>Linguistics is, in a sense, a branch of psychology, and how we think about
people's minds is fraught with political repercussions. But I don't think
that's the most important source of dispute. Linguists argue over which
type of analysis is best without very much knowledge of how language
actually works in the brain.
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>The biggest single problem that I have with generative grammar is that it
invokes one kind of analysis without ever explaining why that one analysis
is better than any other. We can write a generative grammar for any
language, if we fiddle with it enough and define language in a very limited
way. I just don't see any good reason to do so unless we have some evidence
that the brain actually works that way, which strikes me as unlikely.
We will never know how language works in the brain, not because it's some sort of impenetrable mystery, but because language does not work in the brain. Language works in the mind. The mind can be equated with the brain only if neuroscientists can isolate memory in the brain. No memory, no mind.
Neuroscientists assume that memory lurks somewhere in the arrangement of neurons and synapses. The paradox is that once they find it, it will no longer exist. Memory is recall. To remember is to retrieve something which has been lost to the present. So, computers don't actually have memory. If the sought-after information has been stored all this time, then there's no need to recall it. It's as if every particular thing you would ever need to remember is written down on a little scrap of paper somewhere, and it's simply a matter of finding the piece of paper so you don't have to remember it. If we really do have memory, and we have no reason to assume it's a hallucination, then it can't be found in the brain.
Memory is intrinsic to language. To understand a statement, we have to remember the preceding statements. Like music, language is essentially temporal. It exists in time but not in the same way that objects exist in time. For an object, time is passage. For language, time is accumulation. So, language exists *across* time, just as the brain exists across space. The brain does not contain language; it merely facilitates its operations. The brain is the playing out of the mind; it's the moment-to-moment materialization of mentality. It doesn't contain the secrets of language or its rules. It just facilitates speech and comprehension in the moment. I'm not suggesting that the mind exists on some higher plane, imposing its "rules" onto matter. The mind is merely the "echo" of the brain. It informs the brain based on the brain's own past activities.
This leads to a question: Is Chomsky a Platonist? These rules that generate and govern languages sound similar to transcendent Ideas. Do these rules vary at all over time? Or are they static and essentially eternal?
Ted