Many disdainful comments re @patrickc/@tylercowen: “Arrogant tech bros ignorant of the existing fields of history & sociology of science & technology, gah”
I’d like to point out some broad patterns of academic dysfunction manifesting here (
)
-
Show this thread
-
It’s easy to assume that, if there’s an academic field named after some phenomenon, the people in it are doing whatever can be done to discover things about that phenomenon, and everything known about it is taught in that field. This is rarely true.
1 reply 24 retweets 173 likesShow this thread -
Academic fields are social clubs operated for the benefit of insiders. Field founders want to claim as much territory as possible, so they name the field after some broad phenomenon. And then… 4/∞
1 reply 20 retweets 175 likesShow this thread -
Outwardly, an academic field claims as much territory as possible, but inside, it narrows its scope to a particular subset of phenomena, and methods of treating them, which allows it reduce the work to a safe routine of minimal-publishable-units production.
4 replies 21 retweets 170 likesShow this thread -
An academic field then *must* attack outsiders addressing the broad phenomenon it supposedly covers—because their investigations would reveal the field’s actual narrow scope, limited methods, and dubious foundational assumptions.
1 reply 15 retweets 129 likesShow this thread -
Linguistics in the second half of the 20th century is an extreme example. It claimed “the study of language,” but narrowed to arguments about notational variants for formal grammars that were supposed to account for the syntactic grammaticality judgements of expert linguists.
3 replies 5 retweets 98 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @Meaningness
That's not true, that's only true if you listened to a particular subset of linguists that gained prominence during the period. (For that matter, whether linguistics is "the study of language", "the study of languages", both, or even broader is the subject of endless debates)
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @TyphonBaalAmmon @Meaningness
I think what you're saying in general is only true if you pay attention only to the mainstream of a field and not its entirety. Every field is subject to changes in fashion.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @TyphonBaalAmmon
Yes, there were *some* people doing work in pragmatics in the 1980s; but very few, and they were deliberately marginalized afaict
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @Meaningness
In the USA maybe. I feel like Chomskyism was more aggressively dominant in the US than in Europe.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
Ah, yes, I know only about the US situation.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.