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TOPIC... COMMENT Footloose and context-free It was not an isolated believe-it-or-not coincidence when a Cambridge mathematician (Adams) and a Paris mathematician (Leverrier) both predicted the discovery of Neptune at the same time through similar but entirely independent calculations of Uranean orbit wobble. Similar things happen all the time. Ideas often seem to be hanging from the tree of science like ripe fruits ready to fall, and several hands may grasp at the bough simultaneously. A number of things are necessary to make it nonetheless possible to identify the discoverer(s) of a given truth: careful record-keeping about research activity, fair and efficient management of the peer-review and publication enterprise, and above all, generally accepted standards about what constitutes a result. If things that have not by any stretch of a disordered imagination been demonstrated are claimed to have been demonstrated, clearly it will be hard to establish later that a given person discovered a given thing. If standards of evidence are set ad hoc to ensure rhetorical victories over critics, and alliances determined more by sociological groupings than by problems shared, there is little hope of being able to look back and see progress. Let me give a case history. It is not pretty; in fact, it is a mess, but we must face our world as it really is. By 1985 it had become clear that not all natural languages are context- free. In 1955 the question could not ...

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