In science what do you call something you know is wrong because its against all common sense but you cant prove it

My guess was that this quote was misattributed to him

He's talking about universal grammar you guys.

>n science what do you call something you know is wrong because its against all common sense but you cant prove it

A preconceived idea.

'Shit Chomsky Says'

The only thing that could falsify the hypothesis would be meeting some aliens speaking a language that doesn't fit anything in the formal grammar hierarchy, though. I mean, that's provided we do recognize such aliens as living beings, and the stuff they create as a "language".

That otherwise disappointing movie, "Arrival," did have an interesting way the aliens expressed language, at least.

>otherwise disappointing
Do you know if the book is any better? I didn't read anything else from the author, either. The only interesting books about aliens with strange languages that come to my mind immediately would be Lem's "His master's voice" and maybe Watt's "Blindsight" (though both are a bit of a stretch, but I guess it's not really possible for a human to write about a truly inhuman language in a book meant for humans).

IMHO there is no such thing as "language" in the formal grammatical sense, and what is really happening is children and humans generally learn by imitation and punishment and reward. No one "understands" things initially they just imitate based on what leads to rewards and what does not, what feels good and what does not. Only after the imitation to people begin to form sentences and do what looks like grammatical language, and even then most of that is still imitation, i.e. recognizing identities and equivalences which you could call "high level" or abstract imitation.

>you know is wrong because its against all common sense but you cant prove it
Like relativity or quantum mechanics?

>Do you know if the book is any better?

I will confess to not even knowing there WAS a book. Just watched the movie trying to kill time on a 16-hours-in -planes travel day last week.

>t. first year undergrad
get the fuck out of here bitch boy

>I will confess to not even knowing there WAS a book.
The book was "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. I didn't either read it or watch "Arrival", though.

...

I don't know of a technical term but I know the feeling. You can see that an idea or outcome is illogical but you can't isolate exactly where the problem is, only that one exists. It just means you can not yet articulate the flaw in the underlying logic. All it requires is further thinking in order to straighten out the matter enough in your head before you can verbally explain to others why it is wrong. A lot of people seem to misinterpret the inability to articulate an idea in the moment as a fault in logic, which is not necessarily the case.

Which has been displayed to be false by several natural languages contradicting it and no evidence supporting it at all.

There are many models for UG, you just haven't looked into the literature. I don't see in what way it's been shown to be false. UG is simply the claim that humans come pre-programmed with the capacity to learn languages. That should be uncontroversial.

Noam Chomsky is a linguist, not an economist. He should stop speaking about politics as though his opinions have any validity. Fucking hippie bullshit.

You clearly didn't understand the quote. What he's saying is, every language today, with its logic and structure, were made according to our brain limitations, therefor every baby has the potential to learn every language.

If you take something extremely artificial and complex, let's say Ithkuil, then maybe the children would have a hard time learning it.

Chomsky arrived at the inevitable conclusion that the Human Spirit is immanent through decades of Dialectic reverse-engineering.

UG is a stronger claim than that. It purports that languages all share the same low-level architecture, which is innately built into brains.

Well, it's a very strong claim, but it's not hard to believe, it's a very interesting theory.

lol, this is not a real quote, it's supposed to be a blatant misunderstanding of Chomsky's ideas. This is a common way to misunderstand Chomsky. In fact he doesn't claim that children are pre-programmed for any PARTICULAR language, just that humans are biologically predisposed to acquire SOME language, and that really only certain languages are possible. For instance it's impossible to have a language in which you negate a sentence by doing something to the third word of the sentence.

It's a fake quote from like a year ago.

Bias.

Yes, it is very interesting, I agree.

not really. the language that got attention in the press was piraha, but the language really doesn't bear on UG. as far as anyone can tell, piraha still conforms to UG principles.

>actually thinking my friend would utter such nonsense