Heh, I just hit Reply All and I guess the address came in wrong. Ah, well. I strongly agree with you on the state of linguistics, et al. Having done little bits of work in a few of those fields (or at least work _with_ people in them), your comments are spot on. Though perhaps I wouldn't say that mathematics isn't a science (merely because most fields therein satisfy the scientific method). But my glasses may be just a little rosy. :) All that said, I find your points insightful. And don't even get me started on the sloppy math in the social sciences. :D A major issue in the matter of theory/practice drift seems (to me, at least) to be the subject matter's ability to assimilate into pop culture and pseudo-scientific meandering. String theory and some of Penrose's works spring to mind. Sapir-Whorf, "relational" databases, and the events (perhaps to be read 'hype') leading up to the AI Winter also come to mind. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say. Perhaps that's just confirmation bias. I may just think of them as examples because they're pet peeves. :D And, naturally, every field wishes it could be mathematics. (Tongue in cheek… mostly) http://xkcd.com/435/ On Jul 9, 2011, at 7:55 PM, wren ng thornton wrote:

(Psst, the nlp list is :)

...

On Jul 7, 2011, at 10:53 PM, wren ng thornton wrote:

...

I can't help but be a (meta)theorist. But then, I'm of the firm opinion that theory must be grounded in actual practice, else it belongs more to the realm of theology than science.

Oof, you're liable to wound my (pure) mathematician's pride with remarks

On 7/9/11 3:10 AM, Jack Henahan wrote: like that, wren. :P

How's that now? Pure mathematics is perfectly grounded in the practice of mathematics :)

I've no qualms with pure maths. Afterall, mathematics isn't trying to model anything (except itself). The problems I have are when the theory branch of a field loses touch with what the field is trying to do in the first place, and consequently ends up arguing over details which can be neither proven nor disproven. It is this which makes them non-scientific and not particularly helpful for practicing scientists. Linguistics is one of the fields where this has happened, but it's by no means the only one (AI, declarative databases, postmodernism,...)

There's nothing wrong with not being science. I'm a big fan of the humanities, mathematics, and philosophy. It's only a problem when non-science is pretending to be science: it derails the scientists and it does a disservice to the non-science itself. Non-science is fine; pseudo-science is the problem. For the same reason, I despise math envy and all the pseudo-math that gets bandied about in social sciences wishing they were economics (or economics wishing it were statistics, or statistics wishing it were mathematics).

-- Live well, ~wren

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe