Three Models for Linguistics: Newtonian Mechanics, Darwinism, Axiomatics

Abstract

During its history, linguistics has been influenced by several extraneous models, including the three mentioned in the title of this paper. Have these influences been beneficial, harmful, or irrelevant? ‘Newtonian mechanics’ stands here for the general idea of a science with deterministic laws. (It would be implausible to argue that quantum physics, with its irreducibly statistical laws, has had any impact on linguistics.) So far, no (interesting) deterministic ‘laws of language’ have been discovered, either in synchrony or in diachrony. To be sure, looking for what does not exist may be (experienced as) beneficial in its own right.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a virtual explosion of Darwinist thinking in diachronic linguistics. It is indeed hard to deny that some sort of analogy seems to exist between ‘mutation vs. natural selection’ in evolutionary theory, on the one hand, and ‘innovation vs. acceptance’ in descriptions of language change, on the other. But there are disanalogies as well: it is far from self-evident that re-conceptualizing (intelligent) innovation as (non-intelligent) mutation qualifies as a step forward (rather than backward).

Finally, the influence of axiomatic logic on linguistics is easily verifiable and of permanent value. Generative linguistics could not have come into being without the idea that grammatical derivations, which describe sentences by generating them, can be constructed on the analogy of proofs in axiomatic logic: “A derivation is rougly analogous to a proof, with Sentence playing the role of the single axiom, and the conversions [= “rewrite X-i as Y-i”] corresponding roughly to rules of inference” (Chomsky, The logical structure of linguistic theory. New York: The Plenum Press, 1975/1955: 67, emphasis added; for discussion, see Itkonen, Analogy as structure and process: Approaches in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of science. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005: 17–19). What we have really been speaking about is analogical influence. Hence, everything boils down to this: Are we dealing with good or bad or irrelevant analogies?