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| is that elegance <a href="http://rtygxo.com">coteniburts</a> to pursuit-worthiness. And yes, it's consistent with Minimalism emerging out of GB. But I'm not sure it's a totally accurate characterization of what Hornstein et al think they're doing with Minimalism. They think of Minimalism as a reworking of GB consciously undertaken with the hope of yielding new insights. That is, you take a P and P framework, mix in some new-but-currently-unjustified assumptions (namely language is something like perfect, or however Chomsky phrases that), and see how far you get with those new assumptions. So, it's an odd way of doing science, but then Syntax is an odd science (definitely one of the least sciency of the soft sciences; it's damn close to Philosophy). In any case, elegance plays a more prominent role in this exercise than it does in most theoretical endeavors because to the extent that the original hypothesis is true, the theory that describes it will be elegant.It was to disassociate myself from this kind of thinking that I added that last bit about GB and Minimalism being equally explanatory. I think Hornstein et al would say that Minimalism is currently less explanatory than GB, but since it is showing promise we expect it to eventually be more explanatory. I would personally say that GB was never all that explanatory, and that there are independent reasons to do Minimalism. That's probably the subject of a whole nother blog post, but the cliff's notes version is that I think when you're dealing with something as empirically slippery as Syntax, it's more important to get your (assumptions about first) principles in order first than it is with other sciences just because your assumptions will invariably color how you interpret your findings, and there's really no way to test them. So, you have to spend more time than you normally would making sure that what you're peddling seems right, and more time than you normally would making sure that you're not unnecessarily multiplying entities. In Physics, that can come out in the tests. In Syntax, it never will. The only way to eliminate unnecessary assumptions is by thinking through it like a philosopher. So, I think Minimalism was always the better starting point, and I find it much more convincing than GB. GB covers more data, but I don't think it really accounts for it in a lot of cases like OT in Phonology, it's better as a data classification system than as a real explanation for anything. So, GB was useful for laying out what we'd observed, but I have trouble thinking of it as a theory. So, to me, Minimalism isn't really about chasing elegance in the hopes that it pans out and that language turns out to be something like perfect, it's more about enforcing on ourselves the kind of discipline that data would enforce in Physics, but will not in Syntax. So, I guess I have a kind of inverted version of it: Minimalism will start out maximally elegant and get less so as we go along. Although, this descent into messiness will not be linear, and from time to time we may discover connections that bring us closer to the original elegance, and in such cases I would take that as prima facie evidence that the proposal was on the right track. |
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