Facts and Theories; Theoris and Applications
In case partisans of one school or another should feel tempted to refer to the proverb about Jack of all trades, let me say that to my mind by far the greatest danger in scholarship (and perhaps especially in linguistics) is not that the individual may fail to master the thought of a school but that a school may succeed in mastering the thought of the individual.
(Geoffrey Sampson. Schools of Linguistics: Competition and evolution. London: Hutchinson.1980. p.10.)
.....
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost. The coloured lines have been cited as an epitaph for Part One of Sydney Lamb. (Jonathan Webster (ed.)) Language and Reality: Selected Writings of Sydney Lamb. Continuum. 2004.)
'Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.'
(Kenneth E. Boulding. Economic Analysis: Microeconomics. New York: Harper &Row. 1966. p.5.)
'Facts are seldom simple and usually complicated; theoretical analysis is needed to unravel the complication and interpret the facts before we can understand them... the opposition of facts and theory is a false one; the true relationship is complementary. We cannot in practice consider a fact without relating it to other facts, and the relation is a theory. Facts by themselves are dumb; before they will tell us anything we have to arrange them, and the arrangement is a theory. Theory is simply the unavoidable arrangement and interpretation of facts, which gives us generalizations on which we can argue and act, in the place of a mass of disjoined particulars.
(Henry Clay. Economics for the General Reader. New York: Macmillan. 1925. pp.10-11.)
'If the weakness of recent applied linguistics has been its separation from linguistic theory, so has the weakness of recent linguistics been its separation from real human problems. ...Application without theory is mere methodology (an error much of applied linguistics has fallen into). Theory without application is mere speculation (an error which much of theortical linguistics has fallen into).'
(M. Clyne.1987. 'Cultural differences in the organization of academic texts: English and German' Jounal of Linguistics 11: 211-247. Cited by Diana Mary Kilpert in her PhD dissertation: Language and Value: the place of evaluation in linguistic theory. Rhodes University. 2002. p.2.)
Practical applications of Chomsky's work are not obvious. Given that he has revolutionalized our thinking about language and human nature, it is surprising that there is lttle spin-off in education. One might expect that his ideas on language acquisition would have implications for second language teaching, that his ideas on the natute of language would reverbrate in therapy for aphasic stroke victims. There have been forays into both these and other fields by practitioners influenced by Chomsky, but there is no Chomskyan school of language teaching or speech therapy, just as there is no Chomskyan political party. To ask for either would be to misunderstand the nature of his achievement, which is about understanding and explanation rather than applications and implementation. Implications enough arise from an understanding of his work: language instruction and language therapy are more likely to be effective if they are founded on an accurate description of language but, as with Descartes or Galileo, applications are indirect. Despite this his scientific work has changed the way we see ourselves, and his political work has woken up tens of thousands of people to the realities of power. Most importantly, he has shown us a means of intellectural self-defense.
(Neil Smith.Chomsky: ideas and ideals. Cambridge University Press. 1999. p.212)
「犬は老いても、我が身の老いを嘆いたり将来を思い煩ったりせず、現在を満足して生きる」（林良博、東京大学教授、獣医学；朝日新聞 天声人語 2005.3.23）