From: jeffrey E. <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, October 19, 2015 11:22 PM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: but the words are generated by chemical electrical a=tions. . nothing more. there is no make believe force. .=C2 go to the source. On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 7:06 PM, Noam Chomsky < » wrote: She is great, great, great. But=for the moment, roles reversed. Valeria tore a muscle lifting someth=ng that she shouldn't have. Had to call of our trip. Last one was called off because I broke a rib. Maybe the next one be=ause our dog will have a nervous breakdown. It's certainly true that ther= are all kinds of information transfer. Human language, a particular=biological object, can also be used for this purpose (though it is hard to comprehend the common claim that this is its "functi=n"). Suppose, however, that we limit ourselves to organ-to•o=gan signaling. Would it be appropriate to ask why chemical signals a=e not "merely a signal for internal use", just like electr=cal, linguistic, other? I don't think so. We would want to =now what chemical signals are and how they work, and the same for electric=l, linguistic, etc. They are all radically different, and their part=cular nature is the object of inquiry into them. And again, linguistic systems are rad=cally different from the others in that signaling is only one of many uses=of language, statistically speaking (for what that's' worth, probably not much) a very minor one. =nd crucially, investigation of the nature of language has, I think, yielde= mounting and significant evidence that in the design of language external=zation altogether is a peripheral property, largely a reflex of whatever sensory modality is used, hence special uses such as =ommunication even more so. From: jeffrey E. [mailto:[email protected] Sent: Monday, October 19, 2015 1:23 PM To: Noam Chomsky <[email protected] < Subject: > > cells signal each other by various means. =AO. chemical gas . electrical, . , mul