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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
Just-so stories like Kipling’s could be starting point of real science
It has been a popular and long-held view that British writer Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, although delightfully engaging as explanations of how things came to be, were nothing but utterly silly and empty fairy tales. But psychology professor David P. Barash and psychiatrist Judith Eve Lipton, in an article written for the January 3, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, believes that Kipling’s stories—such as his account of how the rhinoceros got its skin and how the whale got its throat—are actually tentative, speculative answers to a question that clarify thinking and serve to goad further thought.
The authors explain that such tales are a necessary preliminary to obtaining the kind of additional information that helps answer a question that in turn could lead to yet more queries. “When that happens—when the narrative is testable and generates fact-based research—then, in a sense, it is no longer a just-so story, but science, pure and … rarely simple,” they contend.
Barash and Lipton therefore make this suggestion to their scientific colleagues: “Let’s stop running from ‘just-so story’ as an epithet and start embracing its merits. To any nonscientist name-callers: Think again before you sign on to a supposed rebuke that isn’t.”
Read Barash and Lipton’s “How the Scientist Got His Ideas” now!
