(no subject)

“A learning instinct, as he[Peter Marler] meant it, isn’t an indiscriminate disposition to learn anything; it is an evolved disposition to acquire a given type of knowledge, such as songs (for birds) or language (for humans). A learning instinct not only targets a specific learning goal, it also provides the instinctive learner with appropriate perceptual and inferential mechanisms to extract the right kind of knowledge from the right kind of evidence.”
...
“How do learning instincts take advantage of experience to produce mature cognitive mechanisms?”

Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”

(no subject)

Watch on YouTube