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From: curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 22:01:06 GMT
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: >In article rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
: >
: >>In spite of the claims of the 'poverty of stimulus' argument, we are

Marvin Minsky (minsky@media.mit.edu) wrote:
: >Bah.  You cannot assess the "poverty" unless you have an idea of the

: Oops.  I fear my "bah" might be misinterpreted.  It was to be applied to the
: subject and not, as it might appear, to Rickert's statement, with
: which I completely agree.

Marvin - since you're lurking here, I'd like to ask you about a
fascinating point you made in "Society of Mind" (a good book,
but an obnoxious form factor - it doesn't fit on my bookshelf,
so I have to keep lending it out). You hypothesized that the
alleged shutdown, at puberty, of special language (or at least
phoneme) learning skills functioned to prevent the parents from
learning to talk like the baby. I have never seen this
hypothesis before. Did you think of it yourself,
or is it propounded at greater length elsewhere (or both)?
I got the impression that Pinker would disagree, but I'm not
exactly sure why. Any comments?

Bo

