Apropos the ongoing exchange between Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch vs. Jackendoff and Pinker, Mark Liberman writes about the slowness of scholarly conversation as mediated through journals.
He’s quite right. It can be done faster and often is. See my earlier post about the new features at arxiv.org, which is how physicists do their scholarly exchanges.
Also, our experience with our Harlem Paper has been amazing. Since we first posted our notes on the web in March 2004, there have been four or five successive drafts by Arnim von Stechow and his colleagues, there or so papers by Janneke Huitink, a SALT paper by Jon Nissenbaum, and — judging by anonymous abstracts I got to review for Sinn und Bedeutung and NELS — some more work by others yet to be presented. In the same span of time, our own paper has gone through three or four revisions and has been presented at a couple of conferences. The speed of the debate is far from the glacial speed that Liberman was complaining about. Of course, we’re all beating up on each other so much that it is quite conceivable that there won’t be anyone left standing to submit a journal article about this topic.
The person who wrote the complaint about speed is not fair at all, from an academic point of view and I would like to defend both Ray Jackendoff and Noam Chomsky for their serious and responsible way of making science.
Fermat’s work had started a deep discussion centuries before the demonstration of his most famous theorem could be found. That is Mathematics, that is Science. Quick answers may be good ones or bad ones.
No every linguist has a capacity to understand Chomsky and enough baggage to criticise his work. Jackendoff has and is one exception.
Nevertheless, there are many weak and false critiques to Chomsky’s works. We do not need them, they only occupy space in libraries. Cliches of the kind that Chomsky does not present data to support his claims and other XIXth old pseudo-positivist empiricist dogmas are not worthy to read, even if they were true. Jackendoff would not make such primary mistake and, of course, he would always prefer to give a well constructed response rather than a quick one. He and Chomsky have a sense of depth, so they take their time.
The problem is that People should read and study both Chomsky’s and Jackendoff’s works to follow the discussion. It is quite wrong to talk only about the works of one and forget the works of the other. People, who do not know Jackendoff’s Architecture of Language Faculty and cannot understand the Minimalist Programme, should not make comments on either one of them. So, in this sense this is a dense debate for those who can, in the proper time, really discuss the issues. True knowledge is a pre-requisite that cannot be waived.
August 26th, 2005, at 9:37 pm #Arxiv has recently moved from an open submission policy to an exclusive one. Previously, anyone could submit papers, now one can only submit papers if one is endorsed by prior submitters. As a consequence, I refuse to post any papers to arxiv. To ensure openness to ideas, science should be open to all, not just to a self-selecting clique.
At least many scientific journals, for all their other faults, still undertake double-blind refereeing, and thus permit the Ramanujans of this world a hearing.
August 29th, 2005, at 6:06 pm #Peter,
Double-blind refereeing, as it is conceived in theory, should be adopted for Ph.D. qualification process before the defence. The problem is that the referees must be people who really have an expertise in the field or fields the works are concerned with, and must be ethical with their colleagues.
But journals are not so blind, as they claim to be. Students supervised by referees of a Journal often have easy access to it, while for others it is much more difficult. And preference is given to country-fellows over foreigners in many wealthy nations. Let me mention two cases:
Anyway, the Archive system has a great advantage for us the readers. If a referee of a Journal does not like a paper for any reason, we the readers can still judge it by ourselves simply downloading it. Two guys may have rejected it, but a multitude of people may find it insightful. One Inquisitor and a group of divines had not approved Galileo Galilei, but his ideas have prevailed in due time.
August 29th, 2005, at 7:28 pm #Tony –
I did not say that Journals are faultless.
My point is this: how do I, who have never published in (say) condensed matter physics and who knows not a single person in the subject, get a paper accepted onto the condensed matter physics section of arxiv? At least, I could submit my paper to a leading Physics Journal with a non-zero probability of it being refereed fairly. With arxiv, this probability for me is exactly zero, since I do not know anyone able to endorse my work in condensed matter physics.
As I said in my post, the chief loser in this is science itself, since by this process arxiv is closing the door to new ideas from outside the existing establishment.
August 30th, 2005, at 5:35 am #Well, you could start your own blog or become one author of Maieutikos, if you give me your e-mail address for me to forward you the invitation.
August 30th, 2005, at 10:17 am #