lingua ex machina {? is anything really NP}

[jporter]

Away back, I said (somewhere):

>> An argument can be made that machines are just linguistic forms. W.C.
>> Williams has considered it from the opposite angle- words, or in his case,
>> poems, as "word machines."

And then Terrence Flaherty said:

>Hmm, how is machine defined here?


Don't know if this helps, but the debate seems to center around the
emergence of language- much too abruptly to be purely learned for Chomsky's
taste- but UG was seemingly dropped into the picture by a crane, fully
developed, at just the right time in the plot to avoid complicated
explanations of where the heck all that syntax machinery came from.

In the inevitable let down after being awarded the "First (hence forward)
Annual Shaggy
Pynch Award, for best joke on-list" (Was I joking? dodgy, very dodgy of
that Max...), I thought it might be worthwhile to restore that discussion
of language as machines and machines as linguistic expressions. It occurred
to me that I had Calvin and Bickerton's _Lingua ex Machina_ (MIT Press), as
well as William Carlos Williams ("no thought but in things") in the back of
my mind at the time.

_Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain_ is
on line at:

http://williamcalvin.com/LEM/     In case anyone's interested.

 I still prefer John Searle's "Chinese Room" formulation, or rather, my own
(in)version of Searle,  "Zoyd at the Helm" which at least incorporates some
notion of cybernetics into the picture, and pops into my mind whenever I
see the icon of my old netscape navigator.

jody