And to make matters worse:

": (1) the clinical literature reveals profound deficits in language only after left-hemisphere damage, but the brain imaging literature shows bilateral activation in most language tasks; (2) language is left-hemisphere dominant in most individuals yet deviation from this pattern does not result in language dysfunction; and (3) lateralization and handedness are related, but the factors that underlie this relation are unknown. "

So there ya go. Major puzzlement. It's always some damn thing.

Fortunately there are still Warriors in Academe who are prepared to cut the Gordion Knot of mindless psychobabble with such bold cleavage as that shown by Agustín Rayo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (April 2007), who bravely declaims:

" On the one hand, I offer an elucidation of the notion of ontological commitment. On the other, I assess the adequacy of criteria of ontological commitment for different languages. The paper ends with some speculative remarks about the significance of ontological commitment....

an ending, I am sure, for which we are all duly grateful.

These characters never rest in their search for truth, and their exercise of obfuscation in polysyllabic circumlocution. For example, here is the bginning of an article on the impelling subjct of Truthmakers, quickly reduced to ghastly ash by the exerfcise of these pedantic talents:

During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of Russell and Moore, were conceived as the bearers of the properties of truth and falsehood. Some thinkers however, such as Russell, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Husserl in the Logische Untersuchungen, argued that instead of, or in addition to, truth-bearers, one must assume the existence of certain entities in virtue of which sentences and/or propositions are true. Various names were used for these entities, notably 'fact', 'Sachverhalt', and 'state of affairs'.(1) In order not to prejudge the suitability of these words we shall initially employ a more neutral terminology, calling any entities which are candidates for this role truth-makers.(2)

The fall from favour of logical realism brought with it a corresponding decline of interest in the ontology of truth. The notions of correspondence and indeed of truth itself first of all came to appear obscure and 'metaphysical'. Then Tarski's work, while rehabilitating the idea of truth, seemed to embody a rejection of a full-blooded correspondence.(3) In the wake of Tarski, philosophers and logicians have largely turned their attentions away from the complex and bewildering difficulties of the relations between language and the real world, turning instead to the investigation of more tractable set-theoretic surrogates. Work along these lines has indeed expanded to the extent where it can deal with a large variety of modal, temporal, counterfactual, intentional, deictic, and other sentence-types. However, while yielding certain insights into the structures of language, such semantic investigations avoid the problem of providing an elucidation of the basic truth-relation itself. In place of substantive accounts of this relation, as proffered by the Tractatus or by chapter II of Principia Mathematica,(4) we are left with such bloodless pseudo-elucidations as: a monadic predication 'Pa' is true if a is a member of the set which is the extension of 'P'. Whatever their formal advantages, approaches of this kind do nothing to explain how sentences about the real world are made true or false. For the extension of 'P' is simply the set of objects such that, if we replace 'x' in 'Px' by a name of the object in question, we get a true sentence. Set-theoretic elucidations of the basic truth-relation can, it would seem, bring us no further forward.

This is why Rapaire and I are always butting heads, in case that is not obvious. Talk about bloodless pseudo-elucidations!! (A lovely flower of phrase found unexpectedly in a bog of cognitive miasma).

Hey, Mom!! It's a quiet post-catastophic day of rest here in sleepy San Diego, where the sun never stops. How're things where you are?

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