Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.mathworks.com!news.alpha.net!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utgpu!pindor
From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: What's innate?
Message-ID: <D4EznA.Kuu@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <1995Feb22.033435.26696@oracorp.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 1995 18:35:34 GMT
Lines: 197

In article <1995Feb22.033435.26696@oracorp.com>,
Daryl McCullough <daryl@oracorp.com> wrote:
>For what it's worth, I would like to apologize to Neil Rickert for my
>hot-headed comments in past postings in this thread.
>
>jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter) writes:
:
>>I have been exposed to very little juggling in my life, and not a whole lot
>>of calculus, certainly before the age of 18.  I know of children, both of 
>>whose parents are physicists, who *do* in fact develop very early familiarlity
>>with mathematics.  I know of children who develop incredible abilities to
>>juggle, skateboard, kick ball, throw frisbees, etc. etc. from no more than
>>"exposure". In fact, I suspect that a young child could learn to juggle
>>with no exposure at all beyond merely knowing that activity can be done.
>>What are your grounds for your claim?
>
>There are several different points to be made here:
>
>1. In the case of language skills, we are not talking about what *some*
>children accomplish, we are talking about what *all* children who are not
>severely handicapped accomplish.
>
>2. In the case of physical skills such as driving a car, juggling,
>etc. there is much more than simply exposure. There is immediate
>feedback.  If you do something wrong in juggling, you drop the
>ball. If you turn the steering wheel the wrong way, you go the wrong
>way. There is absolutely no "poverty of stimulus" argument for (a
>large number of) physical skills, since you immediately learn that you
>have made a mistake.
>
I think you underappreciate the amount of feedback children get learning 
language. Yes, it is not as obvious as in the case of, say, juggling but
it is there. I think children notice very clearly whether the sounds they make 
produce (expected) results from audience (other humans). Also it seems to me 
that the differences in picking up language skills between different children 
are not much smaller than differences in juggling skills. The only problem
is that nearly all adults around children speak, but only few juggle, so
in fact there is more social feedbeck with respect to language than to juggling.
Note that all children (except very handicapped ones) learn to walk and run.
I bet that in circus families nearly all children have reasonably good 
juggling skills. I have seen children learning at a very young age skills 
really obscure skills because parents were doing it.

>3. In the case of complicated mental skills like calculus, people don't
>have to simply "pick it up". They can be *taught* it using language. (Or
>they can read about it on their own, again using language.) The big
>advantage to having language is that it makes learning almost everything
>else so much quicker and easier.
>
>Having said that, I realize that little kids actually have language to
>help them learn language. Once they learn a core language, that core
>language can be used to "bootstrap" them to the full language. For
>example, they can be *told* "No, not `Me want bannana', `*I* want a
>bannana.'"  However, I don't know whether this kind of correction is
>necessary for children. Very young children of immigrants seem to be
>able to pick up English just by watching TV, where there is no such
>correction.
>
I propose to you that children of immigrant families would learn broken
English if they were exposed only to English from their families. If they
were also exposed to TV but not to other native English speakers they would
speak a mixture of correct and broken English. It is only because they are
exposed to other people speaking 'correct' English (at kindergardens, shools,
other kids in the streets etc.) that they notice that most people other than
their parents speak differently. 

>Anyway, whether or not there is a UG, it sure seems to me that language
>is very much a special case. In many ways, it is much unlike juggling or
>anything else that kids learn.
>
You are right. It seems to me that the basic reason is that it is a social
skill and humans from a very early age show a strong a need for acceptance by
other humans. In social groups where there is a lot of music playing and 
dancing (nearly) all children acquire these skills at an early age.
:
>>Surely you don't think that the facts that Mozart was continuously exposed to
>>harpsichord music in the home and that his father wrote manuals on the
>>teaching of music are irrelevant, do you?  "Simply being exposed" fails to
>>note that such prodigies had unusual exposure.  Now, not everyone equally
>>exposed develops equal abilities.  There are matters of temperament and other
>>contingencies.  And of course people do have different aptitudes, but that
>>does not seem to mean that some have an appropriate "module" and some do not.
>
>I wasn't using the case of prodigies to argue either for or against the thesis
>of UG. I was saying that their existence is an interesting piece of data, if
>I knew what it showed.
>
"module" or not, if we work on an assumption that physical features of the
brain determine human capabilities, the only conclusion seems to be that
some brains are born different from other brains. Whether it is a matter of
different modules, different topolgy of wiring, different chemical composition
it is still impossible to say. Most likely all of these and more.
>
>>What we can say about language is that nearly everyone seems to have 
>>sufficient aptitude to a pretty good job.  But there is the major contingency 
>>that language aids in communication, and we do seem to have a builtin desire 
>>and need to communicate, which the child does from the moment of the
>>first breath.  To get from loosely analyzed anecdotes about exposure
>>to "a language module" seems quite a stretch.  I'm not saying that
>>that's all that Chomsky does, but it seems to be all that *you* are
>>doing.
>
>What anecdotes did I give, and where did I argue that they showed the
>existence of a language module??? I really don't know what you are
>referring to. I was simply objecting to Neil's lumping language
>learning in with driving and juggling. I think that language is a
>special case, whether or not it is innate.
>
>>You complain later about weak arguments; how strong is yours?
>
>Weak as water. Chomsky's arguments are weak. Neil's arguments against
>them are weak. My arguments against Neil are weak. Let's face it,
>we're all a bunch of weaklings in this newsgroup. 8^)
>
From an interview with Chomski I have recently seen (PBS program "Human 
language") it seems that his argument is basically a "gut feeling" that there 
is no way that a child can pick up complicated language concepts just by 
listening.

>>And what is your argument that Neil doesn't understand what Chomsky means
>>bu POS?  Even if you can show that he doesn't, it is quite a leap, and
>>a bit of an ad hominem one, to claim that he hasn't *bothered* to.
>
>Well, I apologize to Neil for that and other hot-headed remarks. What
>bothered me about Neil's posts on the poverty of stimulus was that he
>never made explicit what he understood POS to mean. His numerous
>ridiculing articles never made clear exactly what position he was
>ridiculing. Now, maybe that is because Chomsky was very vague about
>what *he* meant. But in that case, it seems to me that Neil should be
>attacking the vagueness, instead of saying that the poverty of
>stimulus argument works as well for driving or juggling.
>
Why? Indicating that the same (POS) arguments applies for other skills too,
where it seems rather silly, exposes its vagueness.

>>Um, the main argument presented against it [UG] in this group has
>>been that the arguments presented for it in this newgroup are pretty
>>weak.  What we have is agnostics arguing that a claim isn't
>>well-supported.  Agnostics don't need a particularly strong argument
>>for that.
>
>I agree with *that* argument. But Neil has gone beyond simply saying
>that he finds the evidence unconvincing. He has gone to great lengths
>to ridicule the idea of a UG. (With his posts about a "driving"
>module, etc.) I'm pretty tired of that kind of argument by ridicule.
>Searle uses against AI, Neil uses it against UG. I don't think it
>accomplishes anything, other than making communication between people
>who have differences of opinion much more strained and difficult.
>
It seems to me that you exaggerate 'ridiclue' factor of Neil's arguments.
I see them rather as 'ad absurdum' arguments. A notion of POS is so vague that 
it can lead to all sorts of obviously absurd conclusions.

>Of course, maybe Neil thinks that the UG hypothesis is so hopeless
>that there is nothing to be learned from those who support it.
>
I think better of him ;-).
:
>>I agree. Unlike Neil, I think that it is reasonable to analyze natural speech
>>in terms of grammar, although I think it is a grammar heavily constrained by
>>linear production, not the sort of recursive phrase-structured grammar that
>>would lead to the silly claims of Pinker and Curry that deeply nested phrases
>>are "grammatical" despite the fact that no human produces them and no human
>>recognizes them (apparently these folks are unfamiliar with ad hoc grammars
>>like FORTRAN_identifier = letter letdig letdig letdig letdig letdig).
>>
>>But of course that does not imply a UG.
>
>I don't think the claim that deeply nested phrases are grammatical is
>silly. I agree that there are processing limits to what we can produce
>and understand, but I think that grammar is *not* the processing
>limitations.  There is no reason to have a "rule" saying "Don't do X"
>when X is something you couldn't do, anyway.  Grammar is structure and
>redundancy in language that makes understanding language in the
>presence of noise possible. It's a code, like Shannon's
>error-correcting codes, but more closely tied to semantics.
>
As I have stated in my other posting it seems to me that it depends on what
we mean by "grammatical". If by "grammatical" we mean conforming to an abstract
set of rules created by linguists as a phenomenological tool for organizing
observed language into small set of generating principles, then such phrase
are "grammatical" by definition. However, if by "grammatical" we meant "used
in real speach", then they are not. From what I have seen I have an impression
that linguists sometimes assume an attitude: "let's not get confused with 
facts, they will spoil our simple, beautiful theory". Of course linguists are
not the only ones who fall in such a trap.

>Daryl McCullough
>ORA Corp.
>Ithaca, NY

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
