I don't think anyone can hold it against me for not really understanding it that well.

After all, it was a full 15 years ago. So much has happened since then, and memories can fade.

Perhaps it's time for another try. Maybe with a fresh perspective and more life experience under my belt, I'll be able to make more sense of it.

I'm willing to give it a shot and see if I can gain a better understanding this time around.

Who knows, maybe it'll turn out to be something completely different than what I remembered.

It's always worth taking a second look at things, especially when they've been lingering in the back of your mind for so long.

So, here's to another try and hoping for a newfound understanding.

I need to create a folder named "Problems".

There are books that must be read again after reading the related books in order to be understood!

This folder will serve as a repository for those books that pose challenges or require a deeper level of comprehension.

By re-reading these books, we can gain a better understanding of the concepts and ideas presented within them.

It is important to note that not all books will need to be placed in this folder.

Only those that we find difficult to understand or that require further study should be included.

This way, we can focus our efforts on the books that will have the greatest impact on our learning and growth.

So, let's start creating this folder and filling it with the books that will help us overcome our challenges and expand our knowledge.

Maybe Another Try When I'm 30

Life is full of uncertainties and opportunities. At times, we may face setbacks and disappointments that make us question our abilities and decisions. However, it's important to remember that failure is not the end, but rather a stepping stone to success.

For me, I've had my fair share of challenges and obstacles. There have been times when I've wanted to give up and throw in the towel. But deep down, I know that I have the potential to achieve great things. That's why I've decided to maybe give it another try when I'm 30.

By the time I reach 30, I hope to have gained more experience, wisdom, and confidence. I want to use this time to reflect on my past mistakes and learn from them. I also plan to set clear goals and develop a strategic plan to achieve them.

Maybe another try when I'm 30 will be the breakthrough I've been waiting for. It could be the start of a new chapter in my life, filled with possibilities and excitement. So, I'm going to stay positive, work hard, and believe in myself. Because I know that anything is possible if I'm willing to take the risk and give it my all.

I am a die-hard fan, and as such, my comments are bound to be 100% subjective.

Being a fan means that my perspective is colored by my love and enthusiasm for the subject matter. I see things through rose-tinted glasses, always looking for the best in everything related to what I am a fan of.

This subjectivity can sometimes lead to biases in my opinions. I may overlook flaws or shortcomings that others might easily notice. However, it also gives me a unique and passionate view that can add depth and excitement to my discussions and evaluations.

Despite the subjectivity, I believe that my comments still hold value. They represent my genuine feelings and experiences as a fan, and they can offer a different perspective that others may find interesting or thought-provoking.

In the end, being a fan is about more than just having objective opinions. It's about expressing our love and appreciation for the things that bring us joy and inspiration. And that's something that I will always do, no matter how subjective my comments may be.

Noam Chomsky is a name that often reverberates in college conversations, especially those that turn a bit rowdy after a few drinks. Mentioning his political activism or linguistic theories seems almost mandatory when trying to showcase one's intellectual breadth. I, too, have been guilty of engaging in such semi-inebriated discussions about Chomskyan linguistics without really understanding it. But now, at least I have a basic idea. So, as a gesture of good will, I've written this short summary, which might come in handy during your next heady wine-fueled chat.

Before delving into the meat of his theories, let's first take a look at the style and format of this book. Chomsky is a capable writer. He is direct, clear, and avoids using unnecessary jargon. He embodies the best qualities of academic writing, always careful to qualify his arguments, thoroughly explain his points, and acknowledge and refute his opponents.

As he mentions in the introduction, there is quite a bit of overlap in content between the six pieces in this book (three lectures and three essays). Normally, this redundancy would be annoying, but I found myself grateful for it. Understanding Chomsky's ideas without a linguistic background was no easy task. In any case, since this book (or at least most of it) wasn't intended for specialists, it can, with a little effort, be understood by a layperson. Combined with its short length, it makes for a nice primer to his work.

Chomsky begins by situating himself within a particular historical tradition - rationalism. One could, with some justice, call him a Platonist, a Cartesian, a Leibnizian, or a Kantian. This is in contrast to empiricists like Locke and Hume. At the time when Chomsky started his linguistic work, the dominant paradigm in psychology was behaviorism. Behaviorism attempts to explain animal behavior by proposing a system of associated stimuli and responses. Pavlov's drooling dogs are the most frequently cited example of this line of thinking.

At first, behaviorism seemed very promising. It was elegantly simple and appeared that any animal could be conditioned to do anything with enough training. It had the advantage of bringing together a variety of different phenomena under the same explanatory umbrella and was amenable to experimental verification. In 1957, B.F. Skinner published his controversial Verbal Behavior, which attempted to explain language within this paradigm. Chomsky, in turn, wrote an enormously influential review of Skinner's book, criticizing the argument and, by implication, casting doubt on the whole behaviorist project.

So, what is Chomsky's argument? And why does he call his thinking rationalist and Skinner's empiricist? Simply put, rationalist accounts of knowledge argue that certain ideas cannot be derived from sense perception or experience and must instead be derived from reason, which is an innate faculty. Empiricism, on the other hand, argues that there are no innate ideas or principles and that sensory perception and experience are sufficient to account for all knowledge.

From this short definition, one can see the connection between behaviorism, which explains knowledge as a set of ingrained habits related to regularly occurring stimuli, and John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he says: "Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience: in that, all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself."

Chomsky has some major problems with this line of thinking. Put simply: how can a human child acquire mastery of the enormously complex symbolic medium we call language with such little exposure to it? If all knowledge is derived from experience, then this shouldn't be possible. Therefore, Chomsky argues, the ability to learn language must be innate.

At first, this argument might seem a little silly. Nobody thinks that the ability to program computers or play chess is innate. We clearly aren't born being able to do so, nor are we born with the ability to speak. Furthermore, a child learns whatever language is spoken around them; a Japanese child in France will learn French. Children gradually accumulate words and put them together into simple sentences, just like aspiring guitarists learn chords, melodies, and riffs. Why posit an innate faculty for language when we don't for guitar playing?

Well, language is a very special activity. For one thing, every normal adult is able to speak a language fluently. Some people are naturally good at computer programming; others are naturally good at chess, but linguistic competence is universal among psychologically healthy humans. Furthermore, language is special in that it makes infinite use of finite resources. There is no limit to the number of sentences that can be spoken in any given language, even though there is a finite number of words and grammatical tenses. Language is also intrinsically creative; we don't simply say a particular sentence when we hear a bell, like Pavlov's dogs, but come up with a sentence to suit the particular situation.

Explaining language as simply a set of ingrained habits clearly won't work, since habits don't have any of these qualities (creativity, infinite potential for variation, universality). So, considering that the potential linguistic output of a given person far exceeds the linguistic "input" (all the utterances that the given person has ever heard), it is logical to posit some innate mechanism that facilitates the learning of language. Now the question is, what is the nature of this mechanism?

This is where this review necessarily becomes a bit vague, as Chomsky's explanation is fairly technical and beyond my understanding. But I'll do my best. Chomsky starts with his famous notion of universal grammar. It's important to note that he isn't arguing that English, Chinese, Norwegian, and Swahili can be boiled down to the same grammar. Rather, universal grammar is a set of conditions that a potential grammar must meet in order to qualify as a human language. Several particular grammars may meet these conditions.

These conditions play a crucial role in language acquisition. As Chomsky explains, these rules greatly reduce the number of admissible grammatical hypotheses that a learner must posit (unconsciously, of course) to account for the linguistic data they are exposed to. Put more concretely, when a young girl is hearing her mother speak English, she doesn't have to go through every logical possibility that might account for the data; in other words, she doesn't need to exhaust every potential hypothesis. Instead, she must simply choose from the various grammars that are permitted by the conditions imposed by universal grammar.

Chomsky points out that universal grammar must be fairly restrictive, as the linguistic data presented to a child is usually "degenerate" (to use his word). Everyday speech is fragmentary, jagged, full of starts and stops, vague, and sometimes even ungrammatical. Yet, from this scanty and inconsistent information, the child assembles the marvelously complex system of communication we know as English. Mere induction is far too weak to make the jump from the data to the grammar; there isn't enough time or information to account for every logical possibility. Remarkably, miraculously, we all come to the same conclusion - English grammar, in this case - from different information - whatever sentences happen to be spoken around us as infants.

Now, you may ask, is language really that tricky? Why do we need these innate principles? Isn't it just subject, verb, object? Nouns, verbs, and adjectives? That doesn't sound insurmountable. To this, Chomsky responds that our everyday notions of grammar cannot account for some basic qualities of language that normally go unnoticed. Consider these two sentences: (A) "I expected the doctor to examine John"; and (B) "I persuaded the doctor to examine John." Now, at first sight, these two sentences seem grammatically identical; the only difference is the verb. However, Chomsky points out that this surface-level similarity obscures a crucial difference at the deep level. This becomes apparent when we transform both A and B to make: (A1) "I expected John to be examined by the doctor"; and (B1) "I persuaded John to be examined by the doctor."

Now, notice that the meaning of A and A1 are identical, but when this same transformation is applied to B - supposedly grammatically identical to A - the meaning changes. Instead of the doctor being persuaded, it's John. This is a subtle point that took me several attempts to understand, but the implication is this: Since every language-speaker instinctively knows that there are different operations necessary to turn A and B from the active to the passive voice, they must understand the grammatical relationship of both sentences on a deeper level than just their surface form. If they only understood the surface-level grammar, they would make the mistake of turning B into B1, which changes the meaning of the sentence.

This leads Chomsky to divide grammar into surface and deep levels. The deep structure must express the exact relationships between the meanings of the words; then, some transformational rules must apply to convert this deep-level meaning into the surface-level grammar of everyday speech. These transformational rules can derive different surface-level manifestations of the same deep-level forms - such as A and A1. (Note that the deep structure is an entirely different concept from universal grammar. The deep-level grammar is a logical relationship between ideas, while universal grammar is a set of properties that any grammar must have in order to be an allowable grammar.)

Because Chomsky believes that this deep structure must exist in order to account for some basic properties of grammar (such as the above example), learning a language is not as simple as we might think. Acquiring competency is not just a matter of dividing words into verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc., but requires a grasp of these more abstract and intricate deep-level structures. These deep-level structures are, in turn, obscured by the transformational rules that convert them into surface-level grammar (as in the case of the apparently identical forms of A and B), which would make the task of apprehending the deep-level structures via induction and experience alone an impractical feat.

I'm quickly reaching the limit of my understanding of Chomsky's ideas. I'm certainly not qualified to pass judgment on the success or failure of his theories. However, I would like to say that it seems fairly obvious to me that there must be certain innate qualities of the brain that enable individuals to learn language. The universality of language-competency and the ease of acquisition from limited data make this conclusion inescapable for me. The only question is: what specific properties must we attribute to the mechanism that enables this learning? Is it Chomsky's hypothesis, or some other innate property?

I'm also sympathetic to Chomsky's rationalism. It seems to me that the best critique of the empiricist account of learning came from the empiricist tradition itself, in the form of David Hume's critiques of causality and induction. As Hume pointed out, even those two basic notions - without which nothing in daily life makes sense - cannot be derived from logic alone, nor from experience alone; the only explanation, as Kant later pointed out, is that the principles of causality and induction are innate (though Kant wouldn't phrase it like that).

But if we're willing to allow that the idea of causality and induction are innate, why stop there? It seems that there isn't any good reason not to continue positing innate principles that would allow humans to make sense of experience. Such an explanation would be compatible within a Darwinian framework and would also be compatible with what we know about the specialized regions of the brain.

But I'll stop speculating on matters I know nothing about. (Well, until I write another long-winded book review.) For now, I only hope that this little summary may help you in your next drunken intellectual conversation.

A Milestone in the Philosophy of Language!

The philosophy of language has witnessed a significant milestone. This development marks a crucial turning point in our understanding of how language functions and its profound implications. It has opened up new avenues of exploration and research, challenging existing theories and conceptions.

This milestone has not only deepened our knowledge of the nature of language but also has far-reaching consequences for various other fields such as linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. It has forced scholars to reevaluate their assumptions and approach the study of language from different perspectives.

Moreover, this milestone has sparked intense debates and discussions among philosophers, linguists, and other scholars. It has led to the emergence of new schools of thought and the refinement of existing ones. The implications of this milestone are likely to be felt for years to come, as we continue to grapple with the complex and fascinating nature of language.

In conclusion, this milestone in the philosophy of language is a remarkable achievement that has the potential to transform our understanding of language and its role in human cognition and communication.

There are an infinite number of questions that could potentially prompt one to embark on a study of language. From a personal perspective, I am chiefly fascinated by the prospect of gleaning knowledge from the study of language that will reveal the intrinsic characteristics of the human mind. Language is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that has intrigued scholars and thinkers throughout history. By delving into its various aspects, such as grammar, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, we can gain valuable insights into how the human mind processes and represents information. The study of language can also shed light on the ways in which we communicate with one another, and how our cultural and social backgrounds influence our use of language. In short, the study of language has the potential to unlock many of the mysteries of the human mind.

The book delves deeply into the development of language philosophy.

It endeavors to seek an answer to the fundamental questions of what the nature of language learning truly is and what specific processes occur within the learner's mind.

By exploring these aspects, the book aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of how language is acquired and how the mind functions during the learning process.

It examines various theories and perspectives, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses.

This exploration not only helps us to better understand the nature of language learning but also has implications for educational practices and the development of language teaching methods.

The book serves as a valuable resource for scholars, researchers, and educators interested in the field of language philosophy and language learning.

Language is one of the most creative aspects of human life. It allows us to express our thoughts, feelings, and ideas, and to communicate with others. But how does it work? And how do we learn it? Linguists have reached some interesting results, but no one yet knows the final answer.

Language acquisition is a complex process that begins in infancy and continues throughout our lives. Children learn language by listening to the speech of those around them, and by imitating what they hear. As they grow older, they begin to understand the rules of grammar and syntax, and to use language more effectively.

However, learning a language is not just about memorizing words and rules. It also involves understanding the culture and context in which the language is used. This is why language learning is often more difficult for adults than for children, as adults have already developed their own cultural and cognitive frameworks.

In conclusion, language is a fascinating and mysterious aspect of human life. While we have made significant progress in understanding how it works and how we learn it, there is still much that we do not know. Further research is needed to揭开 the secrets of language and to improve our ability to communicate with others.

Chomsky's compilation consists of seven chapters, which provides a comprehensive exploration of his views on language.

Each chapter delves into recurring themes, yet the material can be rather dense and difficult to understand.

Although there is consistency in many of his theories and viewpoints, there are significant methodological drawbacks that prevent it from being classified as a purely scientific work.

For example, some of his arguments lack sufficient empirical evidence to support them.

Moreover, the way he presents his ideas can be complex and convoluted, making it hard for readers to follow.

Despite these limitations, Chomsky's work has had a profound impact on the field of linguistics and continues to be widely studied and debated.

His ideas have inspired countless researchers to explore new areas of language study and have contributed to a greater understanding of the nature of language.

I gave the assignment. I didn't get my grade. Because I didn't understand, I didn't write my assignment...

My heart wants to tear it up and set it on fire...

#Angry

Expanded version:

I handed in the assignment dutifully. However, I still haven't received my grade. The reason is that I simply didn't understand the requirements, so I couldn't complete my assignment properly.

Now, my heart is filled with frustration and anger. It feels like it wants to tear the assignment into pieces and set it ablaze.

I'm so angry that I don't know what to do. I hope that the teacher will understand my situation and give me a fair grade. But for now, all I can do is try to calm down and figure out how to improve my understanding and performance in the future. #Angry

The article seems to be in Arabic and I'm not sure what it exactly means. However, I can rewrite and expand the given text in a general way.

The volume was huge and so elaborate!

It was really bad.

Let's expand it further: The volume was truly enormous and extremely elaborate. It was filled with intricate details and seemed to be a masterpiece of some sort. However, upon closer inspection, it was discovered that it was really bad. The quality was poor, the design was flawed, and it just didn't meet the expectations. It was a disappointment considering how grand it initially appeared. Maybe with some improvements and modifications, it could have been something great, but as it stood, it was just a letdown.