G. K. Chesterton, Heretics ch. 20 “Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy”

Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas.

This thesis is quite unconventional.  However, Chesterton has the foremost linguist of our day on his side.  His and their conclusions have important ramifications for self-determinism, learning theory, language, and theology.

Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language ch. 1 “On Cognitive Capacity” pp. 22-23

Suppose that for a particular organism O, we manage to learn something about its cognitive capacity, developing a system of LT(O,D)’s [Learning Theory of an Organism in a Domain] for various choices of D with the rough properties sketched above.  We would then have arrived at a theory of “the mind of O,” to adapt a formulation of Anthony Kenny’s, as the innate capacity of O to construct cognitive structures, that is, to learn.

I depart here from Kenny’s formulation in two respects, which perhaps deserve mention.  He defines “mind” as a second-order capacity to acquire “intellectual abilities,” such as knowledge of English—the latter “itself a capacity or ability: an ability whose exercise is the speaking, understanding, reading of English.”  Moreover, “to have a mind is to have the capacity to acquire the ability to operate with symbols in such a way that it is one’s own activity that makes them symbols and confers meaning on them,” so that automata operating with formal elements that are symbols for us but not for them do not have minds. [e.g., working with computers.]  For the sake of this discussion, I have generalized here beyond first-order capacities involving operations with symbols, and am thus considering second-order capacities broader than “mind” in Kenny’s quite natural sense.  So far there is no issue beyond terminology. 

Secondly, I want to consider mind (in the narrower or broader sense) as an innate capacity to form cognitive structures, not first-order capacities to act.  The cognitive structures attained enter into our first-order capacities to act, but should not be identified with them.  Thus it does not seem to me quite accurate to take “knowledge of English” to be a capacity or ability, though it enters into the capacity or ability exercised in language use.  In principle, one might have the cognitive structure that we call “knowledge of English,” fully developed, with no capacity to use this structure; and certain capacities to carry out “intellectual activities” may involve no cognitive structures but merely a network of dispositions and habits, something quite different.