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The Common Cause Principle in Historical Linguistics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Christopher Hitchcock
Christopher Hitchcock*
Affiliation:
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology
*
†Send reprint requests to the author, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, MC 101–40, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA 91125; e-mail: cricky@caltech.edu.
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Abstract

Despite the platitude that analytic philosophy is deeply concerned with language, philosophers of science have paid little attention to methodological issues that arise within historical linguistics. I broach this topic by arguing that many inferences in historical linguistics conform to Reichenbach's common cause principle (CCP). Although the scope of CCP is narrower than many have thought, inferences about the genealogies of languages are particularly apt for reconstruction using CCP. Quantitative approaches to language comparison are readily understood as methods for detecting the correlations that serve as premises for common cause inferences, and potential sources of error in historical linguistics correspond to well-known limitations of CCP.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , September 1998 , pp. 425 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1998

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank audience members at the Society for Exact Philosophy annual meeting in Montréal, where an earlier version of this paper was presented. For comments upon earlier drafts, I would like to thank David Hull, Merrilee Salmon, Wes Salmon, Elliott Sober, and especially Alexis Manaster Ramer.

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