Is linguistics a science?

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What area does linguistics primarily belong to in your opinion?

Science (general)
20
50%
Art/humanity (classics, literature etc.)
2
5%
Social science (sociology, anthropology etc.)
15
38%
Formal science (computer science, math etc.)
3
8%
Engineering is the only real science. Women are just bad at math
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 40

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Levike
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby Levike » 2016-07-15, 9:57

I put it as Social Science, but then even social science doesn't feel like science to me.

uzferry

Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby uzferry » 2016-07-15, 10:32

Who cares, why not all of them?

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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-15, 16:04

razlem wrote:I almost covered this in my conlang documentary, one of the interviewers was super passionate about linguistics NOT being a "science", needing the associated culture and human elements to be able to see the whole picture (and I tend to agree). At the core, we are trying to figure out how language works, sometimes with a solid scientific method, other times by recording the subjective. It is a "science" insofar as it is a search for truth and knowledge.

Well, the recording of the subjective can still be objective, can't it? I do think, though, that linguistics gets pretty subjective, but that's probably just because there's only so much we know about language, so a lot is open for speculation.
uzferry wrote:Who cares

A lot of us are very interested in linguistics if not linguists ourselves (this is a forum about languages and linguistics, after all), so we care. As razlem points out, it does matter to some extent for funding purposes; if linguistics weren't considered a science at all, then it would not be possible, for example, for language documentation to be funded in the US by the National Science Foundation.
why not all of them?

That would seem to imply that all of these categories mean basically the same thing, so I guess it depends on your definition of each of them. I don't think mōdgethanc's definition of them (in his latest post in this thread) allows for linguistics to be in all of them, and he's the one who started the poll in the first place.

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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby OldBoring » 2016-07-15, 16:12

Is linguistics a science? Depends.
Linguists don't agree.

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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-15, 16:22

Yes, exactly! It's just like the number of linguists it takes to screw in a light bulb. :P

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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby linguoboy » 2016-07-15, 17:19

vijayjohn wrote:Yes, exactly! It's just like the number of linguists it takes to screw in a light bulb. :P

I always heard this as, "How many sociolinguists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" "It varies."

There's also a lightbulb joke I like out there slamming UG, but I can't remember how it goes.
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-07-15, 17:41

md0 wrote:There were even guys who spend years tracking the neural implementation of consonants (phonetics and acoustics). That's sort of my point. A lot of things are under the domain on neurology neuroscience (basically anything that has humans perceiving or thinking), but there's varying degrees of usefulness in analysing everything at that level. So I think we actually agree.
I do think that sociolinguistics are, inevitably, explained by stuff that happens in individual brains, but I finally accepted that we do not the sociolinguists and their theoretical tools, otherwise we would either be able say nothing about sociolinguistics because it requires nearly-impossible brain imaging resolution to find anything useful, or we would stick to computational representations.
When you put it that way, I agree with you.
razlem wrote:Well "science" is such a nebulous term in itself, and is mainly used classificationally for funding or award purposes. If something is a "science" in terms of money, it's something naturally objective like math or physics.

I've been to conferences and seen linguists who will sit and talk about how to convince boards that it's a "science", because "sciences" get more funding. They'll come up with some abstract theory in syntax to present, probably in conjunction with computational applications, and it's kind of ridiculous.
That's another good example of scientism. Academia shouldn't base its funding on the fields that are more practical and bring in more money (and let's face it, linguistics is not the best field for finding a job). If they did, we wouldn't even have humanities.
I almost covered this in my conlang documentary, one of the interviewers was super passionate about linguistics NOT being a "science", needing the associated culture and human elements to be able to see the whole picture (and I tend to agree). At the core, we are trying to figure out how language works, sometimes with a solid scientific method, other times by recording the subjective. It is a "science" insofar as it is a search for truth and knowledge.
That's the original meaning of science.
uzferry wrote:Who cares, why not all of them?
Because traditionally sciences are considered wholly separate from humanities and they have different goals and ways of doing things. That's kind of like asking "why isn't astronomy a fine art?". Some things can't be both.
Levike wrote:I put it as Social Science, but then even social science doesn't feel like science to me.
And you would say that. I find this attitude often comes from people who either haven't been exposed to them much, or are looking at the wrong areas. If all you look at is cultural anthropology and political studies, then you'll get the feeling that it looks like humanities, but if you look at biological anthropology and neuropsychology, you won't.
vijayjohn wrote:That would seem to imply that all of these categories mean basically the same thing, so I guess it depends on your definition of each of them. I don't think mōdgethanc's definition of them (in his latest post in this thread) allows for linguistics to be in all of them, and he's the one who started the poll in the first place.
I don't think so either. I think it's pretty clear-cut that if something is a humanity it probably can't be a science, because they deal with completely different questions.
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-15, 17:50

linguoboy wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Yes, exactly! It's just like the number of linguists it takes to screw in a light bulb. :P

I always heard this as, "How many sociolinguists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" "It varies."

Not me. :D (That was from back when some of us were talking about what it means for a language to be "synthetic," "analytic," etc.).

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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-07-15, 22:33

Simple. It's synthetic if it can be made in a lab, analytic if it can be separated in one. zing
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-16, 0:38

I should've known. Linguistics is a science after all! THREAD DIES :P

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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-07-16, 0:42

vijayjohn wrote:I should've known. Linguistics is a science after all! THREAD DIES :P
lel
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby razlem » 2016-07-16, 2:37

vijayjohn wrote:Well, the recording of the subjective can still be objective, can't it?

Well people going into language revitalization aren't doing it to dissect the language's properties. There's an inherent emotional element in that area.
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-16, 2:42

Yes, but language revitalization and language documentation are not exactly the same thing, right? They're closely related, but still, language documentation is done by linguists and can include the objective recording of subjective things (or so I would think - I'm not a documentary linguist myself). Language revitalization can be done by linguists, too, but they're not the only people who do that.

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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby linguoboy » 2016-07-16, 3:52

vijayjohn wrote:Language revitalization can be done by linguists, too, but they're not the only people who do that.

In fact, I would argue that they're not the people who do that, full stop. Languages are revitalised by a community of speakers who use it in their daily lives. If a language is only (or chiefly) spoken by linguists, it's not a living language, it's a hobby.
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby razlem » 2016-07-16, 7:42

linguoboy wrote:In fact, I would argue that they're not the people who do that, full stop. Languages are revitalised by a community of speakers who use it in their daily lives. If a language is only (or chiefly) spoken by linguists, it's not a living language, it's a hobby.

I disagree. Yes, it's ultimately up to the community to adopt the use of the new language, but looking at cases like Chickasaw, Chitimacha, and Wampanoag, linguistic help was sought to strengthen initial revitalization efforts. It technically *can* be done without linguistic assistance, but then you end up with a lot of poorly-interpreted grammatical/syntactic elements and unstructured teaching programs (as I found in the case of Choctaw/Houma).

But my point was that linguistics is now so interdisciplinary and subdivided that debating whether or not to label it a "science" as a whole is kinda moot, imo.
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-16, 19:08

Just because language revitalization may depend on language documentation doesn't mean they're the same thing, and just because linguists collaborate with people from other fields doesn't mean linguistics is indistinguishable from other fields. It's like how if we were working on the same project, even if we influenced each other a lot, that still wouldn't make us the same person. :P

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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby razlem » 2016-07-16, 20:32

vijayjohn wrote:Just because language revitalization may depend on language documentation

The two are often unfortunately independent of each other. Choctaw has been well-documented for several decades, but lack of linguistic knowledge in building a revitalization program has severely hindered its recovery. It's a well-known problem in the field that little of the information gathered is ever available and digestible to the informant community.

But like I said before, calling something a "science" has no practical value other than funding. It's just "Linguistics" and people need to deal with it. 8-)
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-16, 20:42

I think the context in which I most commonly see people emphasizing that something is science is when they're trying to point out that they're (or somebody else is) using factual information that you can verify yourself rather than relying on their personal beliefs.

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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby linguoboy » 2016-07-17, 2:00

vijayjohn wrote:I think the context in which I most commonly see people emphasizing that something is science is when they're trying to point out that they're (or somebody else is) using factual information that you can verify yourself rather than relying on their personal beliefs.

Where does that leave history then? I don't recall ever seeing it classed as a social science rather than a humanity.
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Re: Is linguistics a science?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-17, 2:08

Wouldn't that be assuming a different definition of "humanities," then? Isn't history supposed to be objective?


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