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Remarks

The title of this essay comes from Stephen Pinker. In fact, the essay was stimulated by his book [Pin94]. While he expresses the opinion that the mind has many built-in characteristics and favors the idea of a language of thought, he elaborates neither idea. His chapter on language learning is exclusively devoted to learning grammar. I decided to see what I could do with a language of thought, and this led to other considerations.

This isn't the best of all possible worlds.



John McCarthy
2008-09-18