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Full Idea
No further predictive or explanatory power is added by saying that there is in addition a level of deep unconscious rules of universal grammar.
Gist of Idea
Universal grammar doesn't help us explain anything
Source
John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch.10.IV)
Book Ref
Searle,John R.: 'The Rediscovery of the Mind' [MIT 1999], p.244
A Reaction
I would have thought that neuroscientists would be very interested in this prediction, if it were convincing enough. Nothing to stop us from trying to infer the nature of something which is beyond our reach.
| 18006 | Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| 18007 | Syntax is independent of semantics; sentences can be well formed but meaningless [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| 3507 | Universal grammar doesn't help us explain anything [Searle] |
| 2581 | Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block] |
| 8073 | How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'? [Devlin] |
| 21638 | Syntactic form concerns the focus of the sentence, as well as the truth-conditions [Hofweber] |
| 15347 | A theory of syntax can be based on Peano arithmetic, thanks to the translation by Gödel coding [Horsten] |
| 18008 | Generative semantics says structure is determined by semantics as well as syntactic rules [Magidor] |
| 18010 | 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' have different deep structure [Magidor] |