Studium Generale Section for linguistics students

Lecture 2: Scientific reasoning and praxis

Contents
Examination again The rescheduled class Todays topics
Pseudo-science and hoaxes The philosophy of science Scientific reasoning
Deduction Induction Inference to best explanation Explanation Causality

Conclusion
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Examination
Confirming ...
3 questions each relating to both parts of the course
From which you select 1

Essays are 10 pages

The rescheduled class

We agreed last time to the following changes:
Lecture Date 1 8 March 2 3 4 5 6 15 March 22 March 29 March 10 April 12 April Topic What is science, what is a scientific approach? Scientific reasoning and praxis History of the science of language Linguistics as a science: linguistic theories and praxis The culture of science Science in culture Readings Okasha 2002, Chapter 1; Principe 2011, Chapters 1-2 Okasha 2002, Chapters 2-3; ; Dixon 2008, Chapter 2 Campbell 2001; Robins 1984 Sampson 1980; Butler 2003, Chapters 1-2 Okasha 2002, Chapter 5; Dixon 2008, Chapters 4-5 Okasha 2002, Chapter 7; Oaks 2001

This class will be in 1467-515 Tirsdag den 10.04.2012 fra kl. 9 til kl. 12

Pseudo-science and hoaxes

An influential philosopher of science, Karl Popper was concerned in distinguishing science from pseudoscience
He suggested that a central feature of a scientific theory is that it be falsifiable
That it makes predictions that can be tested against experience
That is, there are observations that could count against the theory The theory is not compatible with every possible state of the world Otherwise, if the theory is consistent with outcome, it cant be tested, and is pseudo-science
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 One of his favourite whipping-horses was Freuds psychoanalysis

Popper argued that the theory could be reconciled with any empirical finding
Whatever the behaviour of the patient, an explanation could be found in terms of the theory Nothing could show it is wrong

One of Poppers examples:

A man pushes a child into a river, intending to drown him Another man dies trying to save the child
Freudian theory accounts for both behaviours equally easily The first was repressed The second had achieved sublimation

According to Popper concepts like repression and sublimation could permit compatibility with any data the theory is unfalsifiable
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 Popper argued that by contrast Einsteins theory of gravitation makes very definite predictions
These can be tested against observations
Arthur Eddington organised an expedition to the island of Prncipe near Africa to observe the Solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 that provided one of the earliest confirmations of relativity During the eclipse, he took pictures of the stars in the region around the Sun According to the theory of general relativity, stars with light rays that passed near the Sun would appear to have been slightly shifted because their light had been curved by its gravitational field. This effect is noticeable only during eclipses, since otherwise the Suns brightness obscures the affected stars. Eddington showed that Newtonian gravitation could be interpreted to predict half the shift predicted by Einstein 7

 Poppers ideas sound plausible

There is something wrong with a theory if it can be made to fit any observational data But there is a bit more to the story than this
There are other differences between Freuds theory and Einsteins
In particular controllability of context which is after all highly relevant The social sciences have the problem that many variables are simply not subject to experimental control And sometimes if they are the unnaturalness makes the findings less plausible and significant Critiques of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics are sometimes based on the apparent decontextualised experimental circumstances This can result in difficulties in falsification of the theories
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 Scientists frequently find empirical facts that dont exactly fit with the predictions of a theory
But rather than reject the theory, they attempt to save it By taking air resistance into by postulating some other factor that needs to be taken account we could explain into account
almost any empirical finding This is reminiscent Saussures In the case of Galileos falling objects experiment, if a of lead balloon postulation of proto-Indo-European and a feather were dropped at the same time, they would not reach the ground at the same time laryngeals to account for certain Note the obvious parallel to Poppers critique of Freud:

otherwise inexplicable facts about Greek morphology. Instead of rejecting his theory, he takes air resistance into account Subsequently vindicated by Hittite.

A more complex case observations of the orbit of Uranus showed some differences from the predictions of Newtonian physics
Independently in 1846 Adams and Leverrier suggested the existence of another planet that provided the gravitational force that would be responsible for the irregularity in the orbit of Uranus This planet (Neptune) was subsequently discovered almost exactly where predicted
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 Especially in the case of social sciences including linguistics Linguists theories are not always do on occasion critique one another on the easily falsifiable in practice basis of the unfalsifiablity of the others claims.
Even in physics means of measurement Extreme difficulties in applying this notion to the

Generally speaking I dont hold this critique in high regard: present falsifiability may be beyond

linguistic sign It is the less interesting claims that are more easily I believe this is the case for string falsified theory claims not mediated by the sign

It is an important part of the scientific endeavour to account for conflicts exceptional facts while retaining the theory, and working within it
More on this later

Compare two approaches to givenness Givns and mine

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 Popper attempted to characterise science in a Platonic way in terms of an essential feature that must be possessed
His approach to this task seems eminently reasonable:
Compare instances of pseudo-science with good science, and identify the differences
The point is he may have selected the wrong differences

Another possibility is that there is no such essential feature defining science

Like games according to Wittgenstein, there are loose clusters of features characterising things we call games, but no Platonic essence
Games show family resemblances to one another
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Hoaxes and forgeries

Of a rather different nature to pseudo-science are hoaxes and forgeries in science
Consideration of these may give us some inklings into the nature of science itself (when properly done)
Remember my adage that it is when things go wrong that we learn most about how things work rightly
This is implicit in what Popper attempted
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 One of the most famous hoaxes in the history of science was the Piltdown Man:
Bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human.
Parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England

The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawnman", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery
The lower jawbone of an orangutan that had been deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human

Why? What was the point of this forgery?

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 Scientific frauds and forgeries are not all that infrequent

Recent examples:
Milena Penkowa (born 1973) is a Danish neuroscientist who was a Professor at the Panum Institute at the University of Copenhagen from 20092010
Her prolific research mainly concerned the protein metallothionein She received the Danish Elite Research prize in 2009. In 2010 she was accused of scientific misconduct and resigned her professorship
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 Marc D. Hauser (born 25 October 1959) is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate behavior and animal cognition who taught in the Psychology Department at Harvard University.
In August 2010, a committee of Harvard faculty found Hauser solely responsible for eight counts of unspecified scientific misconduct. On August 1, 2011 Hauser resigned his position at Harvard

Hwang Woo-suk (Korean: , born January 29, 1953) is a South Korean veterinarian and researcher, professor of theriogenology and biotechnology at Seoul National University (dismissed on March 20, 2006)
Became infamous for fabricating a series of experiments, which appeared in high-profile journals, in the field of stem cell research Until November 2005, he was considered one of the pioneering experts in the field, best known for two articles published in the journal Science in 2004 and 2005 where he reported to have succeeded in creating human embryonic stem cells by cloning. 15

 It happens in linguistics too

Lanyon-Orgill (19242002) for a full story see Ross Clark (2011). On the margins of Pacific linguistics: P.A. Lanyon-Orgill. Language & History 54(2): 164-177.
In the midtwentieth century his name was quite well known among Pacific-area linguists, through a combination of derivative publication with fictive enhancement both of his own scholarly persona (degrees he never got, colleagues who dont exist) and of the data he presented Changes to his reputation following the exposure in the 1980s of his falsification of alleged eighteenth-century manuscripts, and the realization that fraudulent elements were present in his work from the very beginning.
Nevertheless, some of his work (particularly a few dictionaries) has been found by experience to be sound
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 Consequences of forgeries to science include:

Waste of resources Misdirection of research
For example, the Piltdown Man fraud:
The significance of the bona-fide fossils being found was muted for decades because they disagreed with Piltdown Man and the notions that the faked fossils supported. The paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward spent time at Piltdown each year until he died trying to find more Piltdown Man remains. The misdirection of resources kept others from taking the real fossils more seriously and delayed the reaching of a correct understanding of human evolution. The Taung Child, which should have been the death knell for the view that the human brain evolved first, was instead treated very critically because of its disagreement with the Piltdown Man evidence.
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 In the case of Lanyon-Orgill, I quote from Clarks article

Unexpected evidence of the potential of this material to generate ideas even beyond linguistics appeared in 2003, a year after Lanyon-Orgills death, and more than 20 years after Geraghtys review. Australian journalist and historian Keith Vincent Smith, studying early contacts between Europeans and Aborigines in the Sydney area, came upon Lanyon-Orgills book with its three Lanyon manuscript wordlists from Botany Bay. Whereas the narratives of Cooks first voyage state that the Aborigines were standoffish, if not actually hostile, and that close contact proved impossible, here was evidence that three crew members in three different places had in fact sat down with the indigenous people and learned something of their language. This fed into an ongoing debate in Australia about the history of EuropeanAboriginal relations, so that both the Universitys publicity apparatus and the magazine AQ picked it up (Jopson 2003; Smith 2003, 2004).
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 How does science guard against forgery, and detect it?

Results not replicable by other investigators Results look too good to be true
Error analysis:
Measurements generally have a small amount of error, and repeated measurements of the same item will generally result in slight differences in readings. These differences can be analyzed, and follow certain known mathematical and statistical properties. If a set of data appears to be too faithful to the hypothesis, i.e., the amount of error that would normally be in such measurements does not appear, a conclusion can be drawn that the data may have been forged. Error analysis alone is typically not sufficient to prove that data have been falsified, but it may provide the supporting evidence necessary to confirm suspicions of misconduct
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 In the case of Lanyon-Orgill the main giveaways were:

Problems with the dates of manuscripts:
one wonders, for example, how an English translation of Humboldts TahitianEnglish vocabulary, dated 1845 (130) could have been inserted into a volume bound in 18101815 (286), and whether the John Lanyon who catalogued the manuscript is the same as the John Lanyon (183271) who was eaten by a crocodile.

References to people and articles so obscure as not to exist!

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 Captain Cooks South Sea Island Vocabularies which contained, among other things:
Vocabularies from languages spoken in places where Cook never landed Wordlists that must have been gathered during circumstances of conflict with indigenes Error analysis:
The canonical vocabularies showed the normal quota of errors and inexplicable forms to be expected in such early lists, somewhat enhanced by Lanyon-Orgills ineptitude at identifying modern equivalents for the words. With the Lanyon vocabularies, by contrast, he scored 100 percent, and the resemblances between manuscript and modern language were uncannily close. The apparently inescapable conclusion was that the Lanyon lists were created not by contemporaries of Cook, but on the basis of later sources by a modern hand, using a linguistic equivalent of the distressing applied by makers of fake antiques (for example English-based spellings such as ee, oo would be substituted for modern i, u). 21

 More on frauds and forgeries later ...

For now we can just bear in mind the seriousness of vested interests drug companies, tobacco companies, and so forth
The possibility that research funded by nongovernmental commercial interests will be controlled by these interests

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The philosophy of science

This field of study is concerned with the family resemblances amongst the fields called sciences, With identifying and analysing the methods of enquiry of the sciences
It is concerned with the assumptions implicit in scientific practice
Things that scientists presume but do not discuss or critique
Doing science of course is impossible without making assumptions, and many of them are invisible to the people using them
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 An example: scientific experimentation

A scientist does an experiment, getting a certain result She repeats it a few times and gets the same result After a few goes, she will probably stop, believing that on further repetition given the same conditions of performance the same result will arise
Sounds like a plausible presumption But why? How do we know that this will happen?
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 Wearing your scientists hat, these questions dont really concern you
But many scientists also doff their scientific hats, and think about these questions
Many prominent scientists like Descartes, Newton, Einstein thought about such questions, e.g.
How science should be carried out How much confidence to place in its methods Whether there are limits to scientific knowledge and praxis

The increasing specialisation of science has resulted in less interest in the philosophical questions by scientists
And also the polarisation of science and humanities (where philosophy belongs) of the modern university system

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Scientific reasoning
We now discuss and evaluate some processes employed or claimed to be employed in scientific reasoning
Deduction Induction Inferences of best explanation Explanation

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Deduction
This method of reasoning everyone accepts as valid
Study of deductive reasoning is a part of logic

An example of this type of reasoning is modus ponendo ponens:

A. All men are mortal B. Socrates is a man C. Socrates is mortal

Linguistic examples?

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A. All languages have vowels and consonants B. Nyulnyul is a language C. Nyulnyul has vowels and consonants A. All languages have nouns B. Shua is a language C. Shua has nouns

This principle tells us that if the premises are true, so is the conclusion
The reasoning is valid and exciting eh? But the premises need not necessarily be
E.g. Not all languages have nouns (as a distinct part of speech)

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 What about the following deductions?

A. Most languages have vowels and consonants B. Nyulnyul is a language C. Nyulnyul has vowels and consonants A. All languages have vowels and consonants B. Ngank is not a language C. Ngank has neither vowels nor consonants A. It is not the case that all languages have vowels and consonants B. Some languages have neither vowels nor consonants A. It is not the case that all languages have vowels and consonants B. Some languages have either no vowels or no consonants

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Induction
Many people have suggested a naive inductivist account of science
That places induction as the central method of scientific reasoning

Basis of naive inductivist story

Science starts with observations, using their unimpaired sense organs (ears, eyes, nose) possibly augmented with measuring devices These observations are recorded accurately and faithfully, without prejudice Statements about some aspect of the world are established and justified directly via the observers use of their senses 30

 Examples of observational statements of course, some interpretative knowledge beyond simple observation is essential: these are not completely atheoretical statements
Gooniyandi is spoken in the town of Fitzroy Crossing Shua has a click sound in the word kick The last fluent speaker of Unggumi died in the last decade of the twentieth century
In principle, these statements can or could be established by observation the third one, with some qualifications:
It was observable at some point in time

These are singular statements; in science we are concerned not with singular statements, but with making generalisations
With statements that are universal in application:
Statements that apply to all phenomena of a particular kind
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 How do we get from the singular statements to the universal ones?

One answer is by induction
From a set of singular statements we can legitimately generalise a universal law, provided certain conditions are met
An example:
We make a set of observational statements about Gooniyandi words, that all are made up of vowels and consonants We generalise from the set of observations to the law that all words in Gooniyandi consist of both vowels and consonants
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 What are the conditions that must be met?

The number of observational statements must be large The observations must be repeated under a variety of conditions No observational statement should conflict with the universal law
In our Gooniyandi example this means we would need to:
Examine many different words We should observe them not just in citation, but also in use in different sentences If we observed an exception, then the law would not be universally viable
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 The naive inductivist view of science is that science is based on the principle of induction:
If a large number of Xs have been observed in a wide range of conditions, and if all these Xs without exception possess the property Y, then all Xs have the property Y

Basically the view is that science proceeds as follows:

Laws and theories

Facts acquired through observation

Predictions and explanations

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 There are problems with the principle of induction

Bertrand Russells inductivist turkey:
This turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, he was fed at 9 a.m. However, being a good inductivist, he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he had collected a large number of observations of the fact that he was fed at 9 a.m., and he made these observations under a wide variety of circumstances, on Wednesdays and Thursdays, on warm days and cold days, on rainy days and dry days. Each day, he added another observation statement to his list. Finally, his inductivist conscience was satisfied and he carried out an inductive inference to conclude, "I am always fed at 9 a.m.". Alas, this conclusion was shown to be false in no uncertain manner when, on Christmas eve, instead of being fed, he had his throat cut. An inductive inference with true premises has led to a false conclusion. (Chalmers, p. 14)
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 Linguistic example
We observe through collection of many instances of Agent NPs in Gooniyandi, in a range of different transitive clauses, with many different types of NP (pronominal, animate, inanimate, ...) each of which is marked by ngga We conclude that all Agent NPs are marked by the morpheme ngga
Seems reasonable But how certain can we be of our conclusion
Can we be any more certain than Russells turkey? Not really
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 In fact, once we stop observing elicited examples and look at narratives and everyday speech we find that there are exceptions
Agent NPs that are not marked by this morpheme
A difficulty is that what counts as a broad range of circumstances is not clear
Our elicitation aimed at gathering a broad range of data But in fact it was broad in the wrong ways There is no way we can determine what the relevant range of circumstances is
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 Some have suggested a way out is to introduce probabilities into the story
That the inductive inferences be evaluated in terms of probabilities
E.g. the likelihood that the our general statement is valid given the set of specific statements Possibly this might sound like a reasonable solution
Intuitively it is reasonable to expect that with increasing numbers of singular statements the probability will increase But the turkey example shows that this is not always valid And how could one calculate the probability?
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 Intuitively, if we have a good explanation the probability of the universal statement is increased
But to include this involves a problem for the nave inductivist story of the scientific process
It cant be a simple unidirectional process

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 Another difficulty with the proposals concerns the singular statements conflicting with the generalisations
In our Gooniyandi word structure example, we will eventually find words like mm, aa, mhm
But the obvious thing to do is not to immediately throw out the generalisation
Rather, we look at refining the notion of word

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 Philosophers of science do not generally regard the nave inductivist story as a plausible model of the scientific process
Or consider induction to have a central place in scientific reasoning
This is not to say that it has no place at all:
Presumably we use something like induction in everyday life
From observations we construct expectations as to what will happen a matter of survival
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 Exercise for next time:

What is mathematical induction? How if at all is it like scientific induction? How do mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics regard it?
Are they as cautious and critical of it as in science?

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Inference to best explanation

Another type of non-deductive reasoning, where from a set of specific statements a general statement is inferred that explains them For example:
There are close anatomical similarities between the legs of horses and zebras horses and zebras descend from a common ancestor animal
This provides an explanation of the similarity It is better than the alternative that god created both species separately if so, why the similarity: an omnipotent being could have employed completely different templates for the legs 43

 A similar linguistic example:

Italian and Spanish share a lot of similarities in their lexicons The definite and indefinite articles of Italian and Spanish are very similar in form and system (distinguishing two genders) Italian and Spanish both derive historically from the same ancestor language
This explanation provides a better account of the facts than that the words and articles in the two languages are just accidentally similar
We know from Saussure that the linguistic sign is arbitrary
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 Clearly the premise does not logically entail the conclusion in these cases There are other possibilities, also consistent with the facts:
Although not a good explanation, there is a tiny chance that the similarities are a result of chance They might alternatively be the result of borrowing between the two languages

How can we decide which is the best explanation?

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 We add in further observations (specific statements) or generalisations

Add to the list of similarities til we find that the amount of borrowing would have been so large it is an implausible story Observe that it is much less common for languages to borrow core vocabulary and grammatical morphemes than other lexemes
Since the similarities are in these domains as well as in non-core vocabulary, this explanation is not as good

Observe that among the similarities in the lexicon there are a number of recurrent sound correspondences
Common origin together with regular sound change provides a better explanation than borrowing

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 This example illustrates the development of the comparative method in C19

Numerous linguists contributed to its shaping Rask, Grimm, Grassman, Saussure They observed the similarities in modern languages, and attempted to identify the conditions under which retention and borrowing and other explanations provide the best explanations of similarities

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 This method of reasoning is common in linguistics Another example comes from my own descriptive work on Gooniyandi Here is a potted version of the story of the analysis of the pronoun system in the language
I observed early on that there were two 1st person nonsingular pronominals, ngidi and yaadi I concluded that the language made a distinction between inclusive and exclusive
Which is widespread in Australian languages Specifically,
Ngidi would be 1exclusive, dual or plural Yaadi would be 1 inclusive, dual or plural

Alan Rumsey drew exactly the same conclusion for Bunuba when he did his first fieldwork a couple of years earlier
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 These are not the only possibilities but we were content with them
For a while anyway
Within a few weeks of fieldwork however I found that people were just not using the 1st person pronouns as they should be if it was an inclusive-exclusive system
Observations conflicted with expectations Ngidi was used for not just 1&3 but also 1&2 Yaadi was never used for 1&2, only for 1&2&3 The observations were followed up with experiments i.e. getting speakers interpretations of invented forms: I asked speakers what does yaadi-yoorroo mean? Some rejected the form Some said it means we three!

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 I of course told Alan Rumsey (my supervisor then) about this problem
New to him, so he also tested things out in Bunuba
Finding exactly the same situation as in Gooniyandi

So we ended up with a set of specific statements

Ngidi means
1&2 1&3 1&3&3

Yaadi means
1&2&3 1&2&3
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 Neither of us was happy with these specific observational statements

We wanted to infer a system to suggest a general statement that would account for them
My first attempt was to suggest a contrast between restricted and unrestricted and this appeared in my grammar (1990)
Basically 1 restricted would be a category that included 1 and another person category, but just one 1 unrestricted would include all person categories However, I was never satisfied with this explanation it does not sound nice!
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 In early 1990s Mark Durie suggested an alternative

We were wrong looking for an explanation:
Really, the system was an inclusive-exclusive one, in which there happened to be accidental homophony between:

1dual exclusive ngidi(-yoorroo) and 1dual inclusive ngidi(-yoorroo)

This saves our explanation The problem was that not only was there accidental homophony in these pronominal forms, but also in: The oblique forms (ngirrangi) And throughout the verbal paradigm (jirr-) My conclusion this is too systematic to be accidental: there must be an explanation
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 In the mid 1990s Rumsey and myself both suggested explanations Mine was:
The system is an inclusive-exclusive one, but it operates on different principles than the standard one
What is included or excluded is not the hearer
Just apply logic to

Not (hearer & other(s))

It is hearers specifically the hearer plus others And you get the right
results

Ngidi excludes hearer plus others Yaadi includes hearer plus others

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 In my view this is the best explanation

A long road to its discovery, but preferred over the accidental homophony story
And provides a neater account than what Rumsey suggested at the same time
Which was not intuitively satisfying

We do this regularly in descriptive linguistics

Observe something and immediately seek an explanation to understand it
I hear an intransitive subject NP marked in Pri marked by a morpheme I conclude immediately (tentatively) that the language is ergative
Because in accusative languages the accusative is usually marked, the nominative unmarked Of course, then the conclusion is immediately tested

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Explanations
One of the most important aims of science is to explain the world
Astronomers aim to explain why solar eclipses occur when they do Linguists aim to explain e.g.:
Why languages have the structures they do Why and how some languages are similar to one another How languages are used in speech Why a bilingual person choses to use one language rather than another in a given context
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 What is an explanation? Carl Hempel (1905-1997) suggested the covering law model for scientific explanation in 1950s
While a student in Gttingen he encountered David Hilbert and was impressed by his attempt to base all of mathematics on solid logical foundations derived from a limited number of axioms (Hilbert's Program)

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 Hempel suggested that scientific explanations have logical structure of arguments

Premises followed by conclusions (what needs to be explained) To explain why the ergative marker in Gooniyandi is sometimes used and sometimes not used one needs to set up a set of premises from which this conclusion derives
Accounting for the uses and non-uses

What are the characteristics of a viable scientific explanation?

How should the premises and conclusions be related?
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 Hempels suggestion:
The premises should entail the conclusion (logically a deductive argument) The premises should be true The premises should comprise at least one general universal statement at least one general law

Schematically:
General laws Particular facts Phenomenon to be explained
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 A linguistic example:
We want an explanation for why a bilingual speaker in the Austrian village Oberwart switched from Hungarian to German in an argument In the following discourse a mother is collecting her daughter, who has been looked after by the grandparents during the day. The girl has been misbehaving, and the grandfather sympathises with her.

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The switch to German justifies the choice of child-rearing methods. This switch to German ends the argument between the mother and grandfather

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 How might an explanation go according to Hempel?

Languages express speakers personal and ethnic identities
Hungarian expresses speakers ethnic identity as member of a small village in Austria German expresses speakers identity as an Austrian

Choice of language in bilingual situation indicates choice of identity

I am an Oberwartian we are intimates I am an Austrian we are not intimates
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 We have there general laws (concerning language affiliations and choice) and particular facts (about the language use in the community)
We conclude that the switch to German in the conversation was motivated by the speaker wishing to distance herself from her interlocutor
She establishes herself as an Austrian, not an Oberwartian Austrian is dominant, the language of the powerful By implication she is the powerful one with the powerful argument So we can account for the effect of her language choice for her successfully winning the argument over her father
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 Similarly for the other linguistic example, optional ergative case marking in Gooniyandi though with some twists
A general statement I have proposed in recent work is given that a grammatical morpheme is optional:
Usage vs. non-usage always codes meaning relating to the interpersonal dimension
Specifically, this relates to the general dimension of joint attention
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 This coding is non-arbitrary:

Usage relates to assignment of prominence attend to this, it is important; highlighting Non-usage relates to backgrounding this information is of the setting type, fleshing out contextual details, e.g. provides a search domain
It is not suggested that the clause necessarily presents backgrounded information Greying, defocusing, or distancing is perhaps a better analogy anti-highlighting

Prominence and backgrounding correlate with figure and ground but they are not identical notions
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 This can be easily appreciated in non-linguistic semiosis:

Flashing light on signals engaged in police business, attention is drawn to the vehicle other drivers beware, as this vehicle need not obey the usual rules
tu En rn O L o N IG ga l HT ge i g n th S h e d t s? fl a in shi po ng lic ew or k
HT g G in LI G ash IN FF f l e y SH A O th f f ? g; vi t FL ve so sin ti ha ght ru i ac hy l i st c ified W Ju p ec s un

Flashing light off tells you that these guys are just cruising, looking for trouble: police function backgrounded

FL AS H IN G

hy

Use

System CATEGORY
What typeof ve hicle ? Car

FUNCTION
What function doe s theve hicles e rve ? Police vehicle

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 Applied to optional ergative case marking, we get an explanation for:

Use of the ergative highlights or foregrounds agentivity of an agent Non-use of the ergative backgrounds its agentivity

I said there is a twist to the story

It is that either use or non-use might not convey any meaning
One of them may be so frequent as to tell you nothing So e.g. in Gooniyandi the ergative is so common that it is the norm, and tells you nothing it does not highlight
Omission tells you something, as it is infrequent (c. 10% of the time) Omission serves to background the agentivity of the agent
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 This means that there is an additional factor that must be taken into account:
Markedness

Then we get the following scheme:

Use No meaning [prominent] Meaning [+prominent] No meaning [prominent] Meaning [+prominent]

Non-use

No meaning [backgrounded]

No meaning [backgrounded]

Meaning [+backgrounded]

Meaning [+backgrounded]

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 In my papers on the topic, I show how some specific instances of non-use can be explained in this way:
Now we are explaining the specific statement not the general law (as above)

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 Two illustrative examples:

(1)

aa, ngidi garndiwangoorroo, garndiwirri ngidi yoowooloo-yoorroo, aa we many two we man-DU baraj-jirr++a-yi, thinga, Gooniyandi track-1excNOM+3sgACC+A-DU foot We all we two Aborigines tracked him on foot.

Here the non-use of the ERG on ngidi suggests pragmatically low agentivity of the speaker group.
Why, to what purpose would the speaker do this? It primarily concerns the construal of the narrative world as one in which:
The person being followed expended a lot of effort trying to find his way home, but failed and died. The followers easily tracked him, and found his body.

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 The next example is the only instance in which an inanimate Agent is not ergatively marked:
(1) thinga gilba-yirr++di-yi / gamba / yilij-jin++a foot find-1excNOM+3sgACC+DI-DU water rain-1excACC+3sgNOM+A garr garrwaroo / after afternoon We found his tracks, but it rained on us that afternoon. Gooniyandi

The reason: non-use of the ergative implicates low agentivity, low potency
Lack of effect on the Undergoer as the next sentence says, it was just a sprinkling of rain. NB not lack of volitionality
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 There are two important difficulties with Hempels story see Okasha 2002 First, what explains what? The structure of explanations is symmetric:
Flagpole example provides a clear illustration
We can measure the height of a tree from:
Length of its shadow Angle of the sun

We could use the height of the tree and angle of the sun to explain the length of the shadow In Hempels scheme, we could equally explain the height of the tree by the length of the shadow and the angle of the sun! 71

 Second difficulty is irrelevance

A young child is in a hospital ward full of pregnant women One person in the ward is not pregnant, John, a male Child asks doctor Why isnt John pregnant Doctor replies John has been taking birth control pills for the past 3 years. People who take birth control pills dont get pregnant. So John is not pregnant.

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 What the quack says may be true

For some reason John has been taking birth control pills

This would count as a viable explanation in Hempels scheme

But few would regard this as a decent explanation
Most obviously the explanation is that John is a male Whether he takes the pill or not is irrelevant
We need to at least add a criterion of relevance to Hempels scheme
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 To return briefly to the first problem, we might propose a requirement of causality:

In a clear sense the height of the tree and the angle of the sun cause the length of the shadow
Whereas the length of the shadow and angle of the sun can hardly cause the height of the tree

So we might suggest that to explain something is to identify what the cause is

Height of a tree would be caused by things such as:
Genetic make up of the tree The available resources in the environment

Not the length of the shadow

The causal criterion also explains why Johns taking the pill is not the explanation of his not being pregnant
Clearly the cause of this situation is his sex
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 Things are not always the same in linguistics it is not clear that causality ought to be invoked in all instances of explanation in our subject
In our language choice example, we explain
The choice of German to win the argument The winning of the argument by choice of German

In the case of optional ergative marking

The choice not to use the case-marker to background the Agent The backgrounding of the Agent by not using the ergative 75

 My opinion is that the situation here is different to our flagpole and unpregnant male examples
There is a good reason why
The type of linguistic phenomenon we are trying to explain here concerns the linguistic sign
Recall Saussures model of the intrinsic relation between signifier and signified No causal relation here We can view the sign from either perspective, and thats what we are doing in our two alternative explanations of language choice and case-marker use

Of course, I do not suggest that causal explanations have no role at all in linguistics
Only that causality is not the ultimate arbiter in all instances
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Conclusion
Well be talking more about the philosophy of science including linguistics later
What I try to do in this course is to encourage some of this self-awareness and reflexive thinking about our subject, linguistics
And to see it in the wider contexts of both
Its history of development Its ecology, the other disciplines that it interacts with

In short our interests are in the history and philosophy of the science of linguistics 77

 Finally, let us recall that linguistics straddles the science-humanities divide

A foot in both camps Reflecting its status as a social science
And linguistics shows some peculiarities relative to the hard sciences

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