[Casiopea]

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

I may not have time for a detailed answer until Monday, but I'll try to address the most specific questions

No worries. The discussion is a tad bit on the ethereal side.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

And then there are sounds, like say, the Japanese "r"; which somewhere between "r" and "l", and which I keep hearing as "d".

Yes, ime too. At first, I kept hearing /d/, so that's how I would pronounce it, but my Japanese colleagues would soon correct me with again what I heard as /d/. I had a professor of phonetics who taught that every phone had a range of variants that were neither phonemic nor allophonic. They were just 'static' that speakers learned to accommodate. Japanese /r/, for example, is not within the static range, so non-Japanese speakers hear the closest variant, which for English speakers is /d/ or /dl/. For Japanese speakers of English, English /r/ is not within their static range, so they hear the closest sound, which to them is a kind of /l/--or rather, and in keeping with the topic, is what native English speakers hear as /l//

By the by, in pronouncing the Japanese name Ryou, a male's name, I consciously form /d/ and then say [r]. The result, a Japanese /r/ that sounds like something inbetween the affricate in garage and /dl/, but it's neither. It's Japanese /r/, so say my Japanese colleagues.

There are people who have this knack for knowing how to pronounce a language as if it were their native tongue. I gather those people have an ear for static.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

Yes, but invoking Plato pretty much points towards the philosophic assumptions you're making. A cup is a cup because you know it's a cup. It would be the same object if viewed by an alien, but it would have different (phenomenologist's term) intentionality.

Good point. Speakers do indeed know that, say, an /r/ is an /r/ because they can discriminate sounds in their language. Other r's in other languages, no; i.e., English <r> v. Japanese <r>. Intention, yes. The ear discriminates sound based on a variety of features, distinctive features. If a feature is unknown, then the closest sound is chosen. So, in other words, discrimination is a form of intentionallity.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

But "tools" implies a connection to a "tool user". No "tool user", no "tool"; just a strangely regular object.

No result at all, more likely. How does that factor in here?

Back to discrimination. The assumption that each speaker maps and decodes distinctive features in the same way is erroneous, right?; i.e., auditorily dyslexic learners. Within a given language, not just across languages, there also exists variations of intentionallity, call 'em nano-phones.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

Yes, but see, insight into language change may influence language change. Even mistaken hypotheses (like about the origin of "okay") can have influence on how far some usage spreads.

Bad science is the foundation of good science. Try, try, again, right? Mistakes happen. In fact, most hypotheses end up serving only one purpose, to cancel out what something isn't.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

Actually, speakers/hearers understand language change to some extent. A scientists' hypothesis about language is part of language history. How will you escape this?

Escape...? I'm lost. Sorry.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

Phones are clearly biological. Phonemes?

They describe what is clearly biological.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

There's a sound-wave on one hand, and a brain-state on the other. The phone is in the sound-wave. Is the phoneme in the brain-state? In the interaction between the sound and brain-state?

A phoneme is a bundle of distinctive features. The features themselves describe physiological states: articulation and manner, which are not to my present knowledge--I could be behind in my reading, though--"processes that make a hypothesis a hypothesis (memory for example)." Place of articulation and manner are not connected to how memory works. (Does anyone know yet how memory works?) I may have missed your point.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

The reason ID is unscientific is because "the Intelligent Designer" is beyond all operational definition. Humans are not.

I'd rather not step into that minefield, if that's OK with you.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

If phonemes are biological, and phonemes are distinctions between phones people make, then distinctions are biological.

Phonemes describe physiology. It is in that sense that they are connected to our biology.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

Isn't thinking about phonemes another way of saying "thinking about thinking about phones"?

I doubt speakers consciously focus on phonemes, or for that matter the innerworkings of their DNA.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

How marked is the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness. How different is experiencing from remembering? How different is practical categorising from theoretical categorising? Can we ever think about these thinking properly without spiraling into infinite regress of meta-levels?

Again, you've lost me.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

We cannot yet use biology to explain the exact difference. I'm not convinced we will be able to, but I'm open to the possibility.

But we have. Distinctive features.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

... hypotheses about human production of meaning don't have to be verified to be influential.

The same can be said about any field, say, the idea that the earth is flat--some people to this day still believe that you know.

Originally Posted by Dawnstorm

Understanding a hypothesis might not be that different from learning to speak (from second language learning, say).

Where's the connection?