The Science of Language Read Online Free PDF

physics to be unified with and merged with an unchanged chemistry.
    But even well after that, even beyond Pauling, chemistry is still for many mostly a descriptive subject. Take a look at a graduate text in theoretical chemistry. It doesn't really try to present it as a unified subject; you get different theoretical kinds of models for different kinds of situations. If you look at the articles in the technical journals, such as, say, Science or Nature , most of them are pretty descriptive; they pick around the edges of a topic, or something like that. And if you get outside the hard-core natural sciences, the idea that you should actually construct artificial situations in an effort to understand the world – well, that is considered either exotic or crazy. Takelinguistics. If you want to get a grant, what you say is “I want to do corpus linguistics” – collect a huge mass of data and throw a computer at it, and maybe something will happen. That was given up in the hard sciences centuries ago. Galileo had no doubt about the need for focus and idealization when constructing atheory.[C]
    Further, [in] talking about the capacity to do science [in our very recently practiced form, you have to keep in mind that] it's not just very recent, it'svery limited. Physicists, for example, don't go commit suicide over the fact that they can't find maybe 90 percent of what they think the universe is composed of [dark matter and dark energy]. In . . . [a recent] issue of Science , they report the failure of the most sophisticated technology yet developed, which they hoped would find [some of] the particles they think constitute dark matter. That's, say, 90 percent of the universe that they failed to find; so we're still in the dark about 90 percent of the matter in the universe. Well, that's regarded as a scientific problem in physics, not as the end of the field. In linguistics, if you were studying Warlpiri or something, and you can't understand 50 percent of the data, it's taken to mean that you don't know what you'retalking about.
    How can you understand a very complex object? If you can understand some piece of it, it's amazing. And it's the same pretty much across the board. Theoneanimal communication system that seems to have the kind of complexity or intricacy where you might think you could learn something about it from [what we know about] natural languages is that ofbees. They have an extremely intricate communication system and, as you obviously know, there is no evolutionary connection to human beings. But it's interesting to look at bee signs. It's very confusing. It turns out there are hundreds of species of bees – honey bees, stingless bees, etc. The communication systems are scattered among them – some of them have them, some don't; some have different amounts; some use displays, some use flapping . . . But all the species seem to make out about as well. So it's kind of hard to see what the selectional advantage [of the bee communication system] is. And there's almost nothing known about its fundamental nature. The evolution of it is complicated; it's barely studied – there are [only] a few papers. Even the basic neurophysiology of it is extremely obscure. I was reading some of the most recent reviews of bee science. There are very good descriptive studies – all sorts of crazy things are reported. But you can't really work out the basic neurophysiology, and the evolution is almost beyond investigation, even though it's a perfect subject – hundreds of species, short gestation period, you can do any experiment you like, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, if you compare the literature on the evolution of bee communication to the literature on the evolution ofhuman language, it's ridiculous. On the evolution of human language there's a library; on the evolution of bee communication, there are a few scattered textbooks and technical papers. And it's a far easier topic. The evolution of human language