-----Original Message----- From: Barry DeCicco <bdecicco2001 at yahoo.com>
>>Some natural sciences are non-experimental, or mostly
>>non-experimental, like astronomy, geology, and
>>paleontology.
>
>>Jim F.
>
>And economics. Which is sometimes good for tripping
>up the stereotypical engineer/physical
>scientist-libertarian, who thinks of economics as the
>only 'real' social science.
>
> I've used astronomy to trip up a physics grad
>student/libertarian/scoffer at 'soft science', who was
>foolish enough to distinguish 'soft/hard' by means of
>'experimental/non-experimental'.
>
>Barry
Still worse, people devoted to libertarian notions of scientism seem often to think that the definition of science is some kind of mathematical formalisation. Economics has formal models, so it must be science. Sociology doesn't, so it must not be science.
This formalist point of view is especially hard on linguistics. All those beautiful Chomskyan phrase structure trees let you write very scientific sounding papers about generative properties, but ultimately serve no useful end. X-bar theory was just hopelessly lost in admiration of its own formal coolness. It's even worse now, HPSG introduces all sorts of formally interesting properties of constituents and drags a lot of cool sounding vocabulary into linguistics from object-oriented programming (although I have to admit HPSG is a real improvement in American linguistics, and Pustejovsky's qualia semantics, while almost incomprehensibly formal, do at least have some use.)
Cognitive grammar makes little use of formalism, optimality theory usually uses only very weak formalisms and tends to express everything in regular language and dependency grammar is very suspicious of overly formal theoretical constructs, and both are demonstrably more useful.
My test for when a linguistic theory has grown narcissistically formalised is to check if the Wycliffers use it in Bible translation work or if there's a commercially viable product using it. If someone else can find a real use for it, I have to take it seriously. Otherwise, I just assume that if I think it's useless, it probably is.
Personally, I'm inclined to blame science-fiction for the widespread belief among the Gen-X libertarian crowd that a social science has to be built on formal mathematics and deduced, somehow, from mathematical abstractions of human activity. Asimov's "psychohistory" and Heinlein's bizarre social science musings have put the idea in their heads.
Someday, love of formalism will be regarded as a disaster in the same way that behavourism is now. Social science is not something to be studied in labs. The best insights are out there on the streets, where nice white lab coats can get dirty.
Scott Martens