Word: linguists
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...there is dissent even within the "ultra-Darwinist" ranks. M.I.T. linguist Steven Pinker finds the ideas of memetics intriguing and occasionally even useful but doesn't quite believe it's a science. Nor does he accept the nest-of-memes view of consciousness. "To be honest, I don't even know what that means," admits Pinker. The problem, he says, is that memetics assumes the brain is essentially passive, like a Petri dish awaiting infection. It doesn't account for the self that responds subjectively, that feels sensations such as love, envy and pain. "Babies are conscious," he points...
...neuroscientists, distinguish us from other animals. Evolution is a story, a beauty. We're stories as individuals; our DNA writes the plot, sometimes the theme. It is thought that children acquire language to tell the story that is already in them. Only a few weeks ago, the pure-science linguist Noam Chomsky, in another change of mind, said he now thinks a divine power gave us language in a single, inspired stroke...
Jack Aubrey is a fighting captain, brave and beefy, unsubtle except in naval matters and mathematics. Stephen Maturin, Irish and Catalan, sallow and scrawny, is a gifted surgeon who can whip off a shattered arm or leg and Bob's your uncle; he is also a naturalist, a rare linguist, and a shrewd intelligence agent for the British Admiralty...
...situation from dreams based on what words she hears. If they are too loaded with meaning, they probably belong to Efram and are thus not dreamt. Her awareness of the arbitrary nature of meaning seems more the state of mind of a language philosopher or an applied linguist (i.e. of a post-deconstruction academic) rather than a young adolescent. The issues that haunt Pella are the stuff of very recent debate and need to seep through a whole super-structure for a teenager to unknowingly apply them in her everyday life-even if she is "mature...
Their ranks include linguist Bert R. Vaux, who sometimes illustrates his lectures with examples culled from the previous night's sitcoms, John R. Stilgoe, Orchard professor of the history of landscape development, who gives an entire lecture on Coca-Cola advertisements, and History and Literature instructor Stuart M. Semmel, whose class includes British pop music from the decades after World...