Well, yeah...of course they predict change. That's what makes them stochastic.

Explaining the great vowel shift or grimm's law would be, by definition, post hoc. But, to answer what I think you're asking...yes, there are non-teleological analyses of both. This is a fairly mainstream thread in contemporary phonology.

I'm really having a hard time following you. Do you understand what a stochastic model is? You seem to be treating diachronic structure as a deterministic system. Do people actually claim that?

(why is it random?)

In this kind of modeling, "random" just means underdetermined. It doesn't mean absolutely random.

I'm really having a hard time following you. Do you understand what a stochastic model is? You seem to be treating diachronic structure as a deterministic system. Do people actually claim that?

I understand that it's based on probabilities. And I guess in that there's no categorical distinction between "effective" and "ineffective", unless you have a metric for a specific purpose.

However, my main point is the following: we can't claim to "understand" the past (in the sense of "why") if we can't predict the future (with a reasonable level of probabilistic accuracy).

To rephrase:

We CAN make explanations such as: "if this happened [eg, great vowel shift], then it was probably this reason"
But we can't really make explanations such as: "this is what the language was like, and therefore the next logical step was this [eg, great vowel shift], even with some probability (where that probability allows us to, a fair amount of the time, make the right guess)"

To rephrase:

We CAN make explanations such as: "if this happened [eg, great vowel shift], then it was probably this reason"
But we can't really make explanations such as: "this is what the language was like, and therefore the next logical step was this [eg, great vowel shift], even with some probability (where that probability allows us to, a fair amount of the time, make the right guess)"

You've got it exactly backwards. Stochastic modeling allows us to make predictive estimations about the next state of a system given its current configuration. It *never* allows us, however, to look back at a transformation and assign it one cause from among many. That's just not how non-deterministic systems work.

I gather you're just not familiar with this work. That's fine, of course, but if you really find the possibility of what I'm describing so hard to believe, there's no reason for you to take my word for it. "Evolutionary Phonology" by Blevins (2004) is probably the easiest place to start; I've pointed you there a few times before during similar conversations, I believe.

Hmmm... can stochastic models actually answer a "why" question at all though?

Think about what you're asking here. "Why" is a question of causation, but the entire point of calling something non-deterministic is to say that its basis of cause cannot be exhaustively specified. That's not a limitation of our knowledge; it's an intrinsic part of how non-deterministic systems function.

For this kind of phenomena, any coherent model of cause is necessarily going to be stochastic. For example, something like Evolutionary Phonology presumes variation as an inherent property of messy, material speech, but then goes on to demonstrate that basic facts of perception and articulation make some transformations more likely and some configurations more stable. It's a Markov model in every sense, but to call it "meaningless and uninformative" strikes me as pretty bizarre. I mean, good gravy, it's a comprehensive, systems-based explanation of phonological change! What more could you possibly be hoping for?

Ok, so then why would that be an answer to the "why" question?

In other words, I think I agree.

Huh?

It explains why sounds change (for example, from *e->a) by describing the system pressures that favor the transformation, the system pressures that disfavor it, and the mechanisms of change itself. What more could you possibly hope for?

It depends on what we mean by "meaning" or "informativeness". I'm talking about it from the perspective of the researcher understanding from it. This gets into issues like the Chinese room-- personally I'd rather actually understand Chinese than be able to perfectly imitate it. If it turns out that linguistics (or parts thereof) are just probabilistic, then I'm not too interested in studying them (I wouldn't mind showing it and moving on though). [I won't ever mind doing descriptive linguistics, though, I suppose!]

If a system is built on probabalistic mechanisms, "understanding it" requires building a representation that includes probability. There's nothing particular to linguistics about that. It's just a basic issue of epistemology. The comparison to questions about consciousness is completely missing the point.

Edit: type-o change-o