The pursuit of theory

Abstract

The first of these arises because a theory is the totality of its consequences. It must be given as the set of its defining conditions, and we may polish them, ground them, tailor them to meet various expectations, but unless we have mapped out what follows from them, the theory remains alien territory. Newton’s theory of gravitation can be written on a postcard, and we might like to think of it as nothing more than what makes apples fall straight to earth and planets follow simple repetitive paths, but its actual content is strange beyond imagining and still under study hundreds of years after it was stated. Once formulated, a theory has broken definitively with intuition and belief.We are stuckwith its consequences whether we like themor not, anticipate them or not, and we must develop techniques to find them. The second question arises because the internal logic of a theory determines what counts as a sound argument within its premises. General principles of rigor and validation apply, of course, but unless connected properly with the specific assumptions in question, the result can easily be oversight and gross error. Here’s an example: in many linguistic theories developed since the 1960s, violating a constraint leads directly to ungrammaticality. A parochial onlooker might get the intuition that violation is somehow ineluctably synonymous with ill-formedness, in the nature of things. A grand conclusion may then be thought to follow: