Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!fas-news.harvard.edu!newspump.wustl.edu!news.ecn.bgu.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!swissbank!root
From: gerryg@il.us.swissbank.com (Gerald Gleason)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Message-ID: <1995Jan26.150315.1420@il.us.swissbank.com>
Sender: root@il.us.swissbank.com (Operator)
Nntp-Posting-Host: ch1d264nwk
Organization: Swiss Bank Corporation CM&T Division
References: <3g6js6$fug@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 1995 15:03:15 GMT
Lines: 34

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
