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Isn't it just baffling shit? I'm probably going to do with social science overall, even though there is enough formal science (if you stick to things like syntax) that it practically looks like computer science sometimes. Or, dare I say ... computational linguistics.vijayjohn wrote:Oh boy, I don't know what my answer for this is, either!
mōdgethanc wrote:Isn't it just baffling shit?
I'm probably going to do with social science overall, even though there is enough formal science (if you stick to things like syntax) that it practically looks like computer science sometimes. Or, dare I say ... computational linguistics.
FUCK computational linguistics.vijayjohn wrote:Eh, syntax is way messier than it looks at first glance. I mean, most of the prominent approaches to it may look like computer science (and have a lot to do with it), but that's not necessarily an accurate assessment of how we process it in our brains IRL at all. It's just a convenient model that comp. sci. people (and computational linguists) like.
vijayjohn wrote:Documentary linguists mostly just elicit, collect, and report on data.
linguoboy wrote:vijayjohn wrote:Documentary linguists mostly just elicit, collect, and report on data.
Isn't that like 90+% of any established science, though? How many meteorologists or geologists are really making and testing new hypotheses as opposed to just collecting and reporting data which may or may not be useful for scientific research down the line?
That doesn't make much sense to me. Some fields of it are closely related to neuroscience (which isn't the same thing as neurology - that's a medical specialty) but others are only related to it in the sense that biology is related to math. Going back to that xkcd comic (which I like a lot and frequently show to others), all sciences are related to each other, but at each level you find phenomena which can theoretically but shouldn't be reduced to the ones below it. I don't see what's productive about trying to reduce sociolinguistics to brain function (unless that's the specific topic you want to study).md0 wrote:It's a very specialised (and very immature) field of neurology, if you ask me.
You will see a lot of variations on it, but the core of it is simple: observe > hypothesize > predict > test > analyze. You see something, you come up with an idea about how it works, you come up with a plan for testing it and predict what you might find, then you run the test and see how the results compare to your prediction. Doesn't linguistics do this at least some of the time?vijayjohn wrote:You know, I honestly still don't get what exactly the heck the scientific method is. I swear, I've seen at least three very different definitions for what it is.
Which is something a lot of people forget, especially when "hard science" people get into the aforementioned dick-waving. You can't do an experiment without first knowing something about what you're doing an experiment on. Without taxonomy and periodicity, biology and chemistry wouldn't be very coherent fields.linguoboy wrote:Isn't that like 90+% of any established science, though? How many meteorologists or geologists are really making and testing new hypotheses as opposed to just collecting and reporting data which may or may not be useful for scientific research down the line?
According to that definition, there are only like five fields that can be called science. I don't see any reason why humans can't be studied in an objective way (whence my disclaimer about how I think social sciences are real sciences) so my definition of science is based on method, not subject.razlem wrote:If you consider "science" to be distinguished by it's lack of the subjective human element, then yeah Linguistics is not a science. But in terms of using the scientific method, it's just as complex a science as any other.
That's exactly what mine said!linguoboy wrote:One of my linguistic professors called it "The most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences."
Later I heard that bon mot is also applied to anthropology/sociology.
mōdgethanc wrote:You will see a lot of variations on it, but the core of it is simple: observe > hypothesize > predict > test > analyze. You see something, you come up with an idea about how it works, you come up with a plan for testing it and predict what you might find, then you run the test and see how the results compare to your prediction. Doesn't linguistics do this at least some of the time?vijayjohn wrote:You know, I honestly still don't get what exactly the heck the scientific method is. I swear, I've seen at least three very different definitions for what it is.
That's a terrible way to try to get a child to succeed at something. (But of course, the evidence for that is based on a wimp science, psychology.) You're yet another victim of scientism, the belief that hard sciences are better than everything else.vijayjohn wrote:I never really saw the connection between linguistics and science, but I think in my case, that's really just because unfortunately, the word "science" carries a lot of weird (and of course undeserved) emotional baggage in my life. "Science" for me is all this shit I could never seem to do when I was younger - math, biology, chemistry, physics, medicine, genetics, whatever - that my parents kept trying to encourage me to get into. Languages were another matter entirely (and I could easily see the connection between them and linguistics; between linguistics and science, I was of course much less certain).
I might have mentioned this somewhere before, but the reason why I got into languages so much in the first place was because it was the one thing that I could do where no one could tell me everything I was doing wrong as I was trying to learn it. Nothing else was like this. If I was trying to learn addition, oh I was totally going about it the wrong way because I should do this, not that (as of course my beloved dad, the mathematician, knew). If I was trying to learn biology, same thing. If I was trying to learn chemistry, same thing. If I was trying to learn anything (even sports, even playing on swings!), it was like that, except with languages. My parents only really speak two languages anyway, so of course they couldn't know if I was going about learning something like French the right way, and so learning languages was the only thing where they didn't try to steer me in what they thought was the right direction. And because they finally left me the fuck alone, I got to learn it however I wanted, and it basically spiraled from there.
Science, broadly speaking, is any field that tries to study things in an objective way. Humanities are fields that are by definition subjective, and based on opinion (which is not to say they aren't rigorous; philosophy is a good example of a field that's highly rigorous and logical while also being highly subjective). Science tries to explain what something is and how it works, and humanities try to explain what it means. That's basically how I would describe it.vijayjohn wrote:EDIT: I'm tempted to go with "social science," but maybe that's because I'm not entirely sure what that term means, or what implications it would have for linguistics. I kind of sympathize with the view that "science" normally refers to the hard sciences, but that's not to say that nothing else is a science, either...idk.
mōdgethanc wrote:That doesn't make much sense to me. Some fields of it are closely related to neuroscience (which isn't the same thing as neurology - that's a medical specialty) but others are only related to it in the sense that biology is related to math. Going back to that xkcd comic (which I like a lot and frequently show to others), all sciences are related to each other, but at each level you find phenomena which can theoretically but shouldn't be reduced to the ones below it. I don't see what's productive about trying to reduce sociolinguistics to brain function (unless that's the specific topic you want to study).
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