Philosophy Across the Oceans

No, the 16 are

Ray Monk, Nigel Warburton, Aaron Ridley, Jonathan Wolff, Roger Crisp, Rae Langton, Miranda Fricker, M.G.F. Martin, Timothy Williamson, Tim Crane, Robin Le Poidevin, Christina Howells, Simon Critchley Simon Glendinning, Stephen Mulhall and Keith Ansell Pearson, some of whom fit the description of “rising stars”. The complete description is here.

FWIW I thought that Baggini’s article was pretty poor and, though British philosophers have to cope with a different institutional culture from Americans, there’s really just one anglophone philosophical culture now which includes, also, the Australians (among others). The attempt to suggest otherwise is just a matter of marketing (for the book – probably some commissioning editor’s brainwave) and journalism.

You are confusing What Philosophers Think (2003), which has interviews with 22 British and American philosophers and philosophically interesting scientists, with New British Philosophy (2002), which has interviews with 16 British philosphers. An easy mistake to make given the similarity in content and proximity of publication date.

Incidentally, participatory in this case means taking part in committee work with non-philosophers rather than starting a conversation in the blogosphere.

There is quite a good interview with Janet Radcliffe Richard in What Philosophers Think which discusses this. She’s asked what exactly she does in these committees and she describes it as baby philosophy, or something like that.

She says that she examines arguments which are full of the most basic philosophical mistakes that people wouldn’t make on any other subject that isn’t of such great concern to them as medical ethics. She claims that they make these basic errors of logic, precisely because they’ve decided their position with passion, and then seek to justify it.

Far from letting the fly out of the flybottle or examing the consequences of adopting certain axioms, she seems to be applying the tools of informal logic – ie a fairly standard list of fallacies for detection – to ethical controversies that the government can pass on to a committee because they don’t split people on party-political lines. This last par is my view rather than hers as I understand it.

Chun, I have the table of contents and abstracts of the June issue of Language – the articles themselves aren’t online. Of four articles, two are on dialectology, and area that has very little to do with Chomsky, one is on using neural networks in historical linguistics, which is a pretty anti-Chomskyan thing to want to do, and the remaining article is by a specialist in Arabic morphology who frequently writes articles making a case against the Chomskyan school of morphology.

The March issue is a little better for Chomsky. There are two articles whose titles suggest that Chomsky is definitely going to be cited – one on wh-movement in children with soi-disant SLI, which means Chomsky and Pinker are going to be cited as demi-gods; and the other talks about the “syntax-semantics interface”, which means the author has probably rejected strict Chomskyism, but isn’t quite willing to totally give up on the indepedence of syntax. The December 2002 issue is worse. It has one article that specifically denies using linguistic universals to explain a phenomena that has often been expected to require a universal. One article appears to use a constraint-based grammar – not a very Chomsyan thing. Of the remaining two articles, one is about the history of Welsh prepositions and the other might evoke Chomskyan linguistics.

Are you sure you’re not seeing him cited so often as what the authors are against?

Scott,

I wouldn’t deny that he’s a polarizing figure, but your claims of total non-contribution, etc., are implausible.

I have access to the entire text of recent issues of Language, and I made a pretty serious mistake in my “15 times per issue.” The actual figure is cited or mentioned in 15 articles/reviews per issue.

Goodness knows I’ve made my share of intemperate arguments on the internet, and I certainly don’t much enjoy arguing with people about Chomsky, for the exact reasons you mention. I don’t see how one could fail to find his lacerating contempt for those who disagree with him a source of endless amusement, however. If he’s set back linguistics back decades, at least he’s made it more enjoyable to the layperson with an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology, nyeagh.

Much thanks for the tip about the books. I clearly did get the two mixed up. I’d actually seen the earlier book too, it was at the book expo at one APA or other, I’d just forgotten I’d seen it. The list doesn’t strike me as too bad, apart of course of the absence of any CTers. (What should the term be here? I thought it would be easiest to say that each member of Crooked Timber is a Crook, but that might seem loaded.)

Scott, I really find your claim about Chomsky’s influence in linguistics quite puzzling. I mean, just for starters, what about the entire minimalist program, which still seems extremely active? And G&B still seems to be a major component of pretty much every linguistics grad student’s education. I agree that the stuff about innate knowledge is doubly controversial (in what sense innate, and in what sense knowledge?) But it’s interesting that the Chomskyan syntax has flourished even in the absence of anyone making particular sense of the innateness claims.

None of this should be at all construed as a defense of the man’s politics, btw. And, for that matter, it’s not meant to imply that he hasn’t had a deleterious effect on other parts of linguistics, such as semantics, most notably. But I must suspect that your categorical condemnation of his linguistic work is a bit overstated.