on with the show

If we conceive of intentionality as "representation of goals", I guess I don't have much of a quibble with that; although I think there is a lot of stuff hidden inside that phrase, not least because I feel that "goal" includes intention, which is prima facie not a good basis for a stable definition.

I've been reading up on AI & A-life recently (has AI as a term subsumed A-life?) so it's inevitable to end up wondering about the brain & the mind; it's also concomitant with interest in language. I have yet to read any satisfying linguistics in terms of the relationship between the brain and language. Chomsky's grammar module makes me laugh, but I guess it wan't a bad punt in 1957 and for all I know it makes him laugh now. Someone should write a book about Chomsky's linguistics; it seems that he progressed by grudgingly incorporating rival linguists' contributions, typically after a period in which they/their ideas were belittled. He demonstrated the behaviour of, say, Microsoft - placeholder here for any market leader - well in advance. Chomsky was a great rhetor though, and that is actually the fundamental skill of the public world, now conceived considerably more widely than it was when Aristotle wrote the textbook. Sigh. I've always been a sucker for good rhetoric. I still read Nietzsche with all my critical faculties turned off; fortunately once the reading stops the brain stutters back into gear.

I've caught so many red herrings in that lot that I'm not sure which one to pick out & fry.

OK, how about this...

from the NYT today comes, Which is correct "He was one of those teachers who prefer to do rather than show" OR "He was one of those teachers who prefers to do rather than show"?

There isn't much doubt that the latter version is taking root in the language community and will probably supplant the former, which is actually prescriptively correct. Mind you, I think the 3rd-person "s" is going to die out in the next 50 years (good riddance), so the "wrong" version will end up being homologous with the "right" version.

Anyway, the reason that the 1st version is right is that the phrase-structure (simplified to the relevant elements) of the sentence is:

(S(N(He)

(VP(V(was)

NP(one of those teachers

(S (N(who=teachers)

(VP(V(prefer) COMP(to do rather than show)))))))

not:

(S(N(He)

(S (N(who=he)

(VP(V(prefers) COMP(to do rather than show))))

(VP(V(was)

NP(one of those teachers))))

I have to work out a way to do these trees in this environment, but hopefully that's clear enough for now. I could also say that the relative pronoun "who" refers to "teachers", which being a plural noun needs the plural, no "s", verb form. Or I could say that the dependent clause hangs off "teachers", not "he". I find it easier to see grammar in diagrams, myself.

This happens, IMO (= not empirically given), because "He" is the topic of both the independent and the dependent clause and "prefer" is really the first substantial verb, so it's not unreasonable to associate the two. It is quite natural. After all, one of the definitions of "Subject" is "grammaticalised topic" (that obviously has problems when you consider languages with a separate grammaticalised topic & subject, such as Korean, but that's for another day). In fact, the producer of the "wrong" sentence could defend it with reference to the meta-rule (which purports to apply to all languages). Clearly in English the proximity of the plural non-topic noun is supposed to override the meta-rule.

I'll have to get back to this later. Life supervenes.