Universals

[H Stephen Straight]

To quote Tony Wright:  "Whoa!  I said all that?  I didn't mean to."
        I'm a linguist in an anthropology department and have been reading and
teaching and writing about psycholinguistic issues for a long time now.  I
don't have any doubt about the existence of universals and can't think why
anyone would doubt their existence.  More important, I don't see what I've said
that would make you think that I have the slightest doubt of their existence,
to say nothing of dismissing them as summarily as you imply.  Please help me to
better understand your apparent disagreement with my position.
        As for "the millennia old debate between formalists and Platonists," by
which I think you meant to say "between idealists and realists" (with
formalists and Platonists being examples of the former and functionalists and
processualists examples of the latter) -- but maybe I don't get your point, I
don't pretend to have laid this or any other such yin/yang dichotomy to rest.
I do however think that humanists, social scientists, neuroscientists, and many
others have provided hard empirical evidence and powerful conceptual tools for
getting beyond the Myth of G whereby an essentially set-theoretic descriptive
device (a grammar) becomes reified as a mental organ.  I don't know whether to
call it the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or just plain old equivocation
and mystification, but I do think that locating grammars in the mind/brain
makes about as much sense as locating physical equations (E=mc squared) in
physical objects (atoms?).

                Best.           'Bye.           Steve