Over at Psychology Today, Vyv Evans, cognitive linguist and UG critic, has written a piece criticizing generative linguistics, and those who defend its practice. In particular he criticizes what he sees as the shape-shifting nature of UG.

I don’t want to address the substance of Evans’ piece, but rather a rhetorical choice he makes, specifically, his choice to compare UG to Brexit. (There was at least one other bit of rhetoric that bothered me, but I’ll save that for a later post.) A choice that serves no other purpose than to give the reader a negative emotional impression of UG. “Brexit is bad. UG is like Brexit in some way. Therefore UG is bad.”

So, what do UG and Brexit have in common? Well, Evans begins by discussing the fact that members of the UK government can’t seem to reach a consensus as to what Brexit means. In Evans’ words:

…[T]here are now, perhaps, as many versions of Brexit as there are governmental ministers; moreover, each minister’s version of Brexit seems to change each time they are interviewed on the subject. Brexit is a shape-shifting chimera, as the UK government attempts to square the impossible circle of respecting the referendum result, and democracy, while attempting to avoid destroying the UK’s economy.

UG, in Evans’ estimation is the same. Ask two generative grammarians what Universal Grammar means and you’ll get two distinct answers. Ask them again in a year, you’ll get two more answers. This leads Evans to the question of why generative grammarians can’t just settle on a definition of UG, to which he offers the answer: Because it isn’t real.

Seems pretty damning, but let’s push on it just a bit. If the “shape-shifting” nature of generative linguistics follows from the fact that UG isn’t real, does that mean that Brexit also isn’t real? Surely, Evans doesn’t believe that Brexit is merely a figment of the UK government’s collective imagination. I don’t think he does, but I do think he knows that most of his readers wish Brexit were just a dream they could awake from. And maybe now they want UG theory to be false.

And if “shape-shifting” is a sign that UG is false, why bother with the talk of Brexit? Why not write an article surveying the many ways UG theory has changed and been reinterpreted since the 50’s, and how current generative grammarians still debate each other on what UG is and isn’t? Perhaps because that wouldn’t make it as easy for the reader to conclude that UG theory is patently false.

Just to drive my point home, let’s consider an article Evans could have written. One with the same logical structure, but vastly different emotional structure.

What do Quantum Mechanics and Universal Grammar have in common?
Ask a layperson about quantum mechanics and they may tell you something about Schrödinger’s cat being both alive and dead until we observe it, but ask a physicist or a philosopher of physics, and who knows what they’ll say. They may talk about superposition or the randomness of the universe. They might talk about guiding waves. They might even talk about multiple realities. Or maybe they’ll just show you some equations and go back to their experiments. In fact if you ask any number of physicists what quantum mechanics is you’ll get the same number of responses which differ from each other to varying degrees. And if you look at Universal Grammar theory, you’ll find a similar situation. Probably because UG simply isn’t real.

Such an article would never be published by Psychology Today, and any academic who wrote it would be laughed out of academia, and scolded for suggesting that quantum mechanics might be a lie.

And to be perfectly clear, anyone who used such a comparison to quantum mechanics to assert Universal Grammar’s validity would be equally as wrong, because (and I assume that Evans knows this, because I assume him to be neither stupid, nor irrational.) just because two things share one property doesn’t mean they share any other properties.

Quite frankly, I’m disappointed by Evans’ article. I’m disappointed that he’s resorted to this kind of emotional appeal rather than well-reasoned criticism against UG. Academics, like artists and politicians, need good criticism to keep them honest, because theories are made stronger not only by adding good arguments in their favour, but also by discarding bad arguments in their favour.