This shift is significant from a philosophical perspective, not just a practical one: It suggests that traditional thinking about language may have been too reliant on introspection. The limitation of introspection is that very little of what goes on in our brains when we comprehend or think about language is accessible to consciousness (see for example the discussion of “two-channel experiments” in Baars 1997). We consciously register the results of our understanding and thinking, apparently in symbolic form, but not the understanding and thinking processes themselves; and these symbolic abstractions, to the extent that they lack quantitative or probabilistic dimensions, can lead us to suppose that the underlying processing is nonquantitative as well. But the successes of statistical NLP, as well as recent developments in cognitive science (e.g., Fine et al. 2013; Tenenbaum et al. 2011; Chater and Oaksford 2008) suggest that language and thinking are not only symbolic, but deeply quantitative and in particular probabilistic.