It's kind of ridiculous that Chomsky is #1. You can't deny it was influential. Chomsky singlehandedly split the linguistics field into two camps, and it's taken the better half of the century to put his ideas to rest.
He basically argued that all languages are governed by the same set of rules, that such rules were innate, and that languages could thus be parsed into trees. The problem arises that a lot of primitive languages don't even seem to support the notion of recursion, let alone something that parses to a syntax tree. And the statistical NLP folks have a major bone to pick with such ideas, because real language apparently isn't so clean.
What seems more plausible is that more advanced societies developed rules of logic that they then imposed on their communication, hence the property that well-written English ought to be pars-able to a syntax tree. But even then you have ambiguities in how the tree is structured.
The flip side is that Chomsky's framework hasn't been useless to science. You can do some interesting things if you can parse a piece of text's syntax tree with halfway decent accuracy. One example would be idiom-finding. If a word seems misplaced, or used out of its usual context (e.g. "kicked the bucket"), then it is likely an idiom. One could simply do an analysis using the frequencies of the words as they appear next to each other, but applying a filter on only those phrases that are likely to be idioms improves your results by quite a bit.
Did you just say Noam Chomsky is just a really good troll? He does seem fond of meeting his critics as having "virtually no comprehension of the work they are discussing", being "technically correct, but completely irrelevant", etc.
chomsky adulation within the academic community is a huge pet peeve of mine. the man is a hypocrite. he makes wide ranging commentary on fields he has no background in.
Ditto regarding the pet peeve, but I just don't like his attitude - I've repeatedly seen him be combative in completely unnecessary ways. Also, he uses complicated words when simple ones would do.
The idea that any language lacks recursion is firstly very poorly supported — the only person who actually thinks this is true and demonstrated by any real language is Daniel Everett who thinks Pirahã lacks recursion, but there's a wealth of argumentation over whether this is true or not (for starters see Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues's "Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment" for a good discussion on this). Secondly, it's not crucial to any contemporary, wide-spread notions of Universal Grammar that languages have recursion in their structure — the theory of Syntactic Structures does not suppose, or even depend upon, expressions having recursive tree structures, it merely hypothesizes that the grammatical processes of a language can only employ structural relationships (and syntactic types) to determine when they can or cannot apply, but this idea has long since fallen into the dustbin of history as ever more non-structural phenomena (features, binding, etc.) became relevant to the grammatical theory.
Second, there has yet to be a demonstration from any known language that the language actually does not have an underlying tree structure to it — even the most free word-order languages such as Warlpiri display evidence of tree structure. NLP people may have a major bone to pick with core Chomskyan theory because of the incredibly difficult in parsing using it, but Chomskyan linguistics isn't about designing computationally efficient means of parsing sentences, it's about developing a good scientific theory about the nature of the constraints on human grammars. And I say core Chomskyan theory above because NLP people actually love various less core Chomskyan theory (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, for instance, which has plenty of work done on it in the parsing world; or Combinatory Categorial Grammar which has been looked at quite a lot in the computational literature). The fact that NLP people prefer other methods such as dependency grammars doesn't say anything about the theoretical framework Chomsky introduced any more than their preference for numerical methods of differentiation and integration in mathematics bears on the theoretical importance or validity of precise symbolic differentiation and integration. Or to rephrase that more concisely — just because your computer isn't powerful enough to calculate these equations doesn't make the equations wrong.
I don't know whether or not Chomsky should be #1 on this list, but I do know that you have no clue what you're talking about with regards to contemporary linguistic theory.
Sadly, of the top 10, only 1 has a link to the text. And the link doesn't work. And a basic search for the title of the article doesn't work on the website (though it is hosted there, by that identical title. And an advanced search-by-title finds it).
It also seems to imply that most of the judges haven't read everything, even the top 10, as there are so few comments on the works, and few have usefully descriptive nominator's comments. Basically, if you haven't read the works, you don't really know why they're influential.
Some nominator statements include:
URLs to the content, with no description.
"This one is a must!"
"An important book, but certainly not what launched cognitive psychology! At best, it helped baptize it with a name."
"For more information on Brunswik and current work in the Brunswikian tradition...".
Gee, thanks for those eloquent descriptions of why you nominated that particular item.
Oh, the list is pretty good, I've read/recognized a lot of the pieces in it and they're mostly all extremely useful reads. I'm just annoyed by the exceptionally poor job done by the organizer(s), nominators, and judges in encouraging people to use their list.
It strikes me as something that was never intended for outsiders to see / use, in which case what's the point of its existence? Stroking their own egos because they can make a list, and feel important that they've read some / all of them?
Wow - nice list. Many/ most I do not know. If I were in school today I would look for a cognitive science program. It seems like a rich field.
- and your question:
>Do you have any better recommendations? I'm interested in cognitive science, possibly a PhD.
I know you are specifically asking about recommendations of books - and I might be tempted to add works by Teodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch to get some of the more 'Hegelian' approaches to history and consciousness.
Adorno's "Aesthetics" and "the Dialectic of the Enlightenment"
Walter Benjamin's general essays and the "Arcades Project" (a genesis of the idea of the hyperlink)
Bloch's "The Spirit of Utopia"
But is also makes me think about a built-in danger - the implicit warning in this post:
would apply to a field like CogSci to some extent.
Looking back on my college and gradschool years I grazed in different areas: Biology, Comparative Lit, Political Theory and played around with the Apple computers in the little used Rutgers computer lab... But I didnt have the 'wherewithall' to knit these different interests into a curriculum. I had a friend who finished majors in BioChem, English Lit and Art (Sculpting).
In my case I followed my interests in a hermetic way - cognitive science would have been a good platform to do it differently.
The problem with a cross-disciplinary program can be that you come out as a dilettante - able to have good conversation s in a few areas but no depth. I made it through graduate level classes based on difficult and interesting works of literature, philosophy, literary/political theory and math. But in my 40s I realize I know little of depth. And I don't mean this in the Socratic 'i know that I know nothing' way. I am really not an expert in anything at a time in my career where I should be. I am a generalist. A mid-level Linux SysAdmin. Which is by no means the end of the world. But there is a lot unexpressed, a lot undone and if you do not develop the tools to do this when you are young - it is only harder later.
There is a Nietzsche quote that has always haunted me. The opening lines of "On the Use/Misuse of History"
"We do need history, but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge, however grandly they may look down on our rude and unpicturesque requirements...we need it for life and action, not a convenient way to avoid life and action, or to excuse a selfish life and a cowardly or base activity. We should serve history only so far as it serves life."
Alot of stuff from Nietzsche feels like it was written 'Just For You' but that is how it has been for me. A jaded idler in the garden of knowledge. Eternal student - still catching up on novels bought a decade ago.
Even in computer science - I can really enjoy reading the classics - Kernighan and Ritchie, Knuth, Stevenson, Eric Raymond, etc. But I am not sure if I have ever applied stuff that I have learned to work.
As Nietsche says - "...we need it for life and action, not a convenient way to avoid life and action".
What is the point of reading a book on Lisp if I am likely to never use it? I don't know. I am continually drawn to topics like this but it is all mental activity and no action.
A dilettante.
Which is not to say that many prosper in these programs. People get PhDs in comp lit or anthropology and work in advertising firms.
What drew me to Hacker News is the figure of Paul Graham - his essays and the synthesis of Ars and Techne are teh way it should be...
But the falloff is steep. Be relevant. Or content in a life of 'jaded idling'.
Why would cognitive science or even behavioral economics would replace mainstream economics at all?
At best, behavioral and cognitive economics would complement it, rather than replace it. Incentives, marginal utility, and scarcity and other concepts would still exists.
Quantitative finance? That doesn't deal with economic. It is just counting money.
He basically argued that all languages are governed by the same set of rules, that such rules were innate, and that languages could thus be parsed into trees. The problem arises that a lot of primitive languages don't even seem to support the notion of recursion, let alone something that parses to a syntax tree. And the statistical NLP folks have a major bone to pick with such ideas, because real language apparently isn't so clean.
What seems more plausible is that more advanced societies developed rules of logic that they then imposed on their communication, hence the property that well-written English ought to be pars-able to a syntax tree. But even then you have ambiguities in how the tree is structured.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity
The flip side is that Chomsky's framework hasn't been useless to science. You can do some interesting things if you can parse a piece of text's syntax tree with halfway decent accuracy. One example would be idiom-finding. If a word seems misplaced, or used out of its usual context (e.g. "kicked the bucket"), then it is likely an idiom. One could simply do an analysis using the frequencies of the words as they appear next to each other, but applying a filter on only those phrases that are likely to be idioms improves your results by quite a bit.