There's such a thing as outsider art, but has there been such a thing as outsider historians, linguistics, etc? People with no formal training or institutional exposure who ended up producing revolutionary works in a field?
>>2040739
Adam Smith was an outside economist and Daivd Hume was an outside historian afaik
>>2040739
I know of a someone who studied biogeography but he was notorious for his dilettantism and actually got it wrong in the end. I am sure there are many more.
Oh I know: Jared Diamond is one. Nassim Taleb is another.
I do dislike the general attitude towards outsiders. Diamond was wrong on several points, but some just play the "he is not a anthropologist" card.
>>2040739
Because history is based on 'fact' whereas music is subjective, duh
>>2040739
>tfw rejected for publication again
>>2040739
in linguistics, chomsky could be an example
even though he certainly did study linguistics in university, but he wrote like someone coming into the field from logic, mathematics or natural sciences whereas at the time linguistics was generally closer to philology and interested in historical developments and language families more than psychology, mental representations and synchronic descriptions. tolkien would have been a typical example of pre-chomskyan linguistics. people cared more about typology and diversity whereas after chomsky some people would even say that we can learn everything we need to know about language from a quasi-mathematical analysis of only english sentence structures.
he certainly contributed a lot to the field and is still considered revolutionary and infallible by many linguists but imho in the end his methods lead to an unscientific approach that looses itself in arcane phrase structure trees while denying contrary evidence with the help of invisible elements. i also don't like how he shifted the emphasis of the field from history and cultural diversity towards pattern analysis and an obsession with "elegant" explanations no matter their connection to reality