Abstrakt
The article is a short reaction to the Zámečník's paper The nature of the explanation in the synergetic linguistics (2014) which claims that the synergetic linguistics lacks full-fledged explanation and praises the Menzerath-Altmann Law for its explanatory power. However, this paper shows that the synergetic linguistic explanatory mechanism is comparable to the mechanism of Menzerath-Altmann Law and that it aims to follow the explanatory logic of white-box models in other sciences like ecology.
The quantitative linguistic laws in general often lack clear information about the known principles from which they are derived, what stochastic process they represent and what the interpretation of their parameters is, but it does not mean that they are intrinsically wrong and that we are in a critical need for a paradigm shift.