LING 110g Lecture 13: Class Notes 10%2F31
Document Summary
The principle of science, the definition, almost is the following: the test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth . The purpose of experiments is to test predictions. Guess (hypothesis formation)-compute (deducing predictions from hypotheses)- Main idea for this section of the course. Science can be done without numbers of any mathematical significance. Science can be done without an (incredibly) expensive device. You can have direct experience of this by being part of an experiment, learning how the experiment is designed, learning how to understand the experimental result, and by conducting a mini experiment yourself. The core property of the language faculty is to form thoughts by combining building clocks of thoughts by the operation merge (which iteratively forms a set of two members) If merge is the computational operation of the language faculty, we expect to be able to detect its effects in any i-language.
