A small point troubles me in this discussion, as follows: is 'polylogism' a
real category?

I ask this, because Pat introduced the concept of deep structure into the
discussion. He writes:

"In the past, this theory was proposed by Marxists, racists, religious
zealots, nationalists, and so on. Now it is presented by a professor of
communication, who presumably recognizes that different people speak
different languages but denies that they have a common deep structure."

As a lifelong follower of Chomsky I have always taken deep structure to
refer to an underlying syntactic structure. So, using transformational
grammar, one may recognise that "The cat the man loves" contains the deep
syntactic structure "X is a cat" plus "the man loves x". This remains at the
level of syntax, that is to say, it does not connote meaning. This is used
to explain the fact that we can 'make sense' of nonsense sentences such as
'twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe'.
Chomsky as I recall introduced the concept of deep structure to explain why
and how we could parse such sentences, even though we could not assign
meaning to the terms they contain.

Perhaps this is not the sense of 'deep structure' which Pat intends. In that
case, the term 'deep structure' introduces an ambivalence, since it makes no
reference to such concepts as meaning or reality. I suspect that what Pat
really intends is that polylogists tend to deny that words have objective
meaning, though I am not sure. If so, then of course, this is a serious
matter. The issue then is, since there are a plurality of ways in which
theorists explain reality, is there an 'underlying reality' which
corresponds to all these different theories? This is a very different
question to whether a plurality of modes of syntactic expression refer to a
single underlying deep organization of the terms deployed in the syntax.

If one wishes to study meaning, a further question arises, namely, do the
words that we use refer to any real thing? My problem is then that the
meaningfulness of the very concept being used to study the issue -
'polylogism' - has yet to be established.

I may choose to divide the world's thinkers into those who open their eggs
at the big end, and those who open their eggs at the small end, as Swift
points out, or in any other way I want. I am free to invent any fanciful
word I want, to describe people ideas I like, or don't like. Swift's
(rhetorical) point, however, is that no useful deduction may be made from a
division of the world into bigendians and littleendians. 

My question is, therefore, does the concept 'polylogism' help us understand
the world any better than 'bigendianism'? Does it permit us to make any
useful categorization of the different ways people think, so that we can on
the one side place the polylogists, on the other side the antipolylogists
(monologists?) and deduce other behavioural or intellectual traits from this
division - for example, that side A are more likely to be racist, or side B
are more likely to be wrong.

I haven't seen any argument to this effect, so far. I suspect this may be
part of the reason that the discussion has not got as far as it otherwise
might have.

A