Re: To Matt Pearson

Kou wrote:
>From: "Matthew Pearson"
>
>Rant coming, hide yourselves....
>
> > Well, human language is rule-governed, pure and simple, so there's got
>to
>be a set of rules in our heads somewhere.
>
>Says who? I'm no scientist, but statements like "X is true, so Y *must* be
>true" (a *hypothesis*) fail the scientific method litmus test, unless one
>can come up with proof that Y is true ("Apples fall, so oranges must fall."
>is a hypothesis where we can test if oranges fall.) (As opposed to: Apples
>fall, I've seen an orange fall, apples and oranges are round, so all
>oranges
>*must* fall.)) When *we* were in school :) linguistics profs seemed to want
>to make linguistics legit as a science (as opposed to a discipline) by
>using
>scientific language, but I frequently found the Y part lacking.
If we assume that language is rule-governed (if not, then there's NO
predictable link between content and expression - an unlikely hypothesis
...), and that the human mind is capable of using language (if not, one
gotta wonder who's writing this ...), doesn't it then follow that the human
mind at some level has knowledge these rules? And if the human mind has this
knowledge, mustn't it be stored in the memory? There's ample evidence that
the memory is placed in the brain.

                                                 Andreas

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