[For myself: Copied from the 7/14/2003 Science [43594] posting.]

Feynman Lectures on Physics Volume 1, 47.3 states, "We shall take the simplest example here―the propagation of sound in one dimension. To carry out such a derivation it is necessary first to have some kind of understanding of what is going on." But what Feynman says in the actual lecture, which is available as a CD or an audiobook, is much more interesting. Here is what he says (I am not trying to be completely accurate in writing down what I hear on the audiobook.):

"Now, in order to do any of these problems, in order to set up any of these laws, which is from other laws―we wanna understand sound from Newton's law―, the first thing you have to is to understand as well as possible more or less how the thing works. This aspect is usually forgotten when you read a book; the guy starts to write out the derivation. But when the first man did it, he sat down and he thought a long time about more or less what's involved, so you know what to leave out, what to include, and so on. This may not sound right when at the end it does not look that way, but the secret of all these things is to first get what might be called the feeling for the phenomenon. Now, in the case of sound, we would have to get some kind of understanding more or less. Now, the better the understanding, the easier it will be to set up the laws." ("More or less" and "feeling" are stressed in oral presentation although I did not indicate that here, HH.).

All of this nice point (well, what I consider a nice point) by Feynman is removed in the published version. Too bad. But, I somehow understand why they decided to do that. (I understand that Feynman gave lectures and others wrote them down and edited the lectures. I do not know how closely Feynman was involved in the editing process, but I would not be surprised if he did not listen to what he had said in the lecture and compare it with the edited version.

I think Feynman's point is SO TRUE in language faculty science because, after all, we are studying what "goes on" in our head although we usually do not understand exactly what goes on and we can only go with the judgments we have and try to guess what is behind those judgments as best we can so that the clear sets of those judgments make sense on the basis of a fairly small set of hypotheses and assumptions.