Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch vs. Jackendoff and Pinker

semantics etc. >> http://semantics-online.org/blog/2005/08/journal-mediated_scholarly_debate

Journal-Mediated Scholarly Debate

Apropos the ongoing exchange between Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch vs. Jackendoff and Pinker, Mark Liberman writes about the slowness of scholarly conversation as mediated through journals.

He's quite right. It can be done faster and often is. See my earlier post about the new features at arxiv.org, which is how physicists do their scholarly exchanges.

Also, our experience with our Harlem Paper has been amazing. Since we first posted our notes on the web in March 2004, there have been four or five successive drafts by Arnim von Stechow and his colleagues, there or so papers by Janneke Huitink, a SALT paper by Jon Nissenbaum, and ― judging by anonymous abstracts I got to review for Sinn und Bedeutung and NELS ― some more work by others yet to be presented. In the same span of time, our own paper has gone through three or four revisions and has been presented at a couple of conferences. The speed of the debate is far from the glacial speed that Liberman was complaining about. Of course, we’re all beating up on each other so much that it is quite conceivable that there won’t be anyone left standing to submit a journal article about this topic.