All ideas and concepts, therefore, have a universal or 'public' content in addition to the private content which we give them when we marry them, correctly or incorrectly, to our private world of percepts, and to the mental content, true or false, that we have already made into our own 'world-view'. He insists that the modern world has been almost totally blinded to this truth by the prevalence of materialistic assumptions in science and philosophy, i.e. by the view that ideas and concepts are merely the end-products of physical sense stimulation. Given this assumption, even great minds like Albert Einstein are left to impotently wonder why it is that human thought, seen as an entirely subjective activity, maps onto external reality in so remarkable a manner. A similar dilemma confronts Noam Chomsky, but this time in relation to internal reality. In accepting them, however, he is faced with the task of explaining how this Universal Grammar might operate.
Experience is required to set the switches.
When they are set, the system functions. In several of my recent articles I have argued, I believe convincingly, that the use of mechanistic imagery in attempting to explain or to 'prove' materialistic assumptions, involves a profound historical error in causal logic. An error which arose when materialism first turned Descartes' philosophical dualism into a Monism of Matter by removing the concept of 'God the Designer,' but all the while continuing to use the language of design, which was all that really mattered. Later, when the word 'mechanistic' became a dictionary definition for materialism, an assumed Monism of Matter, no one any longer questioned its entitlement to the use of such imagery, or the use of intentional idioms. In fact, mechanistic imagery and intentional idioms are logically inadmissible to materialism's basic argument, because they serve merely to substitute human creativity for universal or divine creativity, the existence of which materialism seeks to deny.