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This Turing quotation is how I’m starting my personal statement for grad school.
Linguistics relies on intuition and analytic insight, but intuition in linguistics is the ultimate source of knowledge. The competence-performance division means that speakers may not always produce perfect, well-formed utterances in practice but they can always judge well-formedness using their intuition. Since linguistics is interested in modeling linguistic competence, intuition is a weird blackbox that we can draw on for empirical information, but ultimately we want to reverse-engineer and understand the intuition-blackbox and this is where ingenuity comes into play. The confluence of intuition and ingenuity is what makes the field so elegantly robust and pleasantly difficult.
Now, I just need to capture these ideas in a succinct, engaging and substantively self-disclosing manner.
