Flag waving
As usual, I agree with almost everything Arnold Zwicky
says,
but I think
explanatory adequacy
is a suggestive example of a quirky linguistics meme for precisely the reason he says it is a bad
example: as he puts it,
someone who
uses the expression might just as well be waving flags that say
"CHOMSKY" and "MIT". Precisely! Using the term, I'm suggesting, has more to
do with saying who we are than saying what we mean.
I'll buy, in humble pie contradistinction to
what
I said previously, that
explanatory
adequacy is a technical term. Quite apart from Chomsky's
stated views on the meaning of
explanatory,
we see at least an ostensive definition in the form of explicit
contrasts between theories which are
explanatorily
adequate, and those which are "merely descriptively adequate" as
I recall Chomsky put it. (And the word
merely is part of this meme.)
How productive is
explanatory
adequacy? Is it the case that something
has
explanatory adequacy if
and only if it is an explanation which is
adequate? If a linguist uses the phrase
adequate explanation, is this
then a technical term? What differs, I submit, is not the semantics,
but the pragmatics. A linguist who uses the phrase
adequate explanation
to describe a theory would presumably deny that the theory was merely
descriptively adequate. So the
meanings of
adequate explanation
and
explanatory adequacy must
be closely related for linguists in general. Both phrases could be used with Chomsky's original acquisition-centered perspective in mind, although my guess is that in practice both are used without this slant: certainly the practice from Chomsky on has been to use them without heavy use of actual acquisition data. The main difference
between a linguist that uses
explanatory adequacy and one that uses
adequate explanation is typically
that the first one waves flags that the second one does not — at least, not as vigorously.
Logically, there are at least two ways that a term like explanatory
adequacy could come to be widespread in the field. First, some users of
a term they have seen before could be repeating it rather lazily, a boilerplate they hammer into a paper to show whether they approve of a given theory. It
would then be snowclonic, to abuse the technical vocabulary of this
blog. Alternatively, they could be repeating it because it really
captures a feeling they take to be appropriate. And the question then
is, do they have this feeing because they want to assert that some x is
P, where x is a theory and P is the set of things that satisfy
explanatory adequacy. Or do they
have the feeling because they know that decorating their thoughts with
a patina of Chomskyana will help establish their credentials and their
sub-cultural affiliation? And are those linguists (I could name some)
who fail to so decorate their papers failing to do so because the
concepts do not refer appropriately, or because at some level they want
to express their disaffectedness?
[Update: In my original post, I should have taken into account that hundreds of occurrences of
explanatory adequacy are bibliographic citations of Chomsky (2001)
Beyond Explanatory Adequacy. This does not affect the argument in a big way, since using Google I can put an upper limit on the number of these citations at less than 15% of the total. But perhaps it is time for me to move beyond explanatory adequacy, and figure out a better way to illustrate my pop-sociolinguistic Tensor-derived point, by finding more linguistic memes that don't fit neatly into the category of technical terms. Even better would be if someone does it for me! Suggestions sent to dib AT stanford DOT edu are welcome. So far the best I came up with is the word
counterexemplify, which is used almost exclusively by linguists, although with a small minority of philosophical uses, and gets over 100 Google hits in various morphological forms. By comparison,
counterexample gets hundreds of thousands of hits, mostly non-linguistic. So which linguist was it that first turned
counterexample into a verb (or added a prefix to
exemplify)?]
Posted by David Beaver at January 29, 2005 03:24 PM