Semantic Compositions

I believe these people are twits, but I can't prove it

(Because SC wasn't paying attention to the "post status" box, an early draft of this ended up published prematurely. No hiding of anything was intended.)

Yesterday, Arts & Letters Daily linked to an annual roundup of currently hot thinkers done by a website called Edge. SC likes Edge, doesn't read it nearly as frequently as he should, and usually enjoys the interviews that AL Daily links to from them throughout the course of the year.

The annual Edge New Year's article always revolves around some sort of question of general interest, and by posing it to specialists across numerous disciplines, the goal is to produce some genuinely interesting insights for lay readers. Some of the answers are serious and worthy of additional cogitation; others are depressingly political or small-minded. To give an example from a previous year, in 2003, the question was a hypothetical request from President Bush for guidance on science policy. Some of the responses, like that of John McWhorter, were excellent discussions of individual expertise (but not necessarily quite on point). Some responses really were serious meditations on specific problems of science policy, like Margaret Wertheim's comments on education, or Wired's Kevin Kelly on changing our perspective on funding priorities, and some were just cheap anti-Bush rants like that of Stuart Pimm.

This year's question was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?". SC likes the idea, and will throw out his own answer, in the spirit he thinks the question was meant to be taken in. Your host believes, but cannot prove, that the human mind will never be demonstrably reducible to brain states (plus assorted chemical reactions). This is hardly a unique position -- any philosophical dualist or idealist shares it -- but to hold it after taking courses in psycholinguistics and brain theory requires some conviction that the explanatory gaps of present neuroscience are not merely due to the relative crudeness of our tools. Almost nobody interviewed by Edge seems to hold this belief, with the notable exception of Donald Hoffman (whose position is far more radical, and absolutely thrilling -- SC will have to read more by him). There are others who are ambiguous on this point, like Daniel Gilbert, but suffice it to say that philosophical materialism is in -- which we'll get back to in a minute.

There are a number of other answers which interest SC as well: David Buss on true love, Dennis Dutton on permanent aesthetic value, Tom Standage on the safety of cell phones ([he didn't mention driving with them -- ed.]), Leon Lederman on the elegance of the universe, David Gelernter on the fundamental relationship of emotions to thought, and Roger Schank on the importance of unconscious thought.

A much larger group of responses, alas, displays all the classic signs of having been pounded out over the ol' Cracker Barrel. Let's agree at the outset that skepticism being part of the scientific mindset, a certain opposition to faith and belief is almost guaranteed to be the default position for people working in scientific fields. It is nevertheless impossible to not be stunned by the arrogance and moral obtuseness of many of the people who answered. Leave aside those people whose idea of something they believe but can't prove is merely a pet theory in their own field; that accounts for Jared Diamond's quibbling over the date that humans first made it to the Americas, or John McCarthy's speculation on the falsehood of the continuum hypothesis. No grander philosophical viewpoint follows from these beliefs, and they make for answers of largely personal interest.

No, what really raises SC's hackles are the smug post-humans who tediously rehash the extreme skepticism that they imagine is the sign of a truly refined mind, but that G.K. Chesterton could see was a sign of derangement 100 years ago (he does so even better in this book, not available online). Ian McEwan is sure that there is no afterlife, which he can't prove, but he wholly unjustifiably flatters himself with the assertion that it's believers in afterlives who commit all the worst atrocities. That's a rather 20th-century-free rendition of human history. A nearly identical point is made by Robert Trivers, who snidely raises the banner of "self-deception". Randolph Nesse backhandedly praises the achievements of those who, holding to "false beliefs", push on beyond those "who wait for proof before acting" (there is a much more humane, and less disrespectful, way to hold Dr. Nesse's views, as demonstrated by Tor Norretranders). Susan Blackmore comically claims to believe that she has no feeling of acting with free will, and that she is on her way -- albeit haltingly -- to believing that she doesn't exist. (Yes, yes, she acknowledges that it's hard for other people to buy it, but if she doesn't find anything ironic in saying "I don't exist", she might be right for the wrong reasons.) Daniel Dennett, meanwhile, is busy in Peter Singer-land arguing for reducing even further the scope of what we consider to be humanity (in fairness, he explicitly disclaims the ethical monstrosities he knows his position is perceived as licensing, but I think Singer is the one being honest about their inevitability, not Dennett). Chris Anderson scores half a legitimate point about just how far cirricula ought to be opened up to teach alternate theories (in complaining about Intelligent Design), but makes perfectly clear that despite claiming to believe in the skeptical attitude, insisting on a careful distinction between theory and fact is for people who disagree with him. Daniel Hillis comes out for the Whig interpretation of history -- people are getting better, and are evolving towards being morally perfect (a phrase he doesn't use, but which I think is a fair interpretation of his argument -- also, I am overstating Herbert Butterfield's meaning for that phrase). What is the maximum number of retrograde people that Dr. Hillis is prepared to sacrifice in realization of this vision?

None of this is meant to sggest that these people are indecent in their personal behaviors. But it's hard not to read these entries, and maybe a dozen more, without being overwhelmed by the hubris. More than a few claim not to believe anything true if it can't be proved, as does Maria Spiropulu, or to be uninterested in anything that isn't (dis-)provable, as does Simon Baron-Cohen. This sort of claim goes out the window on the first evidence of aesthetic judgments. Worse than the hubris is the scientism, though, the unprovable belief that petty bigotries and merely personal opinions have the same factual status as measured lab values, because the practice of the scientific method in one area of one's life must mean that one behaves the same way in all others. Such thought is not terribly tolerant of disagreement, which can only be seen as the product of bad measurement or mere irrationality, and judging by some of the assertions made, it's rather less amenable to skeptical self-examination than these people seem to think.

Just perfect

It's been a long time since SC has felt like there's been a reason to roll out the cracker barrel, but thanks to a submission to HPSG-L, informing the community of a new article by Steve Pinker and Ray Jackendoff, we're happy to present:

The Faculty of Language: What's Special About It?

Unfortunately, Profs. Pinker and Jackendoff have chosen to use M$ Word as a publication format, so this won't be accesible to everyone. But it should be. Which is different from saying that SC endorses the paper wholeheartedly. Actually, what follows represents a purging of several years worth of unhealthy accumulation of bile in your host's mental spleen ([a-HA! He DOES believe in mental modules! -- ed.]), and is so unrelievedly snarky that he probably should have submitted it to NLLT for publication (disclaimer: NLLT is SC's favorite linguistics journal, precisely because they run this sort of thing).

Essentially, the goal of the paper is to argue against a philosophical view of Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (the authors in properly credited order, referred to hereafter as HCF), that there exist two things called the Broad Language Faculty and the Narrow Language Faculty (inscrutably assigned the acronyms FLB and FLN), that the FLB includes a potpourri of generic primate abilities, and the FLN is a box containing the single trick of recursion, about which more shortly.

Now, it has to be said that SC was simply flabbergasted by the abstract, in which he learned that the views of HCF appeared in Science in 2002 (too bad SC doesn't read Science regularly; he would've had a field day with this one around Minimalists). In the abstract, we learn that HCF think language isn't "special" after all (which turns out to be necessary to keep it "perfect"), and that "the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g., words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g., speech perception)". The temperate response to reading this is: WOW. In order to illustrate exactly what sort of a reversal this represents, it would be as though Freud had published a paper late in life saying, "Maybe I'm really the only one obsessed with sex, and it doesn't explain much about the rest of you", or Darwin publishing something saying "To heck with Galapagos turtles, it's Genesis all the way down". How your host managed to miss this one is beyond him.

Readers wondering what exactly is at issue with describing the language faculty as "perfect" deserve an explanation here. HCF argue, following a line of Chomsky's since 1995 or thereabouts, that the mental apparatus concerned with language exclusively, the FLN in the above terminology, is basically just a little black box that does syntax, and everything else is not part of language. Semantics is dismissed to a "conceptual" unit which is now held to be general purpose, phonetics and phonology are just motor control devices for getting the vocal tract to spit out the conceptual content, and all of those are now held to be common primate capabilities. FLN not only is restricted to providing order and an interface between the other components, but recursion is the only human-specific ability claimed to be involved. This is held to be "perfect" (and "minimal") in the sense that it is the minimum possible adaptation for humans on top of their otherwise generic primate abilities that makes language possible.

To tie in another favorite theme of mine, financial columnist Jim Cramer often tosses variations on his favorite self-coined aphorism into his writing: "Irony isn't an investment thesis; it only looks that way". Similarly, irony appears to be the best explanation for how a couple of prominent cognitive scientists could now be complaining, "No! Wait! Language is special after all!". Actually, that misstates the point somewhat. In finally joining a number of linguists, neuroscientists, and psychologists which can be estimated at about...oh, all of them minus Chomsky on the subject of whether or not the language faculty makes use of general cognitive abilities, he's managed to go too far in the other direction. There are, after all, some things which are unique to humans. Pinker and Jackendoff lay out a few of them: the apparently unique ability of humans to discriminate among phonological features, the specialization of the human vocal apparatus for speech (compared to the more general sound-imitation abilities of other animals), the size of the lexicon compared to the symbolic inventories of animals. They also make some interesting points about how Chomsky and friends grossly overrate the importance of recursion in syntax, but their argument cannot be reasonably summarized in a shorter way than they do it, so go read the paper.

Two facts about Pinker and Jackendoff's paper irk SC greatly, and that's without even addressing the flaming hypocrisy of Steve Pinker resorting to the lexicon without also using a typographical convention that indicates he spat after every invocation of the idea. First is the insistence on taking the background pomposity of Minimalism seriously. Never mind the footnotes in the Minimalist Program that clearly state: "Merge and Spell-Out are defined as the two least possible activities of any biologically based computational system". I'm kidding; that's not really in there. But it might as well be considering that Chomsky actually has written "But in any useful sense of the term, communication is not the function of language, and may even be of no unique significance for understanding the functions and nature of language" and also has asked "how closely human language approaches an optimal solution to design conditions that the system must meet to be usable at all" (citations for both of which can be found in Pinker & Jackendoff's paper). If the language faculty has little or nothing to do with communication, then what design conditions could it possibly have needed to meet? I don't believe that anyone searching the archives of this blog will find anything at all that has been said with the intention of being kind to Minimalism, but it is deeply insulting to Minimalists to suggest that just because Chomsky continues to pursue a 50-year-old neurosis about the autonomy of syntax, they felt obliged to abandon the computationally intractable device of Move Alpha for the highly implausible notions of derivational phases and feature checking (defined as LFG or HPSG attribute-value matrices without the computational grounding). Oh wait, that's exactly what they (approvingly) cite Shalom Lappin, Bob Levine and David Johnson for saying first. Dismissing Minimalism on account of pretheoretical speculation is a lot like dismissing logarithms simply because John Napier also wrote another book where he mispredicted the date of the end of the world, or dismissing heliocentrism because Copernicus' explicit goal in advancing the theory was to produce better tables for astrological divination. In fairness to Pinker and Jackendoff, their issue is primarily with the speculative claims, not with the architecture of Minimalism, but they repeatedly appeal to the suspect validity of Minimalism to explain why the speculative work is invalid. It's not entirely cricket. But it is fun if you like this sort of thing (and your host does, very much).

The second thing that gets SC's goat (click here to hear it being dragged off) is that having decided to systematically dismember HCF's claims about the language faculty, Pinker and Jackendoff wrap up an otherwise successful paper by saying "Nyaah! Nyaah! Everything you claimed for your views...is actually true about ours!". Chomsky has handed them an unusually large elephant gun, and placed his ducks in an unusually small barrel -- he really does argue that "current biology must be revamped to accommodate the findings of Minimalist linguistics" (P&J's phrasing, but the longer following quote isn't different), while having also offered the disclaimers that Minimalism is “still just an ‘approach’” or “a conjecture about how language works”. It's too easy, it really is. But all musings about the evolutionary goals of language are necessarily speculative, and the necessary corrective to excessively boastful claims is a solid dose of humility, not more of same. After adducing as much evidence as they have, including so many embarrassing contradictions, Pinker and Jackendoff are entitled to a rhetorical victory lap. It's just that it's a state track meet that's been won, not the Olympics.

SC can't stop there without acknowledging the not entirely disinterested motives that: 1) brought this to his attention, and 2) led him to write about it. As has been written here before, the HPSG mailing list is prone to a certain amount of reflection and even defensiveness, which is perhaps inevitable when you're in a minority position in any debate. But the tone of the announcement is less that of scholarly debate than open war: "It seems to me that we sometimes exaggerate the strength of minimalism. It is coming under attack by various people who were once quite close to Chomskyan syntax". It's because your host tends to share these feelings, even though his stake in the argument is just about nil these days, that he can't help writing about it. Cracker barrel philosophizing about the ultimate goals of linguistic theory is enormously fun, but with a bit of sober reflection, it's a bit disturbing to think about the real results that Profs. Pinker and Jackendoff -- and SC -- could have been producing instead.

What is it about statistics?

Courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily, as is often the case around here, a review by Francis Fukuyama of a new biography of Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek was a brilliant man whose insights about spontaneous order in complex systems turned out to be as useful in neuroscience as they are in economics. However, Prof. Fukuyama manages to turn a discussion of Hayek's work into an attack on mathematical models and "deterministic, predictive outcomes" (SC thinks he meant "predictable", but no matter).

Now, SC is not a corpus fetishist, and tries not to subscribe to any corollary dogmatism about the singular acceptability of statistical methods. And he could even toss in some hoary cliches about "horses for courses". It's important to step back and try to retain a sense of why statistics are useful, especially in the social sciences. But what to make of this?

Caldwell, an economic historian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, ends his book by plaintively noting that the un-Hayekian agenda of turning economics into a rigorous science has driven all other approaches, including the study of economic history, out of American economics departments. But the damage done by this positivist approach is, in fact, much greater. Economic methodology has colonized political science too, eliminating individuals with knowledge of real peoples, cultures, and history—for example, experts on the Middle East—from the country’s top schools. We are thus presented with a rather depressing picture of human progress. Although the particular brand of intellectual hubris that elevated central planning over markets is gone, other forms persist, and indeed have grown stronger. Hayek’s challenge remains an open one.

Surely there are very few practitioners of economics who would boast of following a "non-rigorous" approach to the field. SC will go further and hazard a guess that "knowledge of real peoples, cultures, and history" is not incompatible with attempting to be both systematic and empirically grounded.

This sort of talk is by no means limited to economics -- just this morning, SC had an identical discussion with a colleague on statistical vs. empirical methods in artificial intelligence. At the core of objections to statistical methods are valid concerns that statistics need a framework for interpretation, and that methodological pluralism has generally been a good thing in the sciences, social or physical. And perhaps at any one moment in time, the ascendancy of a particular research method can be accompanied by both enough success and hubris that it appears destined to blot out everything else, obscuring forever what lies outside current orthodoxy. A fair argument can be made that theoretical linguistics is just now recovering from such an episode. Such critiques need to be careful, though, to avoid falling into self-parody. Appreciating the limits of statistical methods is a good thing. Denouncing rigor is not.

UPDATE: It's not just the sciences. Even baseball pitch counts can provoke vehement disagreement.

(Edited at 9:16 a.m. on 5/10/04)

Does journalism mean never having to check your facts?

If I was a journalist, a look at Language Log would probably terrify me out of ever writing about language research. One can't even fabricate a story about telepathic talking parrots anymore.

This morning, Semantic Compositions featured an article from the Boston Globe, which launched him off about the prescriptive/descriptive debate. Mark Liberman, however, sat down with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, and just demolished the prescriptive case being made. SC envies Prof. Liberman the time necessary to compile such a post, but feels obliged to answer his rhetorical question: "Can't anybody use a dictionary anymore?"

Of course, not, Professor. If they did, that would waste time devoted to a perfectly good rant. Why do the hard work when your Ph.D. in cracker barrel studies can be had with just the submission of an opinion? It's getting clear that the problem with journalists is not so much fundamental dishonesty as an arrogant refusal to seriously engage the ideas they're trying to write about, which would require an effort they never made in college. And they're not about to start now.

Says who?

Mark Liberman has lately been playing with the notion "attributional abduction", which he defines as "reasoning to the most likely explanation for the publication of this bone-headed remark." Today, it came up in the context of an article about distributed computing in plants. SC was fine with the comments all the way up until Prof. Liberman couldn't resist the temptation to commit Cracker Barrel Philosophy of the Internet. It pains SC to say that, because he is on record as holding up Prof. Liberman's blogging as the standard he aspires to, a statement which SC stands by today.

Prof. Liberman starts off safely enough: "There's certainly a lot of garbage out there on the web. But a surprising amount of it is in the digital pages of reputable publications." SC would like to nail this statement to the foreheads of the herbal supplement promoters covered in this New Yorker story. In said story, a man with a Ph.D. in psychology is noted as having come up with the formula for an herbal weight-loss pill as follows: "Mowrey came up with the components of Zantrex-3 the way he comes up with the elements of most of the company’s products: by surfing the Internet." SC has no problem with this statement; "I read it on the Internet" is still the gold standard for reporting the unreliability of information.

SC also is not quibbling with the statement about "low barriers to informal publication" -- he created test blogs on three services in a matter of minutes before settling on TypePad. SC can even swallow the statement about "trustworthy information about authorship of such material", despite the fact that even on the day SC decides to give in to Kai von Fintel's hint about going nonymous, it would be difficult to authenticate comments attributed to SC on other blogs as actually being by your host.

No, what got SC's goat is the synthesis of these technology hosannas into the vision of "a dynamic, distributed information source that can be more reliable than the major outlets of science journalism are". It's not Prof. Liberman's fault that "dynamic" and "distributed", especially in that order, are a pet peeve of SC's (in order to understand why, try Googling +dynamic, +distributed, +DARPA). But beyond that, SC wishes to engage in an act of Cracker Barrel Economics.

Some economists talk about "rational ignorance", the notion that the cost of becoming well-informed on a subject of marginal relevance to your daily activities exceeds any possible benefits. While we must plead ignorance of how useful economists have actually found this notion to their work, it certainly is intuitively plausible. While SC has good working knowledge of acoustics and electronics resulting from his audio hobby, he certainly has to defer to Prof. Liberman (a professional phonetician) on the former point, and knows that most people are immediately bored to tears by even the most basic discussion -- even though they may have spent several thousand on stereo equipment themselves. The level of knowledge you find it appropriate to have personally is thus highly dependent on how important it is to your normal functions.

Even on its editors' worst days, Nature is still a better synthesis, which I can read in less time, than the arguments of 10 well-qualified bloggers. More than that, determining the credibility of the qualifications and their relevance to the topic is not necessarily a trivial task. It might be easy to decide that someone is well qualified to talk about plants or computation, but how about a contentious subject like global warming? Does one trust scientists funded by auto companies, or scientists who say things like "Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." The imprimatur of a publication which presumably employs people competent to figure out who is credible and who isn't is something that matters. Admittedly, print publications have their own biases and mistakes. But it's not at all clear to SC that the proliferation of information on the web actually makes the problem of figuring who to trust (or how to trust that they're who) easier.

It might even be more difficult. SC's readers may have heard of a magic bullet called the Semantic Web, which Tim Berners-Lee promises will let us find things by relying on the miracle of ontologies, which will disambiguate all that nasty text into cleanly partitioned links to just what you want. Prof. Liberman is going to think I've got it in for him by mentioning that he's discussed this recently, but SC's view is that if Harpers.org works, it's because the ontology is tightly controlled by a few editors who are all in contact with each other, and who eventually settle on a consensus, if not perfect agreement ([or because their web server isn't down -- ed.]). The Semantic Web is coming, all right, but SC suspects that it's only through the influence of standards bodies and delegation to experts -- a Good Housekeeping seal for semantics? -- that we'll end up with one that anybody will want to use. SC promises to illustrate why this is a pain with examples from ontologies which have their meaning relationships exactly backward (relative to each other), but that's for another post, and after some checks on copyright issues.

All this is not to say that access to information is a bad thing. It's just that knowing what to believe, from who, and under what circumstances, has been a hard problem for a lot longer than the Internet has been around. The notions of peer review and editorial control aren't perfect, but they're the best solutions that humanity has come up with in 3,000+ years of written communications, and SC isn't convinced that the Web, in and of itself, makes for better science journalism than what we've got -- although to the extent that editors and journalists are reading competent blogs, it's certainly making them more accountable.

Roll out the Barrel!

OK, folks, the moment you've all been waiting for...

As SC noted before, this topic owes its existence to Geoff Pullum's glorious decision to coin it. In an essay published originally in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and later reprinted in "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax", Pullum remarked that "[S]ince I wrote the 1978 review, we have witnessed a new flowering of methodological moaning and self-serving cracker-barrel philosophy of science in the work of people who actually do produce publishable work in descriptive and theoretical linguistics" (p. 125).

Thanks go to David Elworthy for pulling up the quote.

Anyway, the reader may be saying "cracker barrel? huh?", and so the ever-helpful Semantic Compositions research staff provides the following background:

From Merriam-Webster Online: "cracker barrel, adj., Etymology: from the cracker barrel in country stores around which customers lounged for informal conversation : suggestive of the friendly homespun character of a country store "

A search on Google turns up, at this writing, 147 hits for "cracker barrel philosophy".

So what we're talking about is the tendency of people to be unable to resist -- especially in the context of the best human-temperature-raising device ever invented, the e-mail list server -- making statements about the scientific method which, at best, are quite intemperate, and at worst, are egregiously wrong. Cracker barrel philosophy isn't about being right, it's about the much-more-important feeling right ([which makes SC the Aristotle of the field -- ed.]).

Semantic Compositions spent a lot of time thinking about how to kick this off. On the one hand, SC is not an academic, and does not intend to become one in the future. On the other hand, SC would like to be able to visit conferences in the future without being garroted at the registration table. Thus, for the very first discussion of "cracker barrel philosophy of science", we are kicking things off with a topic which never causes any linguist, especially not any syntactician, to fly into a rage -- the question of what makes a theory "generative". SC has no plans to answer that question, just to illuminate it under the oil lamp (presumably hanging right over the cracker barrel).

Even the most casual non-linguist reader probably figured out from that last passage that "generative" is to linguists as a raw steak is to a pit of lions who have been deliberately starved for three weeks. SC prefers to think of it as a scene from The Princess Bride, where a character played by Billy Crystal is hectored by his wife, who runs around shouting the name of his enemy until he finally agrees to do what she wants. Those who have seen the movie will get it; it's not worth reconstructing in full for those who have not.

Once upon a time, Noam Chomsky coined the term "generative grammar" to refer to a grammar which either: 1) produced all and only the valid strings of a language, 2) was explicit in its characterization of the rules, 3) did one and two, or perhaps 4) had been blessed by Noam Chomsky or an anointed disciple thereof. Semantic Compositions does not actually subscribe to the notion that (4) was originally intended to be the case, but as this description of one 1999 conference's proceedings makes clear, some refereed papers lean in the direction of (4) even if they don't say it in exactly those words. And many linguists would argue that there has been a definite shift from (3) to (4) as the field has developed. Personally, SC subscribes to Groucho Marx's dictum (perhaps apocryphal; this search fails to confirm it reliably) that he "wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have him".

Nevertheless, as an example of what the "generative" grenade can do when tossed into the right circles, SC presents this discussion from a mailing list he enjoys, HPSG-L. One day, an innocent undergraduate said: "I wonder what the people on this list have to say about the relationship between HPSG and generative grammar". Little did she know that she was about to spark a flame war where a single e-mail made reference to Pythagoras, Rembrandt, Euclid, Newton, and the Big Bang, all while laying out the answers to the vexing questions of "what is a theory?" and how to distinguish a theory from a model or framework (with the caveat that they were strictly one man's view). And another one threw down a gauntlet.

Semantic Compositions actually believes that insofar as any modern-day research program is close to developing a True Theory of Language, it's the one being followed by the people above, most of whom would refer to themselves as "lexicalists" (those aren't scare quotes, it's just not a common term). Anti-lexicalists are also guilty of overheated rhetoric; one conference paper contains the following: "Lexicalism is dead, deceased, demised, no more, passed on..." (ellipsis in original) and promises to replace it with "the alternative that allows us to dump lexicalism once and for all". SC wishes to further point out that the matter above did have a graceful resolution, but that it took place over too many messages to want to link them all -- just follow the thread and you can see for yourself. Committing an act of Cracker Barrel Philosophy of Science doesn't mean you don't know when to cool off.

Prof. Pullum also wrote that he believed this sort of discourse to be unique to linguistics, and that other disciplines were somehow free of it. In another essay from The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, he shared the results of his discovery that mathematicians were no better (SC is speaking from memory; he might be conflating essays). The truth is, Cracker Barrel Philosophy can be found anywhere that multiple sides want to lay claim to some truth. Or even just some term. And despite the intention of Semantic Compositions to stick to covering this sort of dispute in scientific disciplines, there are Cracker Barrel Philosophers in all walks of life. And Cracker Barrel Philosophies...by the barrel.

UPDATE: On further reflection, something could be clearer about why SC considers a flame war about generativity to be a matter of Cracker Barrel Philosophy: the episode in question didn't actually turn on any relevant facts about linguistics. Despite nominally being a discussion about whether or not HPSG and GB/Minimalism were mathematically equivalent, the most heated rhetoric all had to do with an at best tangential issue, namely which theory got to wear the name "generative". Getting into a dispute over a theory is not Cracker Barrel, but getting into a dispute over a term whose meaning nobody agrees on...well, like we said before, Cracker Barrel Philosophy isn't about about being right, it's about feeling right.

Readers might also object that the dictionary takes a rather less sour view of Cracker Barrel thinking than Geoff Pullum's original article, or SC's. And it's true, thinking in Cracker Barrel terms doesn't require you to be angry. It does, however, require you to insist that the terms be understood in a way that favors you, and from there, it's only a short hop to getting angry when disagreements arise. (added January 23, 2004 at 10:26 PM)

More acknowledgements -- and a preview of coming attractions

Somehow, perhaps due to the fact that I fiddled with the TrackBack details by accident, I missed the fact that Kai von Fintel has also mentioned Semantic Compositions. Fortunately, SC inspects referral logs (oh goody-goody! [reduplication, folks -- we finally have our first phonology post! -- ed.]), and thus has an opportunity to correct the oversight. Thanks, Professor!

Now for a bit of sad news...although SC has enjoyed a phenomenally successful launch, there is an imminent cross-country trip in your host's future. As in first thing Friday morning. The blog will resume on Tuesday, assuming that no opportunities for updates present themselves (and they're not likely to, alas). However, Semantic Compositions aims to please, and so here is a preview of coming attractions:

1) In 1998, SC found himself with a bit much time on his hands once his undergrad thesis was finished, but before graduation occurred. During "dead week", he read two books. One was Randy Harris' "The Linguistics Wars". There may or may not be a place for talking about that in the future. Feedback appreciated. Of more immediate relevance, though, he also read Geoff Pullum's book "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". Among the many delights of that book was a phrase that has been on Semantic Compositions' mind ever since, "cracker barrel philosophy of science". Because your host enjoyed it so much, he is quite bewildered to see that the only references to it on the web are in notices of the book's publication. When this blog was in the planning stage, it was decided that this would be the title of a running, not to say quite regular, feature (source material needs to present itself). The first installment will come on Tuesday.

2) Also coming on Tuesday, "Blasts From the Past". Part of SC's undying allegiance to linguistics came from the early-on discovery that example sentences were not all like "Jack depends on himself" (pulled out of a humor-free textbook on SC's shelf, by opening to a random page). In fact, many of them from the '70s were quite funny. SC does not understand why so few of them are on the web, although he understands that perhaps it was best for the maturation of the field that journals became a bit more intolerant of this sort of thing. In the spirit of popularizing the rich humor of the field, Blasts From the Past will pass along interesting old sentences, accompanied by brief discussions of what made them interesting linguistically (the humor ought to be obvious). Because SC was not involved in linguistics in any fashion until 1996, there's more out there than he knows about. Coming on Tuesday will be a new e-mail account, where interested readers can forward examples they know about -- the earlier in the history of the field, the better. Due to the linear nature of time from our observation standpoint, and the unlikeliness of the '70s repeating with all-new jokes, this will be an occasional feature to avoid exhausting it too quickly.

3) Despite the title, one of Semantic Compositions' very favorite aspects of linguistics is Optimality Theory. So very much so that its terminology has surfaced in his casual everyday speech patterns, in discussion of totally non-linguistic topics with non-linguists. Because SC finds it inconvenient that other people do not understand the references, he is plotting a long-term project to smuggle his preferred terms into general usage. Admit it, SPE fans, even you sometimes wish that your storehouse of jargon made you look cool at parties. So show me some Sympathy ([we'll send the flower to the loony bin -- ed.]) and maybe this will get somewhere.