Category talk:WikiProject Linguistics

Category

This category was put in Category:Culture WikiProjects. I changed it back to Category:WikiProjects, because I do not think that Linguistics fits under the study of culture.

It is certainly true that language and culture influence each other, and that a particular language might be considered part of a particular culture. And certainly, language is an integral part of human culture. Maybe there would be an argument for this category being under culture if all it contained were projects dealing with articles on specific languages (though even there I'm not sure), but linguistics as a field studies language as a phenomenon in-and-of-itself, sometimes bordering on cultural studies, but at other times bordering on human physiology, acoustics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and even philosophy and computer science.

I fail to see how projects dealing with topics such as theoretical linguistics and philosophy of language should come under the umbrella of culture, but they clearly come under the umbrella of linguistics — er maybe PoL is under meta-linguistics, but you get my drift. —Tox 11:54, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

You agree that languages are cultural. And you agree that linguistics study language--and, indeed, that linguistics studies nothing other than language and language-related issues. Your only issue seems to be that linguistics isn't only relevant to cultural studies, but also touches on, and draws from, psychology, acoustics, physiology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, etc. The problem here is that you could say essentially the same thing for pretty much every other subcategory of "culture": everything is to an extent interdisciplinary, and pretty much no field can completely ignore other fields.

Beyond that, there are three problems with your argument. First, your arguments only attempt to show that linguistics isn't solely concerned with culture--you never established that linguistics is completely unconcerned with culture. If linguistics belongs under both culture and some other WikiProject category, then the correct action is not to put it on the top level (if we did that with every interdisciplinary field, the sorting system would be pure chaos!), but rather to cross-reference this WikiProject under both "culture" and other fields--for example, you could cross-reference it as a subcategory in both Culture and Computer Science.

The second problem with your arguments is that you seem to misunderstand how broadly "culture" is being used for the organizational purposes of this sorting. We not only include all arts and recreational activities under Culture, but also all religion and, yes, all philosophy. If philosophy is a subcategory of culture anyway, then your argument that linguistics shouldn't be under culture because it sometimes includes philosophy of language is moot. Other than that, if you think it's necessary, you're perfectly welcome to put WikiProject Linguistics under other categories, such as WikiProject Computer science and WikiProject . However, since you yourself note that this cross-categorization only holds true for a few potential subprojects of Linguistics, I think the most sensible course would be to simply leave things more or less as they were, and cross-reference the individual WikiProjects that pose a problem--if something fits under both linguistics and computer science, or under both linguistics and neuroscience, then put that project under both categories. Problem solved!

The third problem with your argument is that it is impractical. You point out a problem, but fail to provide a feasible or fair solution. Any categorizational system will have minor problems; ultimately, what matters is not absolute, perfect, literal accuracy, but rather utility to our readers. For practical reasons, linguistics, and as many other WikiProjects as possible, should be subcategorized; and Culture is one of the best "fits" for that subcategorization. It does not need to be a perfect fit; the fact that language is cultural, and linguistics is the study of language, is more than enough justification, despite the many other fields linguistics interacts with on a secondary level. -Silence 21:41, 31 December 2006 (UTC)