last changed in 2002 The Best-Fit Principle is the greatest
mystery of linguistics, and maybe of all cognitive science. It
is the core of pragmatics, the set of processes by which we
apply our knowledge (including grammar) to particular cases. It
says that if we want to understand a particular piece of
experience E, we look in our knowledge for the stored concept
which best fits E, and assume that E isa this concept. Having
made this initial link we can then apply default inheritance and
guess vast amounts of information, so the link is vital to the
whole of our understanding. In relation to spoken language, we
hear a sound and decide it is an example of /b/, or we hear a
more complex pattern of sounds and decide it was an example of
the word breakfast; but how do we do it? It can't be that we
take our input experience and look through our knowledge for an
exact match, because our experiences are often distorted in one
way or another - e.g. you can recognise an example of breakfast
even if the speaker is drun