amendment to liz bates' comment

[Lise Menn, Linguistics, CU Boulder]

That's a totally unwarranted slap. You think Lavoisier used Galileo's
results to discover oxygen? Yes, it's true that we dont' know what the
primitives of brain function are yet; but we still have to study that
function with all available tools. No matter how much a neurophysiologist
knows about the brain, she can't design an experiment to look at on-line
sentence processing without the collaboration of linguists and
psycholinguists.



On Sun, 12 Jan 1997, Chris Cleirigh wrote:

> liz bates wrote:
>
> >And while we are at it, I am puzzled by the suggestion that we should
> >describe language "first" before any investigation of its biology can
> >be carried out.  Should physics be complete before we attempt chemistry?
>
> A more congruent question would be:
>
> Should chemistry be complete before we attempt physics?
>
> On a hierarchy of emergent complexity, chemistry sits above physics
> just as linguistics sits above biology.
>
> A lot of "chemistry" was described before the discipline established
> its relations with physics.  I believe it was called "alchemy".
>
> chris
>