What is the point of comparative linguistics?

I won't try to disprove the comparative method. However, I will argue that the comparative method, without outside information concerning other elements of culture or human migration, at its worst gives linguists an ordinal ranking of the age of a language relative to that of another and at its best gives these linguists a rough cardinal approximation of the difference in age for languages that share a high degree of sound correspondence.

My particular beef is with linguists who use the results of the comparative method to apply rigid biological distinctions of family, species, genus to fluid sociological phenomena specific to homo sapiens sapiens, namely the use of thousands of distinct languages to share information. And, though I agree with the principal tenets of linguistics that some langagues are older than others and that some languages have more in common with each other, I don't necessarily see the epistemological benefit in classifying one langauge as resting at a different level in this hierarchy than another in terms of their relatedness as measured by sound correspondences and/or an ordinal temporal ranking.

I understand the need of linguists to try to prove their disciplinary integrity and absence of political biases by creating external criteria for classifying their subject matter, particularly in light of the abuse of science during the past century. Nonetheless, comparative linguists should understand that what they are attempting to do is very similar to both German and Russian attempts in the 20th century to turn law into a deterministic decision system for both understanding and orienting human choice without a necessary element of individual choice and indeterminacy.

Rigid classifications inherently underinclude or overexclude, which is why the wisest drafters of laws realize that a good law does not go so far as to create distinctions in classes of objects as in distinctions of who has the right to classify objects in the first place. So, as opposed to a society's members fighting over the black line distinction of whether 17 or 18 should be the age at which someone becomes liable for statutory rape, a morally preferred law constantly forces the many agents of that law (legislators, police, prosecutors, judges/juries) and the people they represent to question whether the facts of a situation rise to the level of a more general definition of statutory rape.

In other words, in drafting morally preferred laws, we purposefully preserve the political nature of law by retaining the element of individual choice. We do this out of concern for the liberal principle that the only external check on the dictatorship of law (i.e. classification) is individual choice as a function or actor upon another's individual choice. At some point the vote cycling has to stop of course, but it's this vote cycling or exercise of individual choice thoughout a system that seeks to arrive ultimately at a collective choice that allows the agents of the law to remain faithful to the justice principle of treating like cases alike and different cases differently.

The point of this jurisprudential analogy as applied to the field of linguistics is that overemphasizing the classifications of the objects we use in human communication obscures what I see as the true endeavor of the field, which is to understand the internal (e.g. human brain) or external (e.g. military and cultural invasions, new technology, and rebellious youth) mechanisms by which those objects change.

I guess my never-abating discomfort with the comparative method dates from an earlier epistemological debate about whether the emphasis of any science should be more on defining the actors or more on defining the relationship between those actors. To me, particularly in the fields of law and the social sciences, the relationship between objects/actors has always been a much more interesting and fulfilling pursuit than who/what the actors/objects actually are.

The comparative method presents a false solution of seemingly answering a question of relationship, when in fact, it does very little to elucidate the relationship among languages because it does very little to demonstrate the mechanisms by which those languages have grown together or apart in the first place. Identifying and classifying attributes of languages, while perhaps a challenging intellectural exercise, does more to further nationalist claims to fleeting identities than it does to elucidate how we are all connected as human beings in the way we use our many diverse forms of communication to create and to destroy.

Is US democracy devoid of realism?

Samuelson also gets Obama's political game of charades. When will the US variant of democracy produce a leader who doesn't promise the impossible? It is the lack of realistic objectives among leaders of both parties that produces political stalemate -- not vice versa.

Passivity in writing

I hated Strunk and White. Like most UofCers, I was required to purchase a copy for UofC's humanities series, Human Being and Citizen, but I thought the advice and examples in the book were anachronistic and more than obvious to say the least. I thought both the Chicago and APA style manuals provided much clearer and useful examples than Strunk and White, even if they committed many of the same errors in casting judgment on any usage of passive constructions.

The one area where I somewhat disagree with Geoff Pullum in his 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice is that there is a valid teaching reason for forbidding students use passive constructions in their writing - there's nothing about the passive construction that requires specifying an agent. In the legal and research arenas, this is problematic because even the most cautious of lawyers drafting contracts and researchers writing up their findings can easily forget to specify a causative agent for the reader. A contract without a promissor or a reaction without a catlyst are logically impossible, so in some sense, writing should reflect the underlying logic of that, which is being represented (by the lawyer or researcher).

However, I agree there's generally nothing that makes the active preferred to the passive on a simple grammatical level, and anyone who studies passives as reflexives in Spanish or Russian or passive constructions in older languages like Latin, Persian, Turkic, and Georgian and sees their propensity in these languages would realize that there's something more innate to the human mind that at times prefers to represent/emphasize things as being acted on or to as opposed to things doing the acting.