P 155 Quotes

“We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, a word boundary with no one to hear it has no sound. In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary. This becomes apparent when we listen to speech in a foreign language: it is impossible to tell where one word ends the next begins. The seamlessness of speech is also apparent in 'oro­nyms', strings of sound that can be carved into words in two different ways: The good can decay many ways / The good candy came anyways.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Assez bizarrement, donc, le meilleur argument en faveur de l'authenticité est le coût absolument inabordable de la fiction. Il semblerait donc que le spectre qui hante Navidson Record et ne cesse de se ruer contre la porte, soit tout simplement la menace récurrente de sa propre réalité.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Leonardo virtually announced the birth of the method of modern science when he said that true knowledge begins with opinion.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Nature