Linguistics and Philosophy

A short lecture by the notable Noam Chomsky. He touched on a lot of very interestings things all in under two hours! Among them were these:

<ul>

<li>ttp://www.radiofreemaine.com/RFMChomsky.html

<li>The vertebrate bodies are poorly engineered, not a single wheel (or turbine for that matter) was used in its construction

<li> We make infinite use of finite means - we haven't figured out everything the brain can do, but do know everything that's in it

<li>Spoken languages all encode the same type of information - therefore as a child learns a language s/he is simply learning a way to express what he already knows. Currently languages will not be able to express anything but what we already know...this one requires a lot of thinking...

<li> Animals cannot be taught to communicate like humans - if they could evolution would not have kept such a valuable skill hidden. Too bad :-/

<li> Science only makes progress when we begin to questions things that we assumed to be "obvious". (Why did the apple fall ~~down~~?)

</ul>

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