Category: linguistics

Daniel Soar: IARPA interested in the use of George Lakoff’s metaphor theory

It’s here, hat tip to Andrew Sullivan. Money quote:

Then – the real test, in phase two of the project – the government will issue the teams with three separate ‘case studies’: tough questions that intelligence analysts might want the answers to. What sorts of question these are going to be is barely hinted at in the briefing documents, but the implication is that the metaphor repository may provide the clue to understanding the hidden aims of different factions where some dispute is involved. What would it tell us if it turned out that encoded in the very language of the Iranian people is the concept that LIFE IS A BLAST?

Stanislas Dehaene’s new book on Reading

In today’s NY Times Book Review, Alllison Gopnik review’s a new book on reading by Stanislas Dehaene here.

It really comes down in the end to Noam Chomsky’s linguistical theories as they are played out on the modern neuroscience stage.
Money quote:

However, the other, more significant, kind of innateness concerns not the history of the mind but its future. Chomsky also argued that innate structure places very strong constraints on the human mind. Evolutionary psychologists who echo Chomsky say we are stuck with the same brains as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, with just a little tinkering around the edges.

Many social scientists reject this second claim. A new generation of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are starting to reject it, too. In the past few years, computer scientists have developed new machine learning techniques that allow computers to make genuinely new discoveries, and cognitive scientists have begun to discover that even young children’s minds learn in much the same way. At the same time, neuroscientists have discovered that the brain is much more plastic — more influenced by experience — than we used to think.