Darwin-L Message Log 2:8 (October 1993)

Academic Discussion on the History and Theory of the Historical Sciences

This is one message from the Archives of Darwin-L (1993–1997), a professional discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.

Note: Additional publications on evolution and the historical sciences by the Darwin-L list owner are available on SSRN.

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<2:8>From sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu  Fri Oct  1 18:16:50 1993

To: HOLSINGE%UCONNVM.BITNET@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: A parallel between linguistic and biological evolution?
Date: Fri, 01 Oct 93 19:20:25 -0400
From: Sally Thomason <sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu>

Kent Holsinger asks if his formulation is true for fields other
than biology: it looks good for language change; in fact, it looks
like a more elegant statement of what I was trying to say.  As for
his other question, whether it's too general to be useful, that's
harder to answer: we historical linguists need our analogous
principle as part of our underlying assumptions, certainly, but I'm
not enough of a philosopher of science to know whether we actually
make *use* of the principle in doing historical linguistics.

  Sally Thomason
  sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu

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