topics: |  language | logic | puzzle

p.123: reports on Patrick Suppes debating Chomsky.  Suppes argues that "there
is no analyzing language without the theory of probability...  relates to
theory of information - that information is tiself expressed through
probabilistic concepts.

Blurb: This book will not take the casual reader to the cutting edge of
research. Nor is it meant to. What I am after in Black Mischief is the moment
in which various lines in an intellectual field of force collect themselves
into a kind of dense knot....A number of otherwise sympathetic reviewers have
suggested that my real aim in Black Mischief was somehow to show the
persistence of certain outmoded Newtonian forms of thought in economics, or
psychology, or biology, or wherever. Not so. My intention has been to explore
a tangle of connected concepts.

    Black Mischief is the cogent and absorbing story, of an unusually fertile
period in contemporary, science. Irreverent, witty, skeptical, and always
informative, it is an anecdotal potpourri of scientific thought and the
people who shaped it. Berlinski takes a protean look at the science
establishment -- as well as the personalities behind the scenes -- in such
fields as behavioral psychology, linguistics, and economics, and in so doing
enlightens and entertains us beyond measure.