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Psychologist Steven Pinker has summarized the five key ideas from the cognitive revolution in his book the Blank Slate.

1.     "The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback."

Cognitive revolution filled the gap long between the physical world and the world of ideas, concepts, meanings and intentions. It unified the two worlds with a powerful new theory that mental life can be explained in terms of information, computation and feedback. Therefore, reasoning, intelligence, imagination, and creativity are forms of information processing, a well-understood physical process. “Cognitive science, with the help of the computational theory of mind, has exorcised at least one ghost from the machine.”

2.     "The mind cannot be a blank slate because blank slates don't do anything."

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) has argued against the idea of the blank slate. He believed that there must be something innate that was not repeating the exact words but inferring the contents of sentences. Pinker points out that modern cognitive scientists don’t believe “the blank slate”. Though they have disputes on the nature-nurture diffusion, they all believe that learning is based on something innate to humans. Without this innateness, there will be no learning process. The debate on the nature-nurture diffusion, in Pinker’s words, “are all over the details”.

3.     "An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind."

Human’s acts are non-exhausted, yet the basic biological functions are finite. The best example can be those from linguistics. Human can produce infinite sentences, most of which are brand new to the speaker themselves, even though the words and phrases are not infinite.

4.     "Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures."

The best example also comes from linguistics. Humans speak around six thousand mutually unintelligible languages. Nonetheless, the grammatical programs in their minds differ far less than the actual speech. Many different languages can be used to convey the same concepts or ideas, which suggests there may be a common ground for all the languages. Chomsky then proposed the concept of Universal Grammar to account for this phenomenon.

5.     "The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts."

The mind is modular, with many parts cooperating to generate a train of thought or an organized action. It has different distinct systems for different specific mission. In cognitive scientists’ view, “mind is a system of universal, generative computational modules obliterates the way that debates on human nature have been framed for centuries”. Behaviors can vary across cultures, but the mental programs that generate the behaviors don’t need to be various.

As one of the most well-known scholars supporting cognitive revolution, Noam Chomsky has redefined linguistics single-handedly (Miller, 2003). Some scholars have regarded his rebuttal to Skinner's behaviorism in 1959 as the starting point of the whole cognitive revolution.

The key linguistic concepts Chomsky has proposed:


 * 1) Language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species.
 * 2) Mental state is important in studying the learning process of human and thus it should be studied the same way as people study other scientific subjects.
 * 3) Universal Grammar, a set of structural rules that are innate to all humans and independent from sensory experience.  Main article: Universal grammar

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