No subject

[Rob Freeman]

A. Katz wrote:

> ...I would prefer to distinguish the concrete language-processing
> entity
> from the `language' that it processes. Wasn't it Chomsky who
> introduced the idea that language and the little black box that
> supposedly produces it are inseparable? As functionalists, do we buy
> into that?

I think he might have been arguing that concretes don't matter, actually.
Hence the _black_ box.

> ...Speakers don't know how their interlocutors' brains are configured.
> Communication is based on the abstract system of contrasts set up in
> the language.

Am I wrong in thinking that syntactic form is specified by systemic
contrasts of meaning in functionalism? That is what I am arguing, for
myself. I don't know where all this talk of neurons came from.

Rob