This plasticity, contrary to our everyday intuitions, cannot itself have been acquired on the basis of learning processes. For all learning necessarily presupposes the internal availability of suitable predefined concepts. Plato and many after him pointed out this simple conceptual-logical fact: "It is impossible for a person to seek what he does not know, for he then does not know what to seek either." (Plato, Meno, 80e). In cognitive science, therefore, learning and memory cannot be viewed as explanations for psychological phenomena; rather, they themselves represent phenomena that must be explained on the basis of deeper principles. Cognitive science experiments and related theoretical analyses show that the capacity for plasticity and learning itself is based on the biological availability of predefined conceptual forms whose specific structures are not already rigidly formed, but rather possess complex, free parameters that must first be filled through experience. Traditional ideas referred to as the "empiricist theory of mind," according to which the human mind is essentially empty except for sensory concepts and all more complex concepts must first be constructed inductively through experience (i.e., through learning) from sensory concepts, are highly inadequate, both conceptually and empirically. Such ideas have found their most influential expression in behaviorism and its modern successors. They continue to dominate psychology today and are politically closely linked to technocratic ideas of behavior and consciousness control (Chomsky, 1974, pp. 44ff.).

https://chomsky.info/books/

For cognitive science, this unique capacity gives rise to two fundamental theoretical questions: 1. What are the basic units or basic concepts on which symbolic processes operate? 2. What is the nature of the generative process by which an infinite number of expressions can be generated from a finite basis? The capacity to symbolically relate basic concepts of different cognitive subsystems of the brain to one another is possibly the result of processes that arose from internal coordination needs between different symbol-processing subsystems. Such coordination of the diverse subsystems that have become interspersed between sensory input organs and motor output organs during human evolution requires that subsystems of our mind/brain with very different evolutionary histories, which were originally isolated from one another by their different concept bases, develop a common abstract conceptual structure through which their respective symbolic processes can be related to one another. Aristotle already recognized that the eye, ear, touch, and taste speak different languages, so to speak. The visual, auditory, and haptic perception systems can only communicate symbolically with each other when they have a sufficiently abstract common conceptual basis for 'external objects'. The same applies to all other subsystems of our mind. The many very different symbol-processing subsystems of our mind, like the different instruments in an orchestra, require coordination and synchronization for the coherence and stability of their joint operation. At the very latest, when internal symbolic processes must become effective in guiding action, i.e., at the interface between internal processes of symbol processing and motor systems, coordination between them must take place at the symbolic level. The prerequisite for this is a sufficiently abstract common conceptual basis. 21.06.25

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