What is explanatory adequacy?
There's a
nice post at
Tenser said the Tensor on distinctive lexical
features of the linguistic subculture. The point is
that the common language of a scientific subculture is not just a
simple sum [the standard language of scholarly writing]+[an explicitly
or even ostensively defined technical vocabulary]. In addition to the
clearly technical vocabulary there is likely a huge grey area of
semi-technical or non-technical quirky turns of phrase which, having
been infiltrated into our community by a single linguist, pass
virus-like from one paper to the next.
Tensor's examples are
X motivates Y
(with the meaning
X provides
motivation to accept Y), and
standardly
assumed. I would guess that it is standardly assumed by
linguists that
standardly assumed
is not at all particular to
linguistics, but would come up whenever there was something that was
standardly assumed. Apparently not. Tensor points out that googling
"standardly
assumed" produces about 800 ghits, whereas
"standardly
assumed" -linguist -linguistic -linguistics -syntactic -phonology
-phonological -morphology -morphological -grammar -grammatical -phrasal
-clausal -indicative -subjunctive -raising produces only 67.
This is really suggestive: just how large are the differences in
frequency profiles of the languages
(midiolects?)
of different scientific subcultures, and how rapidly do those frequency
profiles change? Can we observe a Kuhnian paradigm shift in action by
looking at frequency data alone? And if we can observe changes in
this way, then to what extent would the changes reflect new
understanding, and to what extent a desire to act different?
The first thing I could think of to test Tensor's method is the
Chomskyan phrase
explanatory adequacy.
which I compared with
adequate explanation to provide a control on the
method, and also on those weird and whacky Google counts we have been
worrying about lately. Here are the searches and their Google
frequencies:
The phrase
explanatory adequacy
is usually not surrounded by quote marks. For
explanatory adequacy is something
that we linguists like to present as an obvious shared goal of
scientific investigation, and we generally assume that any educated
reader will know just what we mean. Perhaps they will. But if that
reader is not a linguist, the table above shows that the chances are
that the reader will never have seen the component words organized in
that way, since at least 85% of uses of the phrase (more if we look at
the actual search results) are in the linguistic literature.
Maybe the compound
explanatory
adequacy could be regarded as a technical term in linguistics.
But I had not thought of it that way, and nor do I want to
now. I personally had assumed that the meaning is derived
compositionally from the meanings of
explanatory
and
adequacy, and that
neither of these were technical terms in linguistics. I had thought
that anyone who knows what an
adequate explanation is also knows what
explanatory adequacy is. Yet, at the text level,
adequate explanation is
distributionally quite unlike
explanatory
adequacy, and is clearly not peculiar to linguistics. The vast
majority of hits for
adequate
explanation appear to be outside of linguistics.
When we use
explanatory adequacy,
we use words that an educated person would know, and the semantics is
intended to be clear. For that reason, I've said I do not want to call it a
technical term. So what is it? Well, what we are really doing when we
use it is conjuring up a web of associations.
Blah blah blah explanatory adequacy blah
blah standardly assumed blah blah, I say, and you might almost
think I have an MIT PhD. It's not so much a technical term as a term of
art, or artifice, designed to tell you who I am. Or wannabe. A lexical
meme, yes, but one I use with an intention to say something about who I
am and what enterprise I am engaged in.
What is
explanatory adequacy?
I regret to have to tell you that
explanatory
adequacy is now part of my identity.
Posted by David Beaver at January 29, 2005 03:24 AM