Language and mind

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1. max_Jan 2024
   The best books I would recommend are;

   — The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos

   — The Book of Why by Judea Pearl

   — What Computers Still Can't Do by Hubert L. Dreyfus

   — Society of Mind & The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky

   — The Feeling Of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

   — Language & Mind by Noam Chomsky

   — A great mooc is also, the "Learning From Data" Telecourse from Caltech https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse

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2. gfodyDec 2017
   this is a great list. I would add Hofstadter's Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking and Chomsky's New horizons in the study of language and mind. they show that language structures are fundamental to consciousness.
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3. dtornabeneSep 2016
   Some of the latter work. He had a book called New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, which is fairly accesible and also covers some historical work, including the necessary underpinning of "where did language come from". His work itself isn't as interested in the way languages evolve. That would ironically fall a bit more under the some of the paradigm he replaced. So Bloomfields book on language was in that tradition and an example of the type of scholarly work that contributes to langauge change over time. De Saussere (I believe, been over a decade since I studied this) did work on synchrony vs diachrony. There are actual journals as well at any decent university library or (sizable) city library that would allow you to dip your toe in to working scholarship and get a sense of how historical linguistics works, if thats what you're interested in.
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4. bborSep 2024
   You’re asking the right questions, IMO! Chomsky has spent his life trying to answer this question in different forms, and has ultimately arrived to the conclusion that we live in a “Pre-Gallilean” era of cognitive science, where the only answers available to us are developed through the use of intuitive interpretation (like they used to do with ‘the heavens’/space) instead of empirical contradiction (aka science).

   He does have some answers, such as “human creativity is the ability to create an infinite range of outputs from a finite range of inputs that nonetheless pertain to our motivations/context in some useful way”, but that’s obviously not a very satisfying answer. It tells us a little — I think Tao is gesturing to exactly this when he complains that GPTo1 can only apply and combine mathematical approaches within a sort of closed domain rather than propose radically new ones - but it’s not helpful for an everyday understanding of creativity. IMO :)

   In his words, from Language and Mind:

     "Roughly, where we deal with cognitive structures, either in a mature state of knowledge and belief or in the initial state, we face problems, but not mysteries. When we ask how humans make use of these cognitive structures, how and why they make choices and behave as they do, although there is much that we can say as human beings with intuition and insight, there is little, I believe, that we can say as scientists… 
     What I have called elsewhere 'the creative aspect of language use' remains as much a mystery to us as it was to the Cartesians who discussed it, in part, in the context of the problem of 'other minds."
   

   If this sounds intriguing to you/anyone, I highly recommend his (in)famous debate with Foucault, which is available for free on YouTube. It’s a bit wandering, but about halfway through they discuss creativity in depth, contrasting Foucault’s vaguely postmodern view-that human creativity is mostly constrained by societal circumstances-with Chomsky’s view, that human creativity is mostly constrained by the natural structures of our cognitive system(s).

   https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?si=WA3DpnaFEvd3QqCt

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5. ehudlaJul 2016
   One of my favorite anti-Chomsky quotes comes from the man himself. It represents a lot of what I find at fault with his approach:

   I emphasized biological facts, and I didn't say anything about historical or social facts. And I am going to say nothing about these elements in language acquisition. The reason is that I think they are relatively unimportant. -- Chomsky, N. (1998), Language and Mind: Current Thoughts and Ancient Problems

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