> i think [Chomsky] actually believes
>you can and should distinguish the form from the content, which is why
>he comes out with arguments like the above. which shows that he
>really cannot come to terms with why so much 'irrationality' exists in
>the midst of 'rationality' - he thinks they can be distinguished
>outside of rhetoric.
He does indeed think form and content are distinct. He's a little bit famous in psycholinguistics for the now-universally-accepted notion of 'deep structure' (content) vs 'surface structure' (form).
The famous example of Chomsky's alluded to by Paul is illustrative -- 'colorless green ideas sleep furiously'. If we're native speakers, we immediately recognise that the form is fine -- it conforms to all our syntactic rules for sentences -- and that 'well-formedness' by itself conveys a tantalising sense of meaningfulness.
But looking at the deep structure of the sentence -- the actual meaning -- reveals that it's nonsensical. The rules of deep structure say, for example, that concepts cannot meaningfully have contradictory values. Thus, even if we grant that the concept of 'idea' can somehow (poetically, maybe) have a color property, that color property cannot have both 'colorless' and 'green' values at the same time.
Form is fine, content is rubbish. Two different issues.
Margaret