It seems to me that overarching theories of a Platonic bent miss the embodied-ness, Dasein-ness of human activity.
Nevermind the debates about the ultimate nature of the human cognitive process; fact of the matter is that as observed, it's always-already wrapped in emotional-social thinking. Enough that there's reason to question the subject-object split altogether.
Now, maybe Chomsky is a kind of extreme social-cognitivist and his abstract generative trees apply to societies as learning and meaning-producing wholes. But on the face of facts, rather than metaphysical speculation as to the nature of personality, intentionality and individuality, it would seem to me that the statistical/machine learning approach already faces language as it happens: as embodied in media, social context and so on.
In other words: I fail to see much value in an abstract account of "pure language" as dissociated from the real communicative process as it happens right now as you read me. Sure, "insights" -- but it remains to be shown that "pure linguistics" is a worthwhile endeavor on the level of "pure quantum mechanics" as formal model.
> I fail to see much value in an abstract account of "pure language" as dissociated from the real communicative process
But this assumption makes assumptions of purity as well. The communicative process may just be a byproduct of a mental process which has little to do with communication. A mutation happens tens of thousands of years ago (say 50,000 years ago), a change happens in the Broca (and/or Wernecke) area of the brain, and suddenly a new mental process kicks off. This mental process can be modeled as a state machine, and has the abilities and limitations of a state machine. It also has known limitations of output, which Chomsky has talked about.
You're assuming the mutations which gave rise to the brain changes which created an internal language generator and parser have only one purpose - communication. But that's an assumption on your part. The ability to communicate may be just one byproduct of those changes which made things like communication possible.
Is there anything that isn't "observed"? Are you suggesting that everything except formal logic (or perhaps including?) cannot be objectively characterized? Have we been awarding the Nobel prize in Chemistry to too many chemists, while failing to recognize the emotional-social validity of alchemy?
Welp, a proposition in chemistry is cleanly falsifiable, so we can gradually (as we have historically) delimit "chemistry proper" from what we could call the general phenomenology of matter. Of course, taken to a metaphysical limit, it's not even the case that things are embedded in a context, but that they're the context itself (as Derrida famously put), but this is completely irrelevant to chemistry.
I don't believe this is the case with psychology or linguistics. Of course, I could be wrong; in particular, they may work as "applied pseudosciences" (much like economics, which is really useful) even though we will never arrive at their foundations.
EDIT: More succintly put: the objects of interest of chemistry always arrived as abstracted from context, while the objects of linguistics and psychology are the context themselves.
In my defense, It was late into the single hours and I couldn't sleep nor think right.
Maybe "embeddedness" is the better word. The symbol system that is language is never the whole story of communication with language; we hardly code expression that's verbal but nonlexical (tone of voice, prosody, etc.); nor we're able to incorporate the layers upon layers of material mediation (reproduction and transmission technologies, air, light) into our generative account of linguistic phenomena.
Which is maybe another way of putting that what you say isn't what you mean - it's what's out there.
Maybe it's still a stupid point, but I thought it was worth trying to restate it once more.
Nevermind the debates about the ultimate nature of the human cognitive process; fact of the matter is that as observed, it's always-already wrapped in emotional-social thinking. Enough that there's reason to question the subject-object split altogether.
Now, maybe Chomsky is a kind of extreme social-cognitivist and his abstract generative trees apply to societies as learning and meaning-producing wholes. But on the face of facts, rather than metaphysical speculation as to the nature of personality, intentionality and individuality, it would seem to me that the statistical/machine learning approach already faces language as it happens: as embodied in media, social context and so on.
In other words: I fail to see much value in an abstract account of "pure language" as dissociated from the real communicative process as it happens right now as you read me. Sure, "insights" -- but it remains to be shown that "pure linguistics" is a worthwhile endeavor on the level of "pure quantum mechanics" as formal model.