Announcement: Alternatives to Chomsky meeting

[Noel Rude]

Well, folks,

        Maybe there's even one more approach besides Chomsky's biological
innateness vs. our supervenience upon a thousand-and-one physical
phenomena.  Like it or not, a large number (perhaps a majority) of
mathematicians (and lots of other people in the nonbiological "hard
sciences") are still Platonists (don't shoot me!) of the old-fashioned
stripe.

        These blokes believe that the laws of physics lie further down in the
hierarchy of reality than the primitive axioms from which mathematics
(and logic) derive.  Modern cosmological theory generally assumes that
physical law traces from the Big Bang (however conceived), and today's
theoreticians profit (they think!) from studying other possible worlds
all the while assuming that the higher-arching principles of math and
logic must obtain there too (and not necessarily the laws of physics).
Whereas the formalists believe we invent math/logic, the mathematical
Platonists believe we discover it.  And--lest anyone gets too
frightened--many maybe most of these Platonists are also hard core
atheists.  And they are reductionists.  They just believe that "those
things which could be no other way" have a reality of their own.

        So instead of throwing spit-wads at each other from these various camps
within a strictly reductionist "physical law" materialism, why not keep
our cool and at least acknowledge what the big boys in the hard sciences
are thinking.  Maybe Chomsky is on to something.  Maybe some of the core
of Language--maybe rather than being biologically "hard-wired"--maybe we
as humans are equipped to "discover" it.

        No, let's avoid extremism (as Givon always warns against).  Let's milk
the biological and discourse-pragmatic sides of the coin for all they're
worth.  But maybe some folks who study the more abstractly logical side
of things should hang in there too.  Just what is there about Language
"that could be no other way"?  What does Natural Language share with
other information systems?  Is there something there that doesn't merely
"emerge" from a swirl of atoms?

        Why is it we can't have both pragmatics AND Plato?

        Noel the Rude