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Originally Posted by Casiopea  How does that relate to hypothesis v. theory? |
Where linguists talk about phones, they have pure data. Where linguists talk about phonemes they don't. That's because what distinctions people make when hearing/speaking depends on what they learned as a child. The result is that the important distinctions are interpretative behaviour, often unconsciously so. A phonologist may be an expert, but his hypothesis aren't hypothesis at data, but they're the attempt to recreate parsing behaviour. It's not so much:
independent data --> hypothesis
as:
informal expectation --> formalised.
Or:
Everyday guesswork --> hypothesis.
How to approach this? With statistics and context (corpus linguistics) or expert's intuition on competence and performance (Chomsky)? Neither of the approaches is arbitrary, yet neither leads to hypotheses in the same way that observing falling apples does.
For example, I'm skeptical about a progression from hypothesis to theory in the "theory of evolution" sense. Popular theories tend to find their way into the "culture", in twisted and mutated form perhaps, but they'll change expectation. But this in itself is a problematic position (see positivism vs. critical theory).
Scientists look for hypotheses with explanatory force. In the social sciences (including linguistics), explanatory force equals the discovery of unacknowledged conditions of behaviour. But, should such a hypothesis become common knowledge, the explanatory force translates to a productive force. The hypothesis has become a cultural tool rather than a theory; something that can itself be subject to hypotheses.
I'm wondering to what extent it makes sense to talk about "theories" (in the sense: "theory of gravity, evolution etc.") in the social sciences. Hypotheses about language acquisition, for example, will add to the roster of pedagogic methodology, which in turn will change what language learners are exposed to. The question that leads most to confusion is the question about universals, here.
In blunt terms, there isn't enough consensus in the social sciences that hypotheses can be said to have reached "theory status" (like, say, gravity), without first naming your philosophical position on fundamentals, such as "Are there universal features?", "How much can you infer from statistics?", "What is the role of interpretation in the creation and testing of hypotheses?"
Does this make any sense?