Darwin-L Message Log 23: 31–52 — July 1995

Academic Discussion on the History and Theory of the Historical Sciences

Darwin-L was an international discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences, active from 1993–1997. Darwin-L was established to promote the reintegration of a range of fields all of which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present, and to encourage communication among scholars, scientists, and researchers in these fields. The group had more than 600 members from 35 countries, and produced a consistently high level of discussion over its several years of operation. Darwin-L was not restricted to evolutionary biology nor to the work of Charles Darwin, but instead addressed the entire range of historical sciences from an explicitly comparative perspective, including evolutionary biology, historical linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology, systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, historical geography, historical anthropology, and related “palaetiological” fields.

This log contains public messages posted to the Darwin-L discussion group during July 1995. It has been lightly edited for format: message numbers have been added for ease of reference, message headers have been trimmed, some irregular lines have been reformatted, and error messages and personal messages accidentally posted to the group as a whole have been deleted. No genuine editorial changes have been made to the content of any of the posts. This log is provided for personal reference and research purposes only, and none of the material contained herein should be published or quoted without the permission of the original poster.

The master copy of this log is maintained in the Darwin-L Archives (rjohara.net/darwin) by Dr. Robert J. O’Hara. The Darwin-L Archives also contain additional information about the Darwin-L discussion group, the complete Today in the Historical Sciences calendar for every month of the year, a collection of recommended readings on the historical sciences, and an account of William Whewell’s concept of “palaetiology.”

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DARWIN-L MESSAGE LOG 23: 31-52 -- JULY 1995
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DARWIN-L
A Network Discussion Group on the
History and Theory of the Historical Sciences

Darwin-L@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu is an international network discussion group on
the history and theory of the historical sciences.  Darwin-L was established
in September 1993 to promote the reintegration of a range of fields all of
which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present,
and to encourage communication among academic professionals in these fields.
Darwin-L is not restricted to evolutionary biology nor to the work of Charles
Darwin but instead addresses the entire range of historical sciences from an
interdisciplinary perspective, including evolutionary biology, historical
linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology,
systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, historical
anthropology, historical geography, and related "palaetiological" fields.

This log contains public messages posted to Darwin-L during July 1995.
It has been lightly edited for format: message numbers have been added for ease
of reference, message headers have been trimmed, some irregular lines have been
reformatted, and some administrative messages and personal messages posted to
the group as a whole have been deleted.  No genuine editorial changes have been
made to the content of any of the posts.  This log is provided for personal
reference and research purposes only, and none of the material contained herein
should be published or quoted without the permission of the original poster.
The master copy of this log is maintained in the archives of Darwin-L by
listserv@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu, and is also available on the Darwin-L gopher at
rjohara.uncg.edu.  For instructions on how to retrieve copies of this and other
log files, and for additional information about Darwin-L, send the e-mail
message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu, or connect to the
Darwin-L Web Server at http://rjohara.uncg.edu.

Darwin-L is administered by Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu), Center for
Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology, University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A., and it
is supported by the Center for Critical Inquiry, University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, and the Department of History and the Academic Computing Center,
University of Kansas.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:31>From andy@dep.philo.mcgill.ca Fri Jul 14 09:41:32 1995

Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 10:45:17 -0500 (GMT-0500)
From: Andrew Burday <andy@dep.philo.mcgill.ca>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Species/Languages

On Fri, 14 Jul 1995, Peter T. Englot (Graduate School) wrote:

> his use of the term "language faculty"): Chomsky's hypothesis about
> all human languages being variants of a single human language, or

I want to throw in a caution here.  Chomsky does occasionally say things
that sound like this, but it's not, I think, his main point.  His main
claim is that the proper object of linguistic study is what is
internalized by the individual mature speaker/hearer, not some public,
abstract entity that sets a standard for the individual.  Of course he
understands that in ordinary discourse we talk about English, Chinese,
Dutch, and so on.  He's perfectly happy to talk about them himself.  The
claim is just that they (the public languages) are abstractions over many
more or less similar internal grammars.  What he denies is that
individuals' languages should be understood as better or worse
approximations to the public languages.  This may sound like a lot of
nitpicking, but the idea that the public language sets a standard that
individuals have to come up to is deeply engrained in Western philosophy
and ideology.  Chomsky thinks that (1) that's wrong and (2) it had better
be wrong if we want to have a natural science of language.

Of course he understands that speakers of, say, his dialect of Ashkenazi
Jewish American English are going to have a lot more in common with each
other than they will with speakers of Korean.  Furthermore, the
association of meaning, syntactic features, and phonetic features of
lexical items (words, essentially) is idiosyncratic and cannot be derived
from a universal human endowment.  (At least, not so far as anyone knows.)

Anyway, my point is just that (at least on my reading) Chomsky thinks
that each individuals' development of a language can be explained only in
terms of an innate language faculty which prepares the individual to
acquire a language.  I don't know of any good theoretical reason to worry
about whether that makes all languages "variations on a single
language".  The important theoretical claim is that it's the individual's
language which is basic in linguistics.  The "public" language is just an
abstraction over the languages of individuals.

> "grammar," seems to rest on the assumption that  all humans share a
> genetic heritage.

Sounds like a pretty safe assumption to me...  Granted that there are
geographical variations in gene frequency, the fact that language is a
universal human trait suggests that the genes "for language" are shared
among all humans.  So far as anybody knows, if you drop a newborn child of
monolingual Malagasay speakers in a monolingual White American English
environment, the kid will acquire that dialect of English.  It's certainly
conceivable that there are geographical variations in predispositions to
acquire a language with this or that feature.  Whether or not it's true is
ultimately an empirical question, and so far as I know, there's no
evidence that there are such variations.  (I put "for language" in scare
quotes to head off possible objections from the biologists.  Of course I
understand that genes code "for" polypeptides, and that getting from the
polypeptides to language of any kind is going to take some pretty fancy
development.)

Best,

Andrew Burday
andy@philo.mcgill.ca

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:32>From lgorbet@mail.unm.edu Fri Jul 14 12:08:45 1995

Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 11:09:45 -0600
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: lgorbet@mail.unm.edu
Subject: Re: Species/Languages

At 9:45 AM 7/14/95, Andrew Burday wrote:

>[Chomsky's] main
>claim is that the proper object of linguistic study is what is
>internalized by the individual mature speaker/hearer, not some public,
>abstract entity that sets a standard for the individual.

I think this representation of what Chomsky *says* is pretty accurate.
What he says is also pretty ironic, since, to the best of my knowledge, no
generative grammarian has ever even pretended to try to describe in any
detail the grammatical competence of any "individual mature
speaker/hearer".  That is, this ostensible theory of *individual*
competences is founded empirically (to the extent that it has empirical
foundations) on "triangulation" from bits and pieces of data from lots of
*different* individuals.  And the extent to which those individuals do or
do not actually speak/understand the "same" languages is treated in fact as
outside the concerns of the theory....

Larry Gorbet                         lgorbet@mail.unm.edu
Anthropology & Linguistics Depts.    (505) 883-7378
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM, U.S.A.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:33>From mwinsor@epas.utoronto.ca Fri Jul 14 12:11:19 1995

From: Mary P Winsor <mwinsor@epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: Species/Languages
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 13:12:33 -0400 (EDT)

Andrew Burday's synopsis of Chomsky suggests a very close parallel to
the insistence on "population thinking" rather than "typological
thinking" which Ernst Mayr has rightly insisted on throughout his
career. Indeed it is such an exact parallel I suppose it has long been
obvious to everyone else on this, but I confess it wasn't to me.
Polly Winsor
mwinsor@epas.utoronto.ca

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:34>From jsl@rockvax.rockefeller.edu Sat Jul 15 15:11:21 1995

To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Species/Languages: seeking enlightenment on Chomsky
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 16:16:58 EDT
From: Joshua Lederberg <jsl@rockvax.rockefeller.edu>

Having seen a bit of traffic on Chomsky encourages me to ask
this net to clarify his views, for the benefit of one who is
avowedly ignorant of linguistic theory.

1.  Can someone epitomize his theory in a way that indicates
which counter-proposals are in serious competition with it; and

2.  What are the proposed observations or experiments that would
falsify Chomskyian theory, or permit a discrimination between it
and alternatives.  (Or perhaps have already done.  Has the theory
already made predictions that have been borne out by experiment?)

Appreciatively,

lederberg@rockvax.rockefeller.edu
--------

Prof. Joshua Lederberg
Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Informatics
The Rockefeller University
1230 York Avenue
New York, NY   10021-6399

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:35>From hale1@husc.harvard.edu Sat Jul 15 19:17:46 1995

Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 20:19:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mark Hale <hale1@husc.harvard.edu>
Subject: Re: Species/Languages: seeking enlightenment on Chomsky
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

On Sat, 15 Jul 1995, Joshua Lederberg wrote:

> Having seen a bit of traffic on Chomsky encourages me to ask
> this net to clarify his views, for the benefit of one who is
> avowedly ignorant of linguistic theory.
>
> 1.  Can someone epitomize his theory in a way that indicates
> which counter-proposals are in serious competition with it; and
>
> 2.  What are the proposed observations or experiments that would
> falsify Chomskyian theory, or permit a discrimination between it
> and alternatives.  (Or perhaps have already done.  Has the theory
> already made predictions that have been borne out by experiment?)
>
> Appreciatively,

Ad 1. The main counter-proposals to the aspects of Chomskyan
linguistics under discussion (thus I leave aside technical
differences between theoretical linguists who generally accept
the ideas outlined in the original post) concern, of course,
the proper object of linguistic study. Sociolinguists, e.g.,
generally consider the domain of analysis (for linguistics
generally) to be "the speech community", rather than "the
grammar". [I inject here that we are not talking about individuals
vs. communities here: the object of study in theoretical
linguistics of the Chomskyan type is not the linguistic
features of an individual, but of that subcapacity of an
individual which one calls his/her "grammar". A single speaker
may, and in the normal case in my view does, embody several
of these.]  Many psycholinguists would not accept the strict
distinction between 'competence' and 'performance' advocated
by followers of Chomsky (believing the two are more interlocked,
less modularly distinct, than theoretical linguistics generally
hold). Historical linguists have a tradition which leads
them to speak of "languages" as if they held a divergent
view from that of Chomsky, though I have attempted to show
in recent work that their own conception, based on their
methods rather than their theorizing, is much closer to
Chomsky's view than most of them (I should say "us" -- I am
a traditionally-trained historical linguist) would admit.

Ad 2. Ummm, does anyone still believe that experiments
"falsify" theories? I would think that on a list devoted
to scientific methodology, this discussion would not be
necessary.  The difference between Chomskyan assumptions
and those of e.g. Socio- or Psycholinguists is that they
generate different research strategies, which may prove more
or less productive, insightful, useful, or intriguing.
In this linguistics parallels scientific endeavors in
all other domains, as far as I can see.

Mark Hale
hale1@alcor.concordia.ca
hale1@fas.harvard.edu (Summer 1995)

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:36>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sat Jul 15 22:47:24 1995

Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 23:48:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Legal writs, group thinking, and tree thinking
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

Peter Junger wrote of his fascinating work:

>As I mentioned here a couple of years ago, I am interested in the
>evolution of the "forms of action"--the various claims that one has to
>make if one is going to bring a valid law suit--in the common law system.
>I have noticed that at least one legal historian can get into a
>squabble--or perhaps only half of a squabble--over the issue of whether a
>fourteenth century writ is a writ of "trespass on the case" or of
>"assumpsit"; the underlying issue being whether the modern action of
>"assumpsit" descended from the action "on the case" or whether there
>was an ancestral form of "assumpsit" that was contemporary with the
>original action "on the case".  (At least I think that was what the
>issue is.)

An interesting thing in the example above is that, if I understand it
correctly, the answer to the question "Which kind of writ is this 14th
century writ?" is not dependent upon the morphology (as it were) of the writ
in question, but rather on its ancestry. This is perhaps an example of a
distinction that can be made in systematics between "group thinking" and
"tree thinking".  Someone who says that dinosaurs are extinct is likely to
be a group thinker, for example, because that person's concept of what
"dinosaur" means is a morphological concept.  A tree thinker would be likely
to hold a historical, genealogical concept of any taxon name, and since birds
are the descendants of one of the branches of the tree that the "dinosaurs"
made up, then dinosaurs are in fact not extinct; birds are dinosaurs.  (I
feel like I didn't explain that well, but I hope the point got through.)

Exploring Peter's example further, I wonder if he can say whether the
following would be an accurate way to represent the two alternative opinions
on the 14th-century writ (W) in question:

                   HISTORY A                       HISTORY B

                            |                   |             |
                            |                   |             |
14th C                      W                   W             |
                            |                   |             |
                 ___________|                   |             |
                 |          |                   |             |
                 |          |                   |             |
                 |          |                   |             |
                 |          |                   |             |
20th C        assump.    on case             assump.       on case

Do people in the field of legal history ever publish diagrams of this type?
If so, I'd welcome citations to them for my bibliography on "trees of
history" in various disciplines.  (This bibliography is available on the
Darwin-L Web Server at http://rjohara.uncg.edu for those who would like to
browse it; I haven't updated it in a while, but I continue to collect items
for it.  Items discussing the theory of historical tree diagrams are
particularly sought; I distinguish historical/genealogical tree diagrams
("trees of history") from logical/classificatory branching diagrams which
aren't within the scope of the bibliography.)

Many thanks.

Bob O'Hara, Darwin-L list owner

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu; http://rjohara.uncg.edu)
Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology
100 Foust Building, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:37>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sat Jul 15 23:02:20 1995

Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 00:03:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Periodization
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

Tim Hunt wrote of archeology:

>Archaeology is a prime example of a discipline which has long struggled
>with the problems of unit construction in an historical science.  Parsing
>the temporal and spatial continuum of the archaeological record into
>meaningful units with which to measure cultural change and social
>interaction has been a problematic (and often unexamined) endeavor since
>the inception of the discipline (Dunnell 1971,1986).

Breaking the temporal continuum into units is a problem that in general
history goes by the name of "periodization", and as Tim observes it is
a topic that is relevant in geology and archeology as well.  A very helpful
reference on many such concepts is:

  Ritter, Harry.  1986.  Dictionary of Concepts in History.  New York:
     Greenwood Press.

This would be an outstanding book to use for a research seminar, or at least
as supplemental reading of some kind.  It's a bit like the recent Keller and
Lloyd book _Keywords in Evolutionary Biology_, though somewhat more
dictionary-like.  It does have a long entry on periodization with references
to the historical literature on the topic, though it rarely mentions work in
the historical sciences.  I think most Darwin-L readers would find the book
very useful.

Bob O'Hara, Darwin-L list owner

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu; http://rjohara.uncg.edu)
Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology
100 Foust Building, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:38>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sat Jul 15 23:53:23 1995

Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 00:54:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Chomsky and populational vs. essentialist thinking
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

I think I'm starting to get confused.  (_Starting_, you say; hah!)   ;-)

Tom Cravens summarized Chomsky's views thus:

>Humans come into the world predisposed to speak human language.  A
>good part of the natural, first-language acquisition of whatever
>language the child is exposed to is in part a process of sorting out
>what constraints on this universal human grammar are relevant to the
>particular language being acquired.  Thus, in a sense -- this is
>stretching it, but not distorting enormously, I don't think -- the
>child is born with 'language', and only (!) needs to sort out which
>peculiarities are appropriate to the language of interest, i.e. the
>one being heard constantly.

And Andrew Burday in expanding upon these ideas said:

>Of course he [Chomsky] understands that in ordinary discourse we talk
>about English, Chinese, Dutch, and so on.  He's perfectly happy to talk
>about them himself.  The claim is just that they (the public languages)
>are abstractions over many more or less similar internal grammars.

Then Polly Winsor made the interesting observation that:

>Andrew Burday's synopsis of Chomsky suggests a very close parallel to
>the insistence on "population thinking" rather than "typological
>thinking" which Ernst Mayr has rightly insisted on throughout his
>career. Indeed it is such an exact parallel I suppose it has long been
>obvious to everyone else on this, but I confess it wasn't to me.

I want to make sure we (Polly and I, at least) are on the same wavelength
here, namely that the Chomskian view sounds typological to us.  (I had better
say "essentialist" rather than typological, because "typology" is a technical
term in linguistics.)  Evolutionary biologists use the terms typological and
essentialist as synonyms to describe a particular way of thinking that they
usually reject (a way of thinking about individual variation).  They contrast
typological/essentialist thinking with "population thinking".  These terms
comes from Ernst Mayr who has written about them for many years.

Here's a quotation I sometimes use in my classes to illustrate the
essentialist view.  Do any other evolutioanry biologists here think the
Chomskian view sounds like this?

  There is, in nature, a general prototype in each species upon which
  each individual is modeled, but which seems, in realizing itself, to be
  altered or perfected by circumstances.  So that, relative to certain
  characteristics, there is an unusual variation in appearance in the
  succession of individuals, and at the same time a constancy in the
  species as a whole which appears remarkable.  The first animal, the first
  horse, for example, has been the external model and the internal mold
  upon which all horses which have ever been born, all those which now
  exist, and all which will arise, have been formed.  But this model, which
  we know only by its copies, has been able to be altered or perfected in
  the communication and multiplication of its form.  The original impression
  subsists in its entirety in each individual, but although there might be
  millions of them, none of these individuals is similar in entirety to any
  other, nor, by implication, to the impressing model. [Georges Buffon,
  1753, Histoire Naturelle, v. 4 (quoted in Sloan, 1987:121)]

Bob O'Hara, Darwin-L list owner

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu; http://rjohara.uncg.edu)
Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology
100 Foust Building, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:39>From hale1@husc.harvard.edu Sun Jul 16 00:17:23 1995

Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 01:18:40 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mark Hale <hale1@husc.harvard.edu>
Subject: Re: Chomsky and populational vs. essentialist thinking
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Surely the "perfecting" part of that quote is antiquated
(he asserts, from the lofty position of total ignorance
of the field)? Other than that, it sounds like Chomsky's
view to me.

Mark

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:40>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sun Jul 16 12:05:18 1995

Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 13:06:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Re: Chomsky and populational vs. essentialist thinking
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

Mark Hale wondered about the use of the term "perfected" in the
quotation from the 18th-century naturalist Buffon:

  There is, in nature, a general prototype in each species upon which
  each individual is modeled, but which seems, in realizing itself, to be
  altered or perfected by circumstances.

I think the word is used here in its old sense, as Mark suspects, meaning
simply "completed" or "finished", as in the grammatical "perfect tense"
for actions that have been completed.  Of course the original (which I
don't have) is in French, so I don't know what exactly Buffon's words were.

Bob O'Hara
darwin@iris.uncg.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:41>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sun Jul 16 12:24:21 1995

Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 13:25:36 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Species/languages (fwd)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

The following message comes from Salikoko Mufwene, who was having
trouble posting it from his address.

Bob O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)

---------------------------------------

Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 06:57:30 -0600 (CST)
From: "Salikoko Mufwene" <s-mufwene@uchicago.edu>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Species/Languages

In message Sun, 16 Jul 1995 03:12:10 CDT,
  darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu  writes:

> I want to make sure we (Polly and I, at least) are on the same wavelength
> here, namely that the Chomskian view sounds typological to us.  (I had
> better say "essentialist" rather than typological, because "typology" is
> a technical term in linguistics.)  Evolutionary biologists use the terms
> typological and essentialist as synonyms to describe a particular way of
> thinking that they usually reject (a way of thinking about individual
> variation).  They contrast typological/essentialist thinking with
> "population thinking".  These terms comes from Ernst Mayr who has written
> about them for many years.
>
> Here's a quotation I sometimes use in my classes to illustrate the
> essentialist view.  Do any other evolutioanry biologists here think the
> Chomskian view sounds like this?
>
>  There is, in nature, a general prototype in each species upon which
>  each individual is modeled, but which seems, in realizing itself, to be
>  altered or perfected by circumstances.  So that, relative to certain
>  characteristics, there is an unusual variation in appearance in the
>  succession of individuals, and at the same time a constancy in the
>  species as a whole which appears remarkable.  The first animal, the
>  first horse, for example, has been the external model and the internal
>  mold upon which all horses which have ever been born, all those which
>  now exist, and all which will arise, have been formed.  But this model,
>  which we know only by its copies, has been able to be altered or
>  perfected in the communication and multiplication of its form.  The
>  original impression subsists in its entirety in each individual, but
>  although there might be millions of them, none of these individuals is
>  similar in entirety to any other, nor, by implication, to the
>  impressing model. [Georges Buffon, 1753, Histoire Naturelle, v. 4
>  (quoted in Sloan, 1987:121)]

    Your intervention and the passage you quote raise interesting
methodological questions on the Chomskyan Principles and Parameters approach
to language: Where does individual variation fit in all this? What justifies
assuming that any language, even if perceived as I-language/system (i.e. the
internalized and psychologically relevant abstraction from
E-language/external language), is homogeneous from one speaker to another
and that there is no (significant) variation within the population of
speakers? We may live with ignoring idiolectal variation, perhaps because,
given practical considerations, there would be no end to details one would
have to struggle with before getting a workable picture of how language works
and is acquired. However, does anybody hear Chomskyans speak of dialectal
variation? Although we linguists typically speak of typological variation
(and principles and parameters) in comparing languages, I would think
interesting discussions would start at the level of dialectal variation
(within the species/population, rather than across species/populations),
which would make the language/dialect/idiolect distinction a closer homolog
of distinctions in population studies. There is a certain intuitive and
scientific appeal in the Chomskyan notions of Universal Grammar and
biological endowment for language; the latter makes a lot of allowance for
variation from one individual to another and from one species/population to
another. What I do not understand is why there is so much emphasis in this
research paradigm on cross-language variation and negligible interest in
intra-language variation. If the philosophy of this research paradigm
justifies interesting comparisons with biology and population genetics,
one may want to take a closer look at what the practice is.

Sali Mufwene.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:42>From andy@dep.philo.mcgill.ca Sun Jul 16 16:04:41 1995

Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 17:08:41 -0500 (GMT-0500)
From: Andrew Burday <andy@dep.philo.mcgill.ca>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Chomsky and populational vs. essentialist thinking

I'm afraid I may be reaching the point where time will no longer
permit me to contribute much to this discussion.  As we've seen, the
Chomskian position is by no means universally accepted among linguists;
and finding the analogies between it and various positions in
evolutionary biology and the history of biology is no more
straightforward.  But I'd like to make a couple of replies.

First of all, I hope we're all clear that there are three levels of
generality in play in linguistics, not just two.  The three are: (a) the
individual speaker/hearer's grammar, (b) "public languages" such as
English, Dutch, German, Chinese, etc, and (c) the species-wide (barring
pathology) human endowment that allows us to acquire a grammar.  Some of
these levels may need to be elaborated: for instance, it probably is
wrong to suppose that each speaker/hearer has only one internal grammar,
as has been pointed out.  For simplicity, I will continue to write as if
each speaker/hearer does have only one.

A Chomskian claim is that (b) is of little theoretical interest.  In
drawing the distinction between "languages" and "mere dialects", we take
account of political boundaries (as when we say that Dutch and German are
different languages, but Chinese is a single language with many dialects).
We also consider normative considerations, such as being able to speak
convincingly in certain social contexts, be they dinner parties or
political rallies.  This kind of ability is often built into the concept
of "communication".  These contexts require that one come up to certain
standards of language usage; but there's no reason to think that those
standards have anything to do with knowledge of language per se, any
more than knowing how to dress authoritatively has to do with language.
Dress and use of language may be equally important when it comes to
"communication" in the sense of convincing people to agree with you.  (Of
course, as has also been pointed out, you can also work with different
standards of "communication".  Again, the question is why you should
settle on any particular level as constituting genuine communication.  The
concept of (public) language inherits the vagueness of the concept of
communication, and when "communication" is made specific, it often seems
to build in extra-linguistic criteria of social performance.)

The goal of a Chomskian theory is to get at (c) by constructing theories
of (a).  It's true, as has been pointed out, that no one has given a
*complete* theory of (a) for any given speaker.  It's hard to see why
you'd want to.  The real goal of investigation is (c).  It's not to
capture every detail of (a) for every speaker.

Insofar as I understand the views on biological species, there does appear
to be an analogy between Chomskian views of (b) and Mayr's views on
species.  "Languages" in the sense of (b) are polyglot constructions of no
particular theoretical interest.  They are interest-bound abstractions
over many individuals' grammars, not real objects in the world.
Similarly, if I understand the view correctly, Mayr thinks that species
are abstractions over the many individual genotypes (phenotypes?) --
anyway, that species as such are not the proper objects of study in
biology.  The relation between Chomskian views of (a) and (c) on the one
hand, and views of evolution is more complicated.  Let me comment on this
by responding to points that Bob raised.

On Sun, 16 Jul 1995 DARWIN@steffi.uncg.edu wrote:

> And Andrew Burday in expanding upon these ideas said:
>
> >about them himself.  The claim is just that they (the public languages)
> >are abstractions over many more or less similar internal grammars.

I think this may have been misleading.  I meant the "less" in "more or less"
to be taken seriously.  At the very least, speaker/hearers will differ
quite substantially in their lexicons -- the associations of sound,
meaning, and syntactic categories that make up the individual words.
There seems to be some recent consensus that the syntactic component of
speaker/hearers' competences really is quite similar from individual to
individual.  If that's correct, though, it's an empirical discovery, not
a basic tenet of the theory.  It could have been the case that, starting
from a basically uniform innate endowment, people developed very
different syntaxes.

> Then Polly Winsor made the interesting observation that:
>
> >Andrew Burday's synopsis of Chomsky suggests a very close parallel to
> >the insistence on "population thinking" rather than "typological
> >thinking" which Ernst Mayr has rightly insisted on throughout his
> >career. Indeed it is such an exact parallel I suppose it has long been
> >obvious to everyone else on this, but I confess it wasn't to me.
>
> I want to make sure we (Polly and I, at least) are on the same wavelength
> here, namely that the Chomskian view sounds typological to us.  (I had better

My impression was that Polly was noting the analogy that I suggested
above at the level of (b) -- that is, the analogy between the rejection
of (public) languages and the rejection of species.  Polly, please correct
me if I'm wrong, though.

> Here's a quotation I sometimes use in my classes to illustrate the
> essentialist view.  Do any other evolutioanry biologists here think the
> Chomskian view sounds like this?
>
>   There is, in nature, a general prototype in each species upon which
>   each individual is modeled, but which seems, in realizing itself, to be
>   altered or perfected by circumstances.  So that, relative to certain
>   characteristics, there is an unusual variation in appearance in the
>   succession of individuals, and at the same time a constancy in the
>   species as a whole which appears remarkable.  The first animal, the first
>   horse, for example, has been the external model and the internal mold
>   upon which all horses which have ever been born, all those which now
>   exist, and all which will arise, have been formed.  But this model, which
>   we know only by its copies, has been able to be altered or perfected in
>   the communication and multiplication of its form.  The original impression
>   subsists in its entirety in each individual, but although there might be
>   millions of them, none of these individuals is similar in entirety to any
>   other, nor, by implication, to the impressing model. [Georges Buffon,
>   1753, Histoire Naturelle, v. 4 (quoted in Sloan, 1987:121)]

Well, I'm not a biologist but I'd like to take a crack at it anyway.  I
think I can see the analogy you suggest, but there are a couple of
features of this passage that suggest to me that what Buffon had in mind
was something quite different from what Chomsky is talking about.

--First, I'm worried about how the analogy is supposed to go.  We all
agree that we are *not* talking about the development of language through
human history, right?  There *may* have been an original "ur-language";
my understanding is that there is some evidence for that claim, although
it's still controversial.  In any case, that's just orthogonal to the
discussion we've been having, which concerned the way that language
develops in each speaker/hearer, not the way it has developed through
human history.  (If the development of language through human history WAS
what Bob had in mind, then there's no analogy.  Chomskian theory makes no
predictions at all on this score.  Postulating a universal human endowment
that's brought to language acquisition does not commit you to the claim
that there ever was a universal human language.  See below on conflation
of levels (a) and (c).)

--Assuming we agree on that, I'm worried about Buffon's discussion of the
first horse as a "mold" or "model".  The first horse, supposing (probably
counterfactually) that it makes sense to talk about such a thing, was a
*horse*: a fully developed animal.  The initial endowment which every
child brings to the task of language acquisition is not a language in any
sense.  Even if there were no syntactic parameters to be set, the child
would still have to acquire a lexicon.  Roughly, if we applied what
Buffon said directly to the case of language, we'd be confusing levels
(a) and (c) above.  The things at level (a) can reasonably be called
"languages".  Whatever exists at level (c) certainly can't.  Thus, it
makes no sense to speak of the initial endowment as a "model", "mold", or
"prototype" of which the grammar ultimately attained is a "copy" or
"impression".

--Similarly, in language there is no analogy to the "communication and
multiplication" of form that Buffon postulates.  The organism is born
with a complex innate endowment.  Through interaction with the
environment it comes to achieve a mature state (i.e., a grammar).  There
is nothing to be communicated or multiplied.

All that really remains of Bob's analogy, so far as I can see, is that
there is some endowment that you start with and that is then expressed in
different ways depending on the environment.  It doesn't seem like an
interesting analogy to me, but perhaps I'm overlooking some features of
it.  The analogy that looked interesting to me was the analogy I suggested
above, between the concepts of "species" and "(public) language" as
constructs of dubious theoretical usefulness.  Recall that the
discussion began as a comparison of methods of classification.  Bob
wondered if there were any "nominalists" in linguistics, and I suggested
that, if languages are taken to be inherently public, Chomsky would count
as "nominalist" of sorts.  He's a nominalist about level (b), but he's a
diehard realist about (a) and (c).

The Chomskian suggestion, in a nutshell, is that language is a
species-specific trait.  There is an initial endowment, genetically coded
in some way, that interacts with a child's linguistic environment to
produce a mature state.  The initial endowment and the final state are
real objects in the world.  The polyglot groupings that we create by
looking at linguistic, political, and cultural normative features are
not.  The claim, strictly speaking, is not that there is no such thing as
a language: it's that "public" languages such as Chinese or German
correspond to no interesting object of natural science.  Finally, no
claim whatever is made about the existence of anything like an
ur-language.

In conclusion, I want to note what I take to be the important
distinctions.  There are two sense of "language" in play, corresponding
to (a) and (b) above.  When we make claims about "language as such", we
need to be clear about which we are talking about; and we mustn't conflate
either with (c), the initial endowment.  We also mustn't conflate claims
about the ontogeny of language in an individual with claims about the
development of language within the human species.  Whatever we wind up
saying, we need to keep those distinctions straight.

I've enjoyed this discussion, but I'm afraid this may have to be my last
contribution -- my last long one, anyway.  I just don't have the time.
Hope I've been (relatively) helpful.

Best,

Andrew Burday
andy@philo.mcgill.ca

PS.  If any of the biologists would like to comment on a tangential
issue, I'm interested in the following: assuming that I've correctly
understood what Mayr was saying, what do you guys think of the notion of
species-specificity?  There's clearly some useful sense in which we can
say that humans walk erect rather than knuckle-walking.  We have
opposable thumbs on our hands but not on our feet.  The notion of
species-specific traits can't be *complete* nonsense.  But how should we
understand it?  Also, does anyone have a suggestion about where to get
started reading about these issues of classification in biology?  Is any
of Mayr's books a particularly good one for someone who hasn't taken any
biology in about eight years now?  (The last course was an introduction
to evolution and population bio, using Futuyma, so I do have some idea
what's going on in biology.)

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:43>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Mon Jul 17 22:45:50 1995

Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 23:47:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Meetings in Belgium
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

I will be away for the rest of this week at the meeting of the International
Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology meetings in
Leuven, Belgium.  A number of regular Darwin-L contributors are hosting or
participating in various sessions at the meeting, including Polly Winsor,
Mike Ghiselin, Dick Burian, Ron Amundson, Eli Gerson, Peter Stevens, Lynn
Nyhart, Claus Emmeche, Mark Hineline, Jan Witkowski, and probably others I
have missed in my quick scan of the program.  I hope to see all these and
any other Darwin-L members who will be there; please say hello if you can.
Perhaps we can have a Darwin-L social hour at one of the local eating places
and so be able to attach faces to some of the names we have come to know
over the last couple of years.

Bob O'Hara, Darwin-L list owner

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu; http://rjohara.uncg.edu)
Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology
100 Foust Building, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:44>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Tue Jul 18 00:28:46 1995

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 01:29:58 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: July 18 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

JULY 18 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1635: ROBERT HOOKE born at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, England.  Though
he will be remembered primarily as an experimentalist associated with the
Royal Society, Hooke's researches will range widely, covering in addition
to mathematics and mechanics, geology and the nature of fossils as well: "My
first Proposition then is, That all, or the greatest part of these curiously
figured Bodies found up and down in divers Parts of the World, are either
those Animal or Vegetable Substances they represent converted into Stone, by
having their Pores fill'd up with some petrifying liquid Substance, whereby
their Parts are, as it were, lock'd up and cemented together in their Natural
Position and Contexture; or else they are the lasting Impressions made on
them at first, whilst a yielding Substance by the immediate Application of
such Animal or Vegetable body as was so shaped, and that there was nothing
else concurring to their Production, save only the yielding of the Matter
to receive the Impression, such as heated Wax affords to the Seal; or else a
subsiding or hardning of the Matter, after by some kind of Fluidity it had
perfectly fill'd or inclosed the figuring Vegetable or Animal Substance, after
the manner as a Statue is made of Plaister of Paris, or Alabaster-dust beaten,
and boil'd, mixed with Water and poured into a Mould."  (_Lectures and
Discourses of Earthquakes, and Subterraneous Eruptions.  Explicating The
Causes of the Rugged and Uneven Face of the Earth; and What Reasons may be
given for the frequent finding of Shells and other Sea and Land Petrified
Substances, scattered over the whole Terrestrial Superficies_, London, 1705.)

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu or connect
to the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:45>From jcouper@freenet.niagara.com Tue Jul 18 08:11:09 1995

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 09:11:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jim Couper <jcouper@freenet.niagara.com>
Subject: chomsky vs. jung
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Can the Chomskyan predisposition to human speech be found in Jung's
collective unconscious?

Jim Couper

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:46>From PTENGLOT@summon.syr.edu Tue Jul 18 09:06:23 1995

From: "Peter T. Englot (Graduate School)" <PTENGLOT@summon.syr.edu>
Organization:  Syracuse University
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 10:07:11 EST5EDT
Subject: REPLY: chomsky vs. jung

> Can the Chomskyan predisposition to human speech be found in Jung's
> collective unconscious?
>
> Jim Couper

Not knowing whether Andrew Burday will add to his comprehensive
responses in this discussion, I will leap into the perceived void.

In reply to Jim Couper: I'm no expert on Jung, but I think Chomsky's
reply would be "Egad, no!"  Chomsky's claims and those of linguists
and cognitive scientists working in his paradigm are strictly
scientific.  The Chomskyan hypothesis about the human predisposition
for language is that it's in the "wetware" of the human brain, a
conclusion based on observation and testing of widely variant
"public" languages and their speakers.  I understand Jung's notion
of the "collective unconscious" to be scientifically insupportable,
notwithstanding recent accusations about Jung's having fudged his
"data."

Peter Englot
Syracuse University
PTENGLOT@SUMMON.SYR.EDU
(315) 443-4492

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity,
no straight thing was ever made."  Kant

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:47>From elanier@crl.nmsu.edu Tue Jul 25 14:31:45 1995

Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 13:25:17 -0700
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: elanier@crl.nmsu.edu (Ellery Lanier)
Subject: chimps

Just in case you missed it there was a good article on chimpanzee behavior
in the March 1995 issue of Smithsonian. page 70,  author Maxine Rock.

Ellery

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:48>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sat Jul 29 21:05:33 1995

Date: Sat, 29 Jul 1995 22:05:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Disciplinary history from the inside
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

The list owner has returned from a very enjoyable meeting on the history
and philosophy of biology at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and was
very pleased to see many Darwin-L members there.  It's always nice to be
able to connect a face with an email address, and in addition to seeing many
long-time friends, I met a number of you in person for the first time.
I do hope I'll be able to get to a few linguistics meetings some day so I
can meet a few of our regular participants from that part of the academic
landscape.

It was also nice to see some of the ideas discussed on Darwin-L make an
appearance in the papers given at the meeting.  In particular I enjoyed
hearing Polly Winsor talk about her work on how systematists make use of
the history of their own field, something she solicited opinions about here
a few months ago.  On that general topic, I just read an essay-review of
a recent book on natural selection theory that characterizes the previous
reviews of the book, some very positive and some very negative, in terms
of the authors' perceptions of the value of various recent developments in
evolutioanry biology.  It struck me as an interesting example of some of
the things that Polly was talking about, especially in relation to Joseph
Rouse's ideas on how scientists see themselves in the context of a narrative
history of their own discipline.  The essay-review in question is:

  Griffiths, Paul E.  1995.  The Cronin controversy.  British Journal for
     the Philosophy of Science, 46:122-138.

Perhaps it would be of interest to some Darwin-L readers.

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu; http://rjohara.uncg.edu)
Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology
100 Foust Building, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:49>From ad201@freenet.carleton.ca Sun Jul 30 10:41:19 1995

Date: Sun, 30 Jul 1995 11:40:59 -0400
From: ad201@freenet.carleton.ca (Donald Phillipson)
To: Darwin-L@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Darwinism today

Mark Abley published July 22 in the Montreal Gazette a superb popular
account of modern Darwinism (e.g. Galapagos finch speciation,
contradicting academic inhibitions as recent as 1981) with plenty of
guides for further reading.  I've seen nothing so comprehensible to
average undergraduates while fair to all parties.  The review is
distributed (at least in Canada) by the Southam Star network, e.g.
appeared in Ottawa Citizen July 29.

 |          Donald Phillipson, 4180 Boundary Rd., Carlsbad         |
 |        Springs, Ont., Canada K0A 1K0; tel: (613) 822-0734       |
 |  "What I've always liked about science is its independence from |
 |  authority"--Ontario Science Centre (name on file) 10 July 1981 |

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:50>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Mon Jul 31 00:02:25 1995

Date: Mon, 31 Jul 1995 01:02:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: July 31 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

JULY 31 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1858: RICHARD DIXON OLDHAM is born at Dublin, Ireland.  The son of a geologist
at Trinity College, Oldham will himself study at the Royal School of Mines,
and will eventually go to work for the Geological Survey of India, where his
colleagues will judge him "a little too independent sometimes for those in
authority."  He will publish widely on the geology of India and the Himalayas,
and will devote himself particularly to the developing field of seismology,
offering the first substantial seismologic evidence for the existence of a
metallic core at the center of the earth.  He will receive the Lyell Medal of
the Geological Society of London in 1908 and will eventually retire to Wales,
where he will die in 1936.

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu or connect
to the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:51>From dagmarp@aa.gov.au Mon Jul 31 18:41:35 1995

Date: Tue, 1 Aug 1995 06:51:16 -1000
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: dagmarp@aa.gov.au (Dagmar Parer)
Subject: Philosophical bent

I have been told that Charles Darwin, as well as publishing his scientific
material wrote on philosophical matters.  I do not know whether this
material was published or was kept in the form of personal papers. Does
anyone know?? If so I would be very interested in locating the material.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<23:52>From HAAVN@Corelli.Augustana.AB.CA Mon Jul 31 20:55:06 1995

From: "Haave, Neil" <HAAVN@Corelli.Augustana.AB.CA>
Organization:  Augustana University College
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 1995 14:13:03 MDT
Subject: (Fwd) cirla conference announcement

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

LIBERAL ARTS AND THE FUTURE OF UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

May 10-11, 1996

The Banff Centre for Conferences
Banff, Alberta, Canada

2nd International Conference

Sponsored by: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the
Liberal Arts (CIRLA)

University education is no longer simply the concern of
professional educators.  It has now entered the public forum as
an object of political discussion.  The issues are well known:
What form should public support of universities take?  How should
the university be held accountable for that support?  How do we
determine the significance and relevance of the education being
offered?  What is the relationship between academic freedom and
tenure?

Related to these issues is the role of the liberal arts and
sciences in university education.  Once assumed to be the
cornerstone of higher education, the liberal arts and sciences
have become the focus of intense political and social doubt and
debate within the university, within government, and within
society in general. Demands for more specialized and more
practical knowledge suggest that the liberal arts are the luxury
of an elite class.  At the same time, however, the
ever-increasing need to work across disciplines points to the
potential usefulness of both the skills that the liberal arts
develop, as well as the issues they address.  Are the liberal
arts vestiges of a lost era?  Are they a ray of hope in a future
of uncertainty?  What, if not the liberal arts, is to count as
the cornerstone of higher education? Is the very notion of a
cornerstone itself anachronistic?  What role do the liberal arts
have within the university and (post-)modern society?

The purpose of this conference is to explore recent developments
in the relation between liberal arts and the university, the
polis and society.  But we are not only interested in
conversation about the liberal arts; we also hope to foster
conversation within the liberal arts, as the following topics
indicate.  Papers or abstracts may be submitted on any of these
topics (NOTE: this list is not exhaustive, but is meant to give
an idea of some relevant issues. If you have an idea for a paper
or session that is not included here, please contact the director
of CIRLA):

University education, politics, and society

- The role of the university in contemporary society
- Government policy on education: What kind of citizens do we
want?  Who governs education?
- Does the economic demand for flexible institutions mean that
tenure is outmoded?
- Technology, media, and the liberal arts: What are the
implications of technology and the media on the shape and
priorities of university education?

Contemporary university education and the liberal arts and
sciences

- Are the liberal arts and sciences relevant (to the university,
to society, to the student) anymore?
- What relation is there between the liberal arts and sciences
and practical education?
- What relations do the liberal arts and sciences have to
contemporary developments in continental philosophy?
- Reinventing liberal arts:  How have the liberal arts changed,
and how must they change, if they are to meet contemporary
challenges?

Border wars within the academy

- Science and the social construction of knowledge: With the
publication of books like Higher Superstition, some scientists
have returned fire in what they consider to be an attack on
science by the humanities. How does this debate affect the
university?
- Tensions and opportunities in interdisciplinary research and
teaching: Is co-operation possible or even desirable? If so, how?
- The character of the university and the liberal arts: What
types of knowledge or investigation are legitimately part of the
liberal arts? Is there a way of deciding at all?

Diversity and unity

- Gender and tradition: Women's studies and the liberal arts.
- The classroom is the world: Reflecting diversity and fostering
conversation among race, religion, and/or ethnicity.
- What's worth reading/viewing anymore?  Ongoing issues of canon
in text, art, and idea.
- Fissures and bridges in knowledge, society, family,
disciplines, curriculum.

If you are willing to organize a symposium on one of the listed
topics or on another one, please contact us.  As well, there will
be a poster session, in which you may display innovations or
ideas for liberal arts or interdisciplinary teaching or research
expressed visually.

Deadline for abstracts, draft papers, poster display proposals,
or session proposals: November 30, 1995
Notification of acceptance: February 1, 1996
Deadline for completed papers: March 15, 1996

Complete registration information will be mailed in the fall of
1995.

For more information, please contact:

Bruce Janz, Director
Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
     in the Liberal Arts (CIRLA)
c/o Chris Jensen McCloy
Augustana University College
4901-46 Avenue
Camrose, Alberta
CANADA T4V 2R3
TEL: (403)679-1502
FAX: (403)679-1129
email:  JANZB@CORELLI.AUGUSTANA.AB.CA

Neil Haave, Ph.D.
Department of Biology
Augustana University College
4901 - 46th Avenue
Camrose, AB
Canada      T4V 2R3

phone   403 679 1506
FAX     403 679 1129
email   haavn@corelli.augustana.ab.ca

_______________________________________________________________________________
Darwin-L Message Log 23: 31-52 -- July 1995                                 End