{"id":840,"date":"2019-05-29T09:23:13","date_gmt":"2019-05-29T07:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/?p=840"},"modified":"2019-05-29T09:23:13","modified_gmt":"2019-05-29T07:23:13","slug":"more-than-thirty-million-theories-of-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/2019\/05\/29\/more-than-thirty-million-theories-of-features\/","title":{"rendered":"More than thirty million theories of features"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The implicit complaint in McCawley\u2019s book title, Thirty Million Theories of Grammar, was that having many theories of something is a less satisfactory state of affairs than having few (viable) theories of it &#8212; to paraphrase Thomas Graf\u2019s characterization of that position, if you have more than one viable description of something, you don\u2019t fully understand it. At the <a href=\"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/workshop-on-thirty-million-theories-of-syntactic-features\/\">Thirty Million Theories of Features workshop<\/a>, I was indeed hoping we would be left with fewer than we started from. I\u2019m not sure we are (see <a href=\"https:\/\/gillianramchand.blog\">Gillian\u2019s blog<\/a> posts for some summaries). But Thomas Graf articulated the opposite perspective, that it can be better to have more theories of a complex object of study &#8212; in <a href=\"https:\/\/outde.xyz\/2019-05-20\/two-dimensions-of-talking-past-one-another.html#two-dimensions-of-talking-past-one-another\">his words<\/a>, if you only have one viable description, you don\u2019t fully understand the object you\u2019re describing.<\/p>\n<p>Now we segue into Omer Preminger week, with two additional talks and discussion with Omer Preminger (Wednesday and Friday).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The implicit complaint in McCawley\u2019s book title, Thirty Million Theories of Grammar, was that having many theories of something is a less satisfactory state of affairs than having few (viable) theories of it &#8212; to paraphrase Thomas Graf\u2019s characterization of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/2019\/05\/29\/more-than-thirty-million-theories-of-features\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":690,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/690"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":841,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions\/841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/castl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}