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Monday, December 21, 2009

"Linguistic Contributions to the Study of Mind" by Noam Chomsky,1968

The classical questions of language and mind receive no final solution,
or even the hint of a final solution,
from the work that is being actively pursued today.

For the first time in many years,it seems, there is some real opportunity for substantial progress in the study of the contribution of the mind to perception and the innate basis for acquisition of knowledge.

Still, in many respects, we have not made the first approach to a real answer to the classical problems.
For example, the central problems relating to :
the creative aspect of language use remain as inaccessible as they have always been.

And the study of universal semantics, surely crucial to the full investigation of language structure, has barely advanced since the medieval period.

Many other critical areas might be mentioned where progress has been slow or nonexistent.

Real progress has been made in the study of the mechanisms of language,
the formal principles that make possible the creative aspect of language use and that determine the phonetic form and semantic content of utterances.

Our understanding of these mechanisms, though only fragmentary, does seem to me to have real implications for the study of human psychology.
By pursuing the kinds of research that now seem feasible and by focusing attention on certain problems that are now accessible to study, we may be able to spell out in some detail the elaborate and abstract computations that determine, in part, the nature of percepts and the character of the knowledge that we can acquire the highly specific ways of interpreting phenomena that are, in large measure, beyond our consciousness and control and that may be unique to man.

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