<p>It’s one thing to say that the mind is not amenable to certain methods of scientific analysis. To conclude that it “simply does not exist” is an unscientific leap. Just don’t go there. Without commiting yourself to the Chomsky Cult you can take his core arguments as a challenge.
([The</a> Case Against B.F. Skinner, by Noam Chomsky](<a href=“chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website”>chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website))
More at: [A</a> Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, by Noam Chomsky](<a href=“chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website”>chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website)
A grammar is testable. Attributing the grammar to structures in the brain is (as far as my little brain can figure) speculative and not testable.
Agree. Putting together a coherent, rigorous program requires discipline and good mentoring.
Agree. Give biology, chemistry, physics another chance especially if you have the opportunity to study with a gifted instructor.
Statistical Natural Language Processing can generate novel complex gibberish that occasionally resembles grammatical, meaningful language. Google has come up with a statistical machine translation system. If you feed some documents to a Google MT server farm and let it run for 2 weeks, now and then you will get 1 or 2 sentences in a row of really convincing output. It’s not like evolutionary biology, which has satisfying explanations for how randomness leads time and again to observable structures and behaviors. </p>
<p>Anyway, I don’t want to hijack a college counselling thread to debate issues we’re not going to resolve here. I think one take-away message (where siserune, cellardwellar and I seem to agree) is that you are treading into deep waters with a risk of being sucked into academic fads (yes, like the Chomsky Cult of the 60s and 70s). If you commit to getting a solid grounding in areas such as statistics, foreign language mastery, computing techniques, or phonetics, you should be safe. You can leave room in your courses for speculation and wonder but be sensitive to the boundaries between science and untestable conjectures.</p>