Passed on without comment from academic uberblog Language Log:

I've been critical of Fitch's article, so I should emphasize one point on which we agree: he is quite correct (if unoriginal) to say that an `adequate explanation for [what he quaintly calls] glossogenetic phenomena must incorporate individual and collective levels of description, and show why they are necessarily related'. I'm skeptical about the likelihood that statistical analyses imported from other disciplines will solve this difficult problem. It's not that statistical explorations of relationships between frequency and lexical replacement and/or regularization, and in other areas of language change as well, should be ignored; they have produced very interesting results in a variety of domains. But errors of the sort that Fitch makes show clearly that new approaches to historical linguistic analysis will be successful only to the extent that they take into account the results of historical linguistic investigations over the past hundred and fifty years or so. Failing to learn something about a field one wishes to contribute to is all too likely to lead to reinvention of the wheel at best, and to a garbage in/garbage out problem at worst.

But the rigor inter-methodological conceit feels so good.

References:
* Fitchifying Language Change [LL]

Previously:
* Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings - Blogosphere Edition
* Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other
* Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other