In recent years, linguists and philosophers have displayed a great deal of interests in each other’s work. Linguists can be found attending philosophy courses and philosophers linguistics courses in significant numbers, and there is a remarkable overlap among the names that turn up in linguists’ conversation and philosophers’ (and while today there is no known attestation of a philosopher referring to John Ohala or a linguist to Anaximander, who knows what tomorrow will bring?). It has occasionally been suggested that it is difficult to tell a linguist from a philosopher these days. For the benefit of anyone who is interested in drawing that distinction, I submit the following compendium of spot checks:
| The linguist is the one | The philosopher is the one | |
who owns the clean copy of Quine’s Word and Object | who owns the clean copy of Austin’s How to do things with words who cites Greek words in the original orthography |
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who uses examples sentences as an example of more than one thing who uses example sentences that contain subordinate clauses whose IQ drops 30 points when he writes a textbook | who is offended by use- whose vocabulary drops to an infantile level when he makes up example sentences who has finished writing his paper when he leaves for the meeting where he’s going to present it |
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who will present a critique of Chomsky and Halle’s stress rules at a conference on phonetics | who will contribute a paper on the hangman paradox to a symposium on capital punishment who owns a dictionary of English |
|
who can play chess | who talks about chess who feels comfortable eating with a knife and fork |
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who knows the 7-times table | who salivates when mathematics is mentioned |
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who refers to Copernicus and Galileo in a paper on Mongolian vowel harmony | who refers to Chomsky in a paper on quantified modal logic |
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Expansions of Murphy’s Law for Linguists (mostly)—Metalleus |
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A Neurolinguistic Analysis of Sex and Second Language Learning: A Note—Loraine Obler |
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Son of Lingua Pranca Contents |