William -- Since I know your respect for Damasio, I think the following excerpt from Harris's brief intro to integrational linguistics may be of interest to you:
It is sometimes said that a full understanding of our blinguistic knowledgeb (or, alternatively, a bscientificb understanding of language) will be impossible until advances in the study of the brain reveal exactly how the language faculty and other faculties are related. This is held out as one of the hopes for future bcognitive scienceb. 7c. Thinking of language in this way, however, rests on a misunderstanding. The mistake is analogous to supposing that the explanation of why a clock keeps good time must be that inside it there is a set of instructions for time-keeping. Research into brain mechanisms is interesting in its own right. But the fact that linguistic communication has already come to play such a central role in civilization without relying so far on any such research suggests that whatever human beings already know about language from their own experience is quite adequate for an bunderstandingb of the relevant phenomena.
