I don't dive in too often but ...
On Saturday 21 June 2008, And Rosta wrote:
> How great a constraint on the properties of a formal system does
> implementability in wetware impose?
Surely the "implementability in wetware" is paramount if the formal system is
to have any hope of providing insights into the /reality/ of our linguistic
(or general cognitive) capabilities? If this is not the case, we may as well
still argue over whether (human) language is a BNF grammar or a purely
instinctive stimulus-response system.
If we are to learn or discover anything significant in this enterprise, we are
forced to ground our theorising in precisely the constraints which the brain
imposes simply because IMHO the formal characteristics of the system *arise*
from those constraints (and their complex interactions.)
Dylan
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