Mapping Scientific Method

Disciplinary Narrations

Gita Chadha, Renny Thomas, Gita Chadha, Renny Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032273525
• eBook ISBN: 9781000604016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores how the scientific method enters and determines the dominant methodologies of various modern academic disciplines. It highlights the ways in which practitioners from different disciplinary backgrounds –– the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences –– engage with the scientific method in their own disciplines.

The book maps the discourse (within each of the disciplines) that critiques the scientific method, from different social locations, in order to argue for more complex and nuanced approaches in methodology. It also investigates the connections between the method and the structures of power and domination which exist within these disciplines. In the process, it offers a new way of thinking about the philosophy of the scientific method.

Part of the Science and Technology Studies series, this volume is the first of its kind in the South Asian context to debate scientific methods and address questions by scholars based in the global south. It will be useful to students and practitioners of science, humanities, social sciences, philosophy of science, and philosophy of social science. Research scholars from these disciplines, especially those engaging in interdisciplinary research, will also benefit from this volume.

Part I
SHIFTS WITHIN THE SILO: HUMANITIES

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

DOI: 10.4324/9781003298908-3

Most universities and academic institutions divide disciplines into three broad silos: sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. They get listed like this, almost, in the order of their perceived importance to the modern pursuit of knowledge. In fact, if we use science as an identity marker, the humanities, constituted by philosophy and literature (linguistics being somewhat of an outlier even in this classification), are put out of the silos of the sciences – natural and social – which are seen as unified by a method. The ‘humanities’ are constructed as ‘creative’ fields while the sciences are not, much to the chagrin of the scientists. Philosophers are perceived as using speculation without empirical verification and the literature wallahs are seen as exercising imagination without a sense of the real. Linguistics is of course seen as lying in between being a science and an ‘arts’ discipline. Since we had decided, in a considered manner, to imitate the disciplinary order in the academic institutions, we placed linguistics in this section as an ‘arts’ subject. While debating the foundations of methods in any discipline, we inevitably find ourselves excavating its philosophical foundations. Often practitioners of the natural sciences say that the question of method is more to do with philosophy than with science. Paradoxically, we also know that the birth of modern science was born out of generally severing ties with philosophy and more particularly with metaphysics. But how does the discipline of philosophy itself look at the question of method is a fascinating question to explore. It is also interesting to explore how the method question is articulated in the study of both literature and language. Does a ‘scientific reading’ of a literary text enhance or endanger the core text? Does academic equal to scientific, or are there other ways of marking academic readings of literacy texts? The essays in this section explore some of these questions.

1 Methods in Substantivist Linguistics

Probal Dasgupta

DOI: 10.4324/9781003298908-4

Organisation

Disagreements in linguistics and in its classical version, grammar, have always been difficult to resolve. This feature of the discipline goes back to the intellectual landscape of ancient societies. Ancient Romans were used to seeing grammarians debate subtle points without ever reaching a consensus. Horace, in his ‘Ars Poetica’, famously wrote: ‘Grammatici certant et adhuc sub judice lis est’, which is Latin for ‘The grammarians are contending, and the matter is still under dispute’ (line 78 of the ‘Ars Poetica’, quoted in Williams 2013: 67). Thus, speaking for the discipline to an audience largely composed of non-specialists becomes a fraught enterprise not only because of the interminable contestations within the field but also because linguistics strikes today’s general public as a particularly opaque discipline.

This unusual opacity has to do with the fact that linguistics has not been accepted as a science whose authority in the domain of language is uncontested. All societies to this day have their language apparatuses – their systems of language teaching, publishing, editing, etc. – driven by traditional grammar, not by linguistics. In the minefield of ideas and perspectives in linguistics, there is one school of thought, known as substantivism, which treats this unfinished journey of linguistics towards social acceptance not as an irrelevant external difficulty but as part of the core concerns that the discipline has to address. By a fortuitous coincidence, substantivism is also intimately connected to modern India, which makes it a suitable vantage point for an intervention in this volume.

This chapter is organised as follows. In the first section, ‘A Science of Language?’ we look at considerations that justify a science-of-language enterprise. The second section, ‘Compositionalism, Overreach, and Consequences’, takes up some factors that have brought this enterprise into a state of malaise verging on a crisis. The third section, ‘The Architecture Meets the Thatchwork’, flags some resources that help us to diagnose and address the crisis. The last section, ‘Situating the Resonances’, places the specific crisis of linguistic science in a larger context.

A Science of Language?

The ‘common sense’ underlying our scientific discourse classifies happenings into actions and mere events. ¹ Actions reflect free will. There is no science to them. Sciences study the patterns of necessity and chance, not the actions an agent has chosen to perform. The patterns of ‘mere’ events that nobody is responsible for fall under the purview of science. Where does this leave language?

My writing these pages for you is an exercise of free will. If it counts as ‘language’, then there is no science of language. How can acts of writing or speaking be ‘mere events’?

Pursuing this question is trickier than one might imagine. Suppose I say to you, ‘Listen, the cat really is on the mat.’ My saying this, or any other utterance – spoken or written – is a freely chosen action, therefore outside the purview of science. But a science of language treats each language as a super-pattern of possible event-patterns, within which the speaker or writer makes actual choices.

Thus, both (1) The cat is on the mat and (2) The bat is on the hat are possible sentences in English. But the range of the possible excludes (3) *Bat the is hat the on (the prefix ‘*’ labels a string of words as formally inadmissible, excluded, ill-formed).

To speak/write English, in a given context, involves choosing a sentence to utter, within the range of possible sentences. The concrete choices one makes fall outside science; they count as discourse. Studies of discourse cannot be systematised into a science. However, every super-pattern of event-patterns within which speakers/writers make their discursive choices is a language. Linguistics is the science dedicated to languages. The linguistics of English is a province within that science.

This binary – language (systematic event-pattern-schema) vs discourse (system-eluding personal choices) – is more robust than non-specialists imagine. There has never been a science of discourse per se, ² nor is such a science about to take off. But the science of language has flourished since the 18th century as a systematic global enterprise. Today’s linguistics uses tools and terminology drawn from 2000-year-old grammatical traditions whose systematic writ used to run within regional clusters of languages.

Among these traditions, some carry the labels Indian, Chinese, and Arabic. One tradition – the Greco-Roman legacy filtered through later European accretions – is called ‘traditional grammar’, treated as the trans-regional default basis for contemporary linguistics. Contrary to post-colonial expectations, linguists from China, India, etc., do not challenge the default status of this Europe-derived tradition. Linguistics plays the North/South game differently (see the sections ‘The Architecture Meets the Thatchwork’ and ‘Situating the Resonances’); for now, let us focus on shared factors rather than those that lead to contestations. Traditional grammar works alongside lexicography, dictionary-making; it is their joint enterprise, call it Traditional Lexicography-and-Grammar (TLG), which codifies practices of writing, setting standards for them. We have said that a language is a super-pattern of event-patterns defining the range of the ‘possible’. TLG codifies written language standards; its notion of language parses ‘possible’ as validly writable, as acceptable in this normative codification.

Normative dictionaries have always specified the writable words in a given language. But TLG cannot characterise the range of writable sentences – an infinite range, even within a single language. No classical tradition ever tried to map rigorously the syntactic (sentence-making) system. The 20th-century syntactician who took up this work, Otto Jespersen, is an amphibian figure, significantly contributing to both the old TLG (Jespersen, 1933) and the new linguistics (Jespersen 1937). Is Jespersen guilty of confusing scientific analysis (linguistics) with normative-cultural prescription (TLG)?

On the contrary, his two-pronged approach corresponds to the fact that his object of study, the sentence, is an amphibian creature, equally at home in the water of language and on the landmass of discourse. This chapter is built around the following articulation of the amphibian character of the sentence:

1. The sentence is the point at which grammar/science (linguistics) meets grammar/culture (TLG). As an entity structured by the syntactic system, a sentence exemplifies the logic that combines words into phrases, and belongs to Language. It invites exact, rational scientific analysis and more. As an entity assembled by an individual speaker or writer, a sentence is a minimal composition, and belongs to Discourse. It invites prudent, reasonable normative-cultural editorial advice and more.

‘Analysis and more/advice and more’ because both the science of language and the cultural pedagogy of writing are compelled to engage with history – to acknowledge the fact that change is a constant. ³ Linguists stress the role of spoken language as a factor directing change in the written language. Phonetics, the branch of linguistics that deals with speech, was accommodated in the TLG apparatus when foreign language pedagogy began to teach learners how to speak the target language. Dictionaries have been using the International Phonetic Alphabet to register the normative pronunciation of words. Thus, the general public is familiar with this alphabet and peripherally aware of linguists who are responsible for it. But modern societies still keep TLG, not linguistics, in charge of the normative machinery of language in education and publishing.

That the public is only peripherally aware of linguistics, as a limited scientific supplement to TLG, reflects the fact that, ever since the modern discipline took off in the 18th century, linguists specialised in the peripheries. British and French authors of monographs on languages spoken in colonies ⁴ like India and Algeria, or American experts on the languages of indigenous peoples, were marginal figures. But linguists in the 20th century – seeing themselves as scientists who seriously understand language – aspired to gatecrash into the mainstream and depose TLG, just as modern astronomy once unseated the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian orthodoxy. Why, then, did they fail?

While analysing the languages spoken by colonial subjects or indigenous peoples, white linguists engaged in objective ‘description, not prescription’. Turning this gaze on their own societies, those linguists were horrified by the undiminished power of prescriptive TLG, which they proceeded to critique from a descriptivist standpoint. Hall’s Leave Your Language Alone (1950) was a radical overstatement, but even moderate descriptivists failed to convince the public that linguists seriously understand language. It is palpably absurd to treat what a three-year-old toddler speaks as a self-contained, independent system. The public knows that children acquire successive approximations to adult speech. No ‘science’ can ‘describe’ this fact away. Embedded in this fact is an implicit or explicit pedagogy. Prescriptive TLG may have committed authoritarian excesses, but throwing the pedagogic baby out with the authoritarian bathwater hardly helps.

As long as linguists and TLG workers confined themselves to the grammar of words, this stand-off continued. When the best-known linguist of our times, Noam Chomsky, took on the grammar of sentences – syntax – he introduced a conceptually significant twist, which ended the stand-off. He proposed (Chomsky 1965) that linguists describing a particular language (PL) should imagine describing a homogeneous community of idealised speakers who all speak the same variety of PL perfectly and unconstrained by limits of memory and attention. The methodological point of this ‘perfection idealisation’ is to focus sharply on the grammatical core of linguistics – separating it from sociolinguistics (concerned with dialect diversity within PL) and psycholinguistics (which studies the limiting factors that constrain even adult performance and that shape the trajectory of children ⁵ gradually acquiring PL). By pushing those independent factors off the screen of grammar, Chomsky’s move dramatises the fact that any PL, qua language, harbours infinitely many sentences of any length and complexity, which pure syntax must address. The fact that no flesh-and-blood speaker can ever use more than a tiny fraction of the massive range of syntactic options reflects limitations of memory and attention; those fall under psycholinguistics, not grammar.

Why did Chomsky’s move end the stand-off between TLG and linguistics? TLG, which revolves around language pedagogy, imagines perfectly proficient speaker-writers as the ideal end-products of this teaching. Generative (Chomskyan) linguistics – even though it inherits and deepens the descriptivist insistence on spontaneity over pedagogy ⁶ – projects an idealisation akin to the TLG image of pedagogy’s ideal end-product. Given their different priorities, practitioners of linguistics and of TLG cannot see eye to eye. But the two tribes found themselves in operational proximity at the level of idealisations and built a tacit coalition. The perfection idealisation was one factor enabling this; decolonisation was another. With th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Biographical Notes
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Method-o-logical Diversity: Seeking Disciplinary Narrations
• PART I Shifts within the Silo: Humanities
• PART II Shifts within the Silo: Natural Sciences
• PART III Shifts within the Silo: Social Sciences
• Index