Santa Fe Institute

Bio

My long-range research goal is to scientifically understand cognition and intelligence.My own research has concentrated on human intelligence, because that is where intelligence seems to be most clearly manifested.Further, my research has concentrated on human language.It seems reasonable that of all the domains in which humans demonstrate their intelligence, language provides the richest and most direct reflection of that intelligence.I claim that human language is aconstruction of the human mind to a much greater degree than (say) vision or motor planning are.It's possible that any regularities we find in vision just reflect structure present in the scenes being observed (indeed, one would expect that a reliable perceptual system would not impose strong biases), but any structures we find in language – particularly formal structures – are imposed by the human mind.It seems extremely unlikely to me that the hierarchical structures that linguistics provides extremely strong evidence for are not pervasive throughout all of human cognition.