Words and Rules/ Chapter 9/ The Black Box.
Now it gets interesting. That was one of my notes when I read the chapter. However true it may be, this chapter is useless if one has not read the preceding eight chapters. This is how it is with most things, most probably with it all. You cannot appreciate something you “know” nothing about, unless that something is a Pollock painting.
This chapter explores the realms of neuroscience, if the words and rules theory is correct we should be able to identify this on the brain.
Now it gets interesting. That was one of my notes when I read the chapter. However true it may be, this chapter is useless if one has not read the preceding eight chapters. This is how it is with most things, most probably with it all. You cannot appreciate something you “know” nothing about, unless that something is a Pollock painting.
This chapter explores the realms of neuroscience, if the words and rules theory is correct we should be able to identify this on the brain.
““...All this adds up to suggest that irregular and regular inflection, and words and rules more generally, depend on different systems in the brain…Whatever the outcome of the past-tense treasure hunt, I hope it will be emblematic of a trend in intellectual life in the coming millennium that the biologist E. O. Wilson has called consilience: the unification of the arts and the sciences by an understanding of the mind, brain, mind, and human nature. Regular and irregular inflection has long been mulled over by novelists and poets, dictionary writers and editors, philologists and linguists. Now this topic straight out of the humanities is being probed with the cutting-edge tools of molecular genetics and imaging of the brain. Some people fear this kind of development as a crass “reductionism” that will marginalize the humanities and plough under the richness of their subject matter, but it is far from that. Without an understanding of the contents of the mind from psychology, linguistics, and all the other disciplines they touch, neuroscientists would not know where to begin in studying the human brain, and their technologies would be expensive toys. Ultimately all knowledge is connected, and insight into a phenomenon can come from any direction, form the outcome of the Battle of Hastings to the sequence s kinase gene.”
- Steven Pinker, Words and Rules, Chapter 8, pg 268.-
My words cannot never match up to Pinker’s when it comes to describing HIS theory, therefore that previous paragraph is there to illustrate his ideals. This paragraph, I believe, demonstrates Pinker’s true colors, his perspective towards science and the mind especially. Right at first he seems to agree with Wilson, who spoke to us as well in his book Consilience, about the unity of knowledge. Wilson also speaks of the mind in his own way, and his reductionist view seems to coincide with Pinkers.
Going back to the words and rules theory, it seems that Pinker believes we could track down an origin for these phenomenas, rules and words, memories and schema formulating systems. Now that we speak more deeply about the mind, why not bring Hofstadter into the conversation.
Going back to the words and rules theory, it seems that Pinker believes we could track down an origin for these phenomenas, rules and words, memories and schema formulating systems. Now that we speak more deeply about the mind, why not bring Hofstadter into the conversation.