The Birth of the Mind by Gary Marcus

Author:Gary Marcus [Gary Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Figure 7.3 Three syntactic trees, illustrating recursive composition

If I had to bet on one thing that might have given rise to language, that talent for recursion would be it.¹⁰² (Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and the cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch recently argued for a similar position.¹⁰³) Recursion is a key to what allows languages to describe so many things in so many different ways. Picture how disorganized your computer files would be if you couldn’t make use of folders (or what die-hard Unix users refer to as “directories”). From the perspective of the programmer, folders (or “directory structures”) are just a special way of organizing information, but one that radically improves the user’s access to that information. The evolutionary addition of a new data structure for recursion—which is mathematically close to what programmers use to store folder structures—could be tiny from the genetic perspective, but profound in its consequences for communication and thought.

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