🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <RJC.92Nov23111346@daiches.cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley) writes:

>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.

RC:
>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 :-).

Why does the recipient's response have anything to do with the meaning
of the message?  Suppose I put a letter in a bottle, and cast it on the
waters; are you going to tell me that my message is meaningless, until
and unless it gets read?

RC:
>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.

Spare Aunt Sally, Caley.  My claim is just the opposite: that human
context can be represented.  You are the one who wants to divorce
language from its suprahuman value, by separating the words from the
concepts they express.

RC:
>					    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.

Wrong again.  I proceed by abduction, as well as by deduction.  My
considered expectation is that ultimately the formal and the descriptive
approaches will converge, yielding the sort of theory I characterized
elsewhere.  Bit that will not happen, until and unless the twin-headed
monster of Lockean conceptualism and Chomskian syntactical reductionism
gets its just deserts.

>--
>rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk				_O_
>						 |<

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Le cul des femmes est monotone comme l'esprit des hommes."