🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov20.111124.17630@husc3.harvard.edu>, Michael Zeleny (mz) writes:

mz> I see no reason to suppose that the salient contextual features are
mz> unique and irreproducible, in the sense you seem to suggest.

One of them is the person hearing/reading the phrase. You can't rewind
people to an earlier state and giving them two phrases at once is
pointless unless you are one of the more sadistic variety of
psycho-linguist :-).

There, I suspect, is the core of the difference between you and, so
far as I can see, everyone else on this thread. You seem to want to
divorce `language' from its human context. If you do that hard enough,
then indeed you _do_ get a formal language, however you also end up
with something which is of no interest to anyone except formal
language theorists, since you have no way of showing that any facts
you might determine about your formalised language have any relevance
to real language as she is spoke. You're just repeating all of the
mistakes of the people who tried to deduce rules for English from an
idealised Latin grammar, you haven't shown that you have a meaningful
inverse transformation.

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rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk				_O_
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