| Firstly I meant conform btw, not confirm... Unfortunately it's too late to edit! > Are our cognitive processes not included in reality? Ah, this may not be productive, but I'm really just trying to tease apart different things. Of course our cognitive processes exist in reality, however I would say there's nothing that requires that what they produce must materially map to reality. We do not for example treat dreams as evidence, even though they run on our cognitive processes. > It's tiring to hear Chomsky's ideas parroted despite no empirical framework to stand on. To be honest, I had no idea I was doing that... > What ideas could we be lacking? I'm not claiming a lack of any specific ideas, I'm merely pointing out that considering that we do know that we invent terms for phenomena that we experience and I doubt that we have been exposed to even the majority of all phenomena, it seems unlikely that we can casually refute the existence of a universal grammar. Absolutely, proving it does require evidence, which is in short supply and if I was pressed, I would suspect that it's existence is unlikely, but not impossible. Now just to be clear, I don't mean that this is kind of reasoning can be useful for much else, but with regards to attempts to find some complete unification such as a universal grammar. In those specific cases things become a little fuzzier and reasonable people can disagree. |