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From: David E. Weldon, Ph.D. <David.E.Weldon@DaytonOH.NCR.COM>
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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References: <1995Jan26.150315.1420@il.us.swissbank.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 1995 22:34:04 GMT
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==========Gerald Gleason, 1/26/95==========
Neil Rickert writes
> In <1995Jan25.152928.17262@il.us.swissbank.com>  
gerryg@il.us.swissbank.com (Gerald Gleason) writes:

> >                         The program to find a UG in the sense
> > originally meant by Chomsky and his supporters has failed,

> Chomsky would not agree that it has failed.

Probably not.  I suppose there is not any conscensus on this, but the  
evidendce is mounting.

> >                             and so many have concluded that natural
> > language does not have an abstract, exclusively syntactical grammer.

> I tend to question the "and so" with which you begin this assertion.
> I expect many have reached this conclusion quite independently of
> what the Chomsky school has been saying.  It was probably a common
> view prior to the Chomsky era.

You may have a point, but I don't see how it could be much more than a  
conjecture without what has been learned in all the failed attempts.   
Maybe another path could have been followed, but cognitivism was dominant  
at the time when people were first able carry out any real experiments  
with designed systems as complex as computers were then.

It wasn't that the entire program was wrong in any sense, but that a  
researcher's vision is always limited by the historical facts.  How could  
Newton and his immediate successors have predicted relativity or quantum  
mechanics?  It's just that the time between paridigm shifts is being  
compressed so that anyone can look foolish in his or her own lifetime,  
unless you can remain flexible enough to keep learning.

Gerry Gleason

A little history might help here.  In the early sixties, B. F. Skinner wrote a
book describing the acquisition of language from a behaviorist perspective. 
Language was theorized to be acquired gradually vie parental and societal
reinforcement (Skinner was a "radical" behaviorist).  Chomsky wrote a scathing
review of the book bringing to gether most of the research on language
acquisition that he knew about.  It was Chomsky's review that created the
modern sciences of computational linguistics and cognitive science.  His
review was so telling that it virtually destroyed the Behaviorist movement
except for remnants that now exist in clinical and animal psychology.  So far
as I know, there is real evidence for a localized portion of the cerebral
cortex that supports three aspects of language (and they are quite distinct,
at least from studies of aphasia in stroke victims).  One is the lexicon or
concept labeler function, the second is language understanding, and the other
is language generation.

Hope this is helpful.

Dave Weldon
