloppy" control to be adequate where
other times very precise control of the same variable is necessary)
I don't think the number of simultaneously controlled variables
is ever a problem. Organisms are always controlling many variables
simultaneously and the actions used to control some variables are
often disturbances to the state of other controlled variables. But
this creates no problem unless there is conflict. I think the
difficulty of doing the test on language behavior comes from the
fact that the variables that are controlled in language behavior
can only be perceived by people -- indeed, by people who speak the
language under study. There are no machines that can measure the
state of a variable like "degree of sarcasm", for example. So
linguistic tests, especially tests of high level variables, like
sarcasm, will be "instrumented" by human informants. But that's
why linguistic PCT research would be so nice; it would show how
we can test for controlled variables that can only be perceived,
at present, by one kind of measuring device: the human brain.
Best regards
Rick
···
--
Richard S. Marken Phone or Fax: 310 474-0313
MindReadings.com mailto: marken@mindreadings.com
www.mindreadings.com