From: Noam Chomsky Sent: Saturday, August 1, 2015 10:30 PM To: Jeffrey E. Subject: RE: Re: Been on the road all day from the Cape to Cambridge. Along with every other car in Mass. Glad you liked the paper. Since Leonard Bernstein's Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard about 40 years ago there has been interesting work seeking structural similarities between language and at least some musical traditions, mostly western tonal. You might want to have a look. One of those doing the best work is my colleague David Pesetsky, a fine linguist and excellent musician. You're right that "reading the eyes" is a complex and fascinating topic, even extrapolating gaze, the way infants do but probably not other animals. And famously, staring into someone's eyes is far from neutral: either serious threat or real intimacy. But these are all cognitive interpretations of the (internal) output of the visual system. It could be argued that the computations involved in determining what we see are a central system, not just part of a processing system. Hard to see how to pose that as a real empirical issue that can be tested. From: jeffrey E. [mailto:[email protected] Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2015 9:18 AM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: Re: " processing" -my use of sloppy language , sorry, thanks for the great paper. music and its" understanding" , might be a closer representation to expressing a formalism that might help describe the events. it is not an either , or , it is a superposition of melody, prosody, harmony, within certain bounds that differentiate it from noise. fyi, in the paper it says the vision system is only input, .not sure that is corrrect. reading the eyes might have more to it than previously thought. On Sat, Aug 1, 2015 at 6:54 AM, Noam Chomsky wrote: There is a view that language is essentially a processing system. The arguments against it seem to me very power. I'll attach a recent paper about it, a contribution to a volume of