"The most interesting thing about the human species is our plasticity, our flexibility. (…) Over the past 10 years we have started to see powerful evidence that children might learn language statistically, by unconsciously tabulating patterns in the sentences they hear and using these to generalise to new cases. Children might learn language effortlessly not because they possess innate grammatical rules, but because statistical learning is something we all do incessantly and automatically. The brain is designed to pick up on patterns of all kinds. (...) You only have to stroll down the street to see that human beings are learning machines. (...) if you compare us with other species, our degree of variation is just so extraordinary and so obvious that we know prior to doing any science that human beings are special in this regard, and that a tremendous amount of what we do is as a result of learning. So empiricism should be the default position. The rest is just working out the details of how all this learning takes place. (...)" - Amira

"Philosophy tells us what is possible, and science tells us what is true. Cognitive science has transformed philosophy. At the beginning of the 20th century, philosophers changed their methodology quite dramatically by adopting logic. There has been an equally important revolution in 21st-century philosophy in that philosophers are turning to the empirical sciences and to some extent conducting experimental work themselves to settle old questions. As a philosopher, I hardly go a week without conducting an experiment. My whole working day has changed because of the infusion of science.” - Amira