[Corpora-List] Bootcamp: 'Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R'--re Louw's endorsement

[Bob Parks]

John,
Thanks for the reference. I recognize there are a variety of 
cognitive approaches - in linguistics, psychology, etc.  But my 
concern wasn't so much about cognitive science or discourse analysis, 
as about the cognitive assumptions built into ordinary language, and 
their moral/political implications.  The call for tolerance should be 
extended beyond the realm of scientific discourse (cognitive vs. 
discourse approaches), to include the realms of ordinary language 
these sciences analyze. Each of these scientific approaches gain some 
truths - but at a risk to moral truths, if we aren't careful about 
qualifying and constraining the implications of our scientific 
understandings of "meaning".  When we choose a scientific pursuit as 
part of a meaningful life, I suspect we'd have a hard time staying 
within a theoretical frame of mind. Science is a moral choice, at 
least until we have a science of morality. So far, nobody seems to 
have found a way to fully reconcile the two worlds.
Thanks,
Bob

At 11:49 PM -0400 8/17/08, John F. Sowa wrote:
>Bob, Chris, Wolfgang, et al.,
>
>All of this argumentation seems hopelessly confused by different
>assumptions about what a "cognitive" approach is supposed to be.
>
>For the record, I suggest that everybody who is arguing about whether
>a cognitive approach is consistent with a corpus-based approach look
>at the papers that were presented at the founding meeting of the
>Cognitive Science Society.  The early archives are available for
>free download:
>
>    http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/1980v04/index.html
>
>The charter for cognitive science was a very broad interdisciplinary
>approach, and they explicitly tried to include all of the positions
>that everybody has been arguing for and against in these recent emails.
>
>Wolfgang's roughly Wittgensteinian approach is as solidly within
>the mainstream of cognitive science as Chomsky's appeal to intuition.
>Personally, I prefer Wittgenstein to Chomsky, but I wouldn't kick
>anybody out of the party just because they had a different preference.
>
>John Sowa
>
>
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