-----Original Message-----
From: James Heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
>Street-wise, world-foolish, a friend, Mo Benjamin once said to me. Or
>'ignorance never helped anyone' as Marx said to Weitling.
>
>Sympathetic as I am to Scott's despair at linguistics and econometrics,
>it is an error to elevate practice over theory. Marx did good social
>science in the British library. Formalism might be a trap, but abstract
>thinking is the very essence of science. Mathematical measurement is not
>always something to be ignored. It would be childish not to pay
>attention to such things as wage differentials or profit rates.
>
>James Heartfield
I'm not complaining that abstract thinking is useless, and no study - or even measurement - is ever free of theory. I'm not even bothered by formalism as such, I don't see how physics could work without it. Rather, I find it bizarre to see formal neatness raised in support of counterintuitive thinking without any empirical basis. This is rife in linguistics. Ivan Sag's book on HPSG defends phrase structure grammar on the basis of its formal concision, not explanatory power or on the basis of any insight that it offers.
I'll go further than claiming that "mathematical measurement is not always something to be ignored", quantitative measurement is one of the most useful things people do. However, the act of measurement does not, by itself, accomplish anything. An astrologer can measure the locations of stars with arbitrary precision without actually accomplishing anything.
Scott Martens