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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: In defense of Whorf
Message-ID: <1995Apr22.025555.14166@news.media.mit.edu>
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References: <3n2h88$j51@fu-berlin.de> <D7Eo6r.4s8@intruder.daytonoh.attgis.com>
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 1995 02:55:55 GMT
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In article <D7Eo6r.4s8@intruder.daytonoh.attgis.com> David.E.Weldon@DaytonOH.ATTGIS.COM (WELDOD) writes:

>I think you've seriously telescoped history here.  The Whorf hypothesis was
>presented and debated several years before Chomsky wrote his seminal paper. 
>By the time Chomsky wrote the paper, the Whorf hypothesis was an interesting
>idea from sociology that did not appear to be acceptable or correct in the
>halls of academic psychology.  In any case, Chomsky's paper was a critique of
>B. F. Skinner's Radical Behaviorism.  In 1962, Skinner published a book called
>Verbal Behavior in which he tried to show that language learning was due
>solely to social and physical reinforcement from the child's parents and the
>social community.  Chomsky's critique literally destroyed Radical Behaviorism
>as a serious theory of human learning in general and language in particular. 
>The Whorf hypothesis was not even part of the debate.

Or, that is, according to the currently popular views, which I think
ignore work like that of Marcus and Berwick which indicate that
grammatical language may not be so dreadfully hard to learn, after
all.  I agree that Skinner's ideas about learning were inadequate, and
that the brain begins with much structure.  However, it is not at all
clear, despite what we hear so often, that grammatical constraints are
not part of human learning in general.

(Specifically, I conjecture that they result largely from how other,
non-linguistic mechanisms that our brains use for represennting
knowledge affect how we learn to convert our representations into--and
out of--serial forms.)

