- Biological-computational state(describing what I-language fundamentally is)
- A physical state of the brain that works like a biological computer—it's made of neurons and biology, but functions by processing information like a machine.
- Chomsky
- # Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is an influential American linguist and political activist who revolutionized how we understand language by proposing that all humans are born with an innate ability to learn grammar. His ideas transformed linguistics from a descriptive study into a scientific field focused on the deep mental structures underlying how we speak and understand language. Beyond linguistics, he's also famous as a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy and media, making him one of the most cited scholars across both science and humanities.
- Fodor(as the originator of the multiple realizability argument)
- Jerry Fodor is a famous philosopher who argued that the same mental state (like pain) could exist in different physical forms—in humans with biological brains, but also theoretically in aliens with completely different biology.
- Heterogeneous(as used in the statement about diverse phenomena)
- Made up of many different kinds of things that don't all belong to the same category or type.
- I-language(Chomsky's preferred framework in generative linguistics)
- An internalist, mind-internal conception of language; the conception Chomsky regards as the only scientifically interesting notion of language
- Internalism / Internalist program(describing Chomsky's approach to understanding language)
- The idea that language ability comes from something inside the mind or brain, rather than being shaped entirely by the outside world or culture.
- Reduce / Reduction(explaining how different language phenomena can be unified)
- Showing that many different-looking things are actually all examples of the same underlying thing or principle.
- Representationalism(Philosophy of mind; color experience)
- The view that the phenomenal character of experience supervenes on (or is determined by) representational properties
- natural kind(Used to argue that schizophrenia fails to qualify because it is a heterogeneous conjunction of distinct pathologies, not a unified entity)
- A category that carves nature at its joints — a real, unified class of phenomena sharing a common underlying nature or pathology