A non-issue of an important issue

[Carl.Mills at UC.EDU]

J. Diego Quesada of the University of Toronto writes, in part,

" You are right, back in the 1930s. But this is the 1990's!!!,
almost the 21st. C. A.D. Surely some progress must have been made during
these 60-70 years, don't you think? That *meaning* is not reducible to
something like:
                M = x + y/-r, etc.
does not mean that our intuition (as linguists and speakers) and common
sense cannot guide us when making analyses and claims about language."

and a bit later:


"The fact that we talk about the meaning of a lexeme
that grammaticalizes or the meaning of a certain syntactic structure,
etc.etc. is enough proof that we know what we mean by meaning. I cannot
understand what the reason for complicating matters superfluously is."

I don't want to waste a lot of bandwidth on what is clearly a side
issue, but it is statements like these that make communication difficult
between functionalists and those of us who are not functionalists.

The first passage quoted above seems to equate the passing of time with
progress.  And not very much progress has been made since the 1930s.  As
for "common sense," well, for a long time common sense had a lot of
people convinced that the world was flat.

The second passage contains an "argument" that is so vulnerable to a
reductio ad absurdam that I hate to get into it.  But late-19th-century
physicists talked about the luminiferous ether without knowing what they
meant by it--without knowing, in fact, that it didn't exist.  We could
add phlogiston, the philosopher's stone, and Bergson's elan vital.



Carl