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A. Katz
amnfn at WELL.COM
Tue Mar 30 07:21:47 UTC 1999
Rob Freeman wrote (in re Chomsky's black box):
>I think he might have been arguing that concretes don't matter, actually.
>Hence the _black_ box.
The black box is vague, but it isn't all that abstract. As I
understand it, humans are supposed to come equipped with a device that
has specific syntactic settings. The range available is very limited,
it is given in advance, and it is physically hard-wired. We may not
know or care exactly how, but it's a physical property.
This is not too different from asserting that all humans come equipped
with an organ of veneration, whose exact location in the brain is not
currently known. That's kind of vague, but it is entirely too concrete.
--Aya Katz
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