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Life
He argued that children learn language too quickly and from too little evidence for it to be simple habit: proof, he said, of a hidden grammar built into every human brain.
I think, therefore I am. He doubted everything until he found one thing he could not doubt: the fact that he was doubting.
Connection
Descartes innate ideas revived as universal grammar Noam Chomsky — Chomsky explicitly framed his theory of an innate universal grammar as a revival of Cartesian rationalism, titling one of his books Cartesian Linguistics in open homage to Descartes's view that some knowledge is inborn rather than assembled from experience.
Ideas
Words
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
“It is quite possible... that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”
“I think, therefore I am.”
“It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”
Key Moments
1955
Begins six decades at MIT
1959
Publishes the review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior
1596 CE
Born in La Haye en Touraine
1619 CE
The Stove-Heated Room
1641 CE
Publishes Meditations on First Philosophy
1650 CE
Dies in Stockholm
Works
Syntactic Structures
Discourse on the Method
Meditations on First Philosophy