Judgments about simultaneous events

I've been planning out a new post for a few weeks now. However, it's going to take some time to finish. It's kind of a scholarly thing. But I guess that doesn't mean that I can't post in the meantime, right?

I read a fun little article today, an article on methodologies in cognitive linguistics. Sounds fun, right? It actually was a good read, not just interesting but actually fun. It's not often that you run into those in academic prose. I don't remember the title off the top of my head, something about empirical and introspective research in cognitive semantics. It's by Dirk Geeraerts, and it's publised in the book I mentioned earlier in this blog. The article is a mock conversation between two cognitive semantics researchers, moderated by a venerable old teacher, who falls asleep at one point due to their arguing. Basically, the essay's argument is that cognitive semantics is at heart a heuristic discipline and that all forms of semantic research require some sort of linguistic interpretation, though that which is interpreted and the style of that interpretation are heavily disputed in the field.

The essay also does a nice job discussing paradigmatic shifts in methodology, based on the example of light as a wave/ light as a particle debate in physics. It uses experiments to prove that there is a universal ether analogous to water, through which light travels, a medium for the wave pattern. The essay discusses experimental designs to try to prove that light travels faster through this ether when it is travelling toward from earth than it does when travelling away from earth. The interesting thing about this example is that the scientists received negative results from their experiment. But to them, it didn't disprove the assumption of an ether. Instead, they took it as a sign that the experiment was flawed. It wasn't until Einstein posited a different physical theory--based on different assumptions, mainly that the speed of light is constant--that new and different experiments could be run. It should be noted, though, that, in true Kuhnian fashion, the scientists experimenting with varied speeds of light, were unconvinced by Einstein's theory and continued their research with the assumption that the ether still existed.

Now physicists posit that light exists both as a particle (a photon) and as a wave, depending on how you attempt to measure it. That is, light is a wave when we choose to look at its wave-like qualities, and light is a particle when we choose to look at its particle-like qualities. Further, the way scientists measure light as a wave or as a particle actively prohibits them from measuring the other set of qualities. In other words, both sets of assumptions about light cannot be measured simultaneously. This new theory recognizes the role of the observer in taking the measurement, what Einstein called "a judgment of simultaneous events," where the thing being studied exists only in a simultaneous relationship to the observer.