[Dawnstorm]

Originally Posted by bianca

I'm not sure I understood Dawnstorm's last comment, though. Would you mind explaining it to me?

First off, I agree that the "hard sciences" don't get around the perception problem.

I'm not sure the perception problem matters much in the hard sciences. You said it very well:

They go so far as to believe they can divest themselves of philosophical reflection, because such reflection is considered to contribute nothing toward the advance of scientific knowledge.

Now, this philosophical reflection is more problematic in social sciences.

All scientific knowledge is ultimately knowledge about relations (object level). And knowledge itself is a relation of mind to world (subject level).

Since the hard sciences deal with relations of matter to matter, there is no mind-problem on the world side. "Mind" only comes into the relation between mind and world. That's why you can have different theories: Newtonian, relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory etc.

For sciences that deal with products of human activity, mind comes in at the object level. To get back to the phoneme-examples: phonemes are objects that are defined by a relationship between mind (interpretative habits) and matter (sounds). Mind comes in again at the subject level, the level of examining.

Since mind-part on the object level (i.e. the mind-part of the phoneme; the distinction part of the distinctive features) is not directly accessible, but has to be reproduced via intuition to have data at all, there is an element of potential equation: part of the data is assumed by intuitive experience.

This wouldn't be all that important, if there wasn't the possibility of a feedback loop. Any hypothesis (subject level) may change the way you conceive of the "mind-part" on the object level - because you have no (direct) corrective in the physical world.

If you sit alone in a room, with only your memories and without outside input, you may be able to convince yourself that the phoneme "æ" does not exist, and re-map your mind, until you stop perceiving the range of sounds that made up "æ" as a coherent sound. By that time you have redistributed all the sounds towards "neighbouring" sounds. You might still utter the same phones on occasion, but - if you do - you hear different phonemes. Since you're alone in that room, the phoneme "æ" has - for all practical purposes - ceased to exist. (It's a very hard task, and it has no value at all. That's why I said it's impractical.)

If you sit alone in a room, no amount of mindwork can switch off gravity.

Basically, it's why we can speak of "language change", but not "gravity change". Because cognition is not involved on the object level. Whether we have gravity or curved space, the object behaved the same, behaves the same, and will behave the same. What changes is merely the theory; the subject level.

The matter part of the object level doesn't change either. We are physically capable to utter the same sounds (please allow me to ignore individual variety and evolution; my head's already spinning!), but the mind part of the object level can change.

Now, once you realise that, by researching language, you place yourself within the concrete here and now, the huge ongoing process of language change, you can't - with a clear conscience - ignore the "mind-problem". Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to tackle it.

An example: Currently, many native speakers of English view the suffix -ise/-ize as a dialect marker of British/American English. They're often surprised to see the Oxford English Dictionary, the British resource in the popular mind, prefer -ize. You cannot tackle the question on a fact-level, alone. History might help: Britain has moved on, America hasn't. The OED (a) favours variety, and (b) is - where possible - traditionalist. But what does this mean for variety within both American English and British English? Are all those people mistaken? Are we observing language change? Will the OED ever prefer "-ise"? Whatever you say will influence the way it turns out, however small your contribution may be. Viewed like that research is not only finding out facts, it's creating facts. Research is not only discovery, it's also politics.