{"id":1151,"date":"2022-01-09T15:07:02","date_gmt":"2022-01-09T15:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1151"},"modified":"2022-01-16T16:00:20","modified_gmt":"2022-01-16T16:00:20","slug":"is-linguistics-unusually-vituperative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/is-linguistics-unusually-vituperative\/","title":{"rendered":"Is linguistics “unusually vituperative”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The picture of linguistics one can get from books like The Linguistics Wars<\/em> (Harris 1993) and press coverage of l’affaire du Pirah\u00e3<\/em> suggests it is a quite nasty sort of field, full of hate and invective. Is linguistics really, as an engineer colleague would have it, “unusually vituperative”?<\/p>\n

In my opinion it is not, for I object to the modifier unusually<\/em>. Indeed, while such stories rarely make the nightly news, the sciences have never been without a heft dose of vituperation. For instance, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon was accused, slanderously and at book length<\/a>, of causing a measles epidemic among indigenous peoples of the Amazon. And entomologist E.O. Wilson had a pitcher of water poured on his head at a lecture<\/a> because, according to a lone audience member, his research on ants implied support for eugenics. And even gentleman Darwin was not above keeping an ill-tempered bulldog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

References<\/h1>\n

Harris, R. A. 1993. The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure.\u00a0<\/em>Oxford University Press. [I don’t recommend this book: Harris, instead of explaining the issues at stake, focuses on “horse race” coverage, quoting extensively from interviews with America’s grumpiest octogenarians.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The picture of linguistics one can get from books like The Linguistics Wars (Harris 1993) and press coverage of l’affaire du Pirah\u00e3 suggests it is a quite nasty sort of field, full of hate and invective. Is linguistics really, as an engineer colleague would have it, “unusually vituperative”? In my opinion it is not, for … Continue reading “Is linguistics “unusually vituperative”?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1170,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions\/1170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}