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Scientific Papers: Innovation or Imitation?

Reactions to pioneering scientific publications often focus only on the small details of the discovery. We would do better by looking at the bigger picture.

Had its signficance been fully grasped, this paper might have, at least notionally, formed a unifying conceptual bridge between the two nascent schools of connectionism and symbolic AI (one can at least hope). This paper was important not just for the specific result, but for the breakthrough in methodology using rigorous experimental noninvasive methods to discover how human thinking works—a topic we know so little about, even today. The assertions about language structure being shaped by the human mental processing faculty is just an empty truism, unless supported by some amount of scientific rigor and free of the common fallacies of statistical reasoning.

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