Art and Science in Computational Dialectology

Aristotle long ago divided kinds of study into techn and epistm,which we can roughly translate into the modern terms ‘art’and ‘science’. It is certainly the case that computationaldialectologists do well with the Art (techn), in our technicalconstruction and execution of statistical experiments, and wehave two different prominent models to choose from, each onecorresponding to a mode of scientific discovery, either to deductiveor to inductive scientific procedure. But that in itself shouldnot be the whole story. The Science (epistm) of computationaldialectology lies in the creation of arguments from our statisticalresults that are appropriate to the scientific procedure thatmotivates us. It is not so clear that computational dialectologistshave done so well with their Science. What do the results ofthe technical work really mean? In what way are they associatedwith particular choices of linguistic theory? Is it the casethat, after all of our technical hard work, we find only whatwe are looking for? In this paper, I will suggest that an appropriateuse of the technical results of computational dialectology requiresthat practitioners take a more subtle approach to the theorythat motivates the study in the first place, especially to therelationship between perception and production of language.