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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: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 20:04:34 GMT
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: In <D3LuE8.3tq@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

: >In article <3h69pv$en3@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert wrote:
: >>I have seen no argument which is persuasive that we have a UG.  There
: >>seems to be good evidence to the contrary.  A UG should serve to
: >>stabilize the syntax of a language.  Yet we see that regional
: >>dialects can form quite readily, and these can include syntactic
: >>variations.

: >Whoa.  Why should UG serve to do any such thing?  Again, UG is not conceived
: >as including *every* syntactic variation, only certain things common to
: >all languages.  Chomsky holds that children still have to learn the
: >syntactic facts about their own native language.  A dialect might then
: >differ syntactically in various minor ways from other related dialects;
: >it might also differ in the "parameter settings" for elements of UG.

Neil Rickert (rickert@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
: I used to think of Chopin as a brilliant composer.  I realize, thanks
: to Chomsky's argument, that I was quite mistaken.  His etudes were
: already intrinsically present in the piano, and all that Chopin did
: amounted to the mere setting or parameters.

Oh, come now. Suppose that, wherever you wandered in the world,
from the Bushmen to the Esquimaux to the music halls of Europe,
every piece of music you encountered followed the form of a fugue.
You might well postulate a "Universal Musical Grammar", which
looked a lot like the rules for writing fugues. Nonetheless, there
would still be brilliant fuguists (e.g. Bach) and mediocre ones.

: My comments about music are, of course ridiculuous.  But what they
: emphasize is that talk of setting parameters is meaningless jargon.

It can be meaningless, certainly. It depends what weight one tries
to hang upon it. It made perfect sense in context.

: It make sense to talk of parameter setting if a relatively few
: parameters are to be set, and each setting controls a great deal.
: But if there are many parameters, each controlling relatively little,
: then the parameter setting analogy is a gross distortion.  In
: particular, if there are so many parameter choices as to take care of
: every dialect of every language, then the parameters must be like the
: individual binary digits on a computer tape.

According to Chomsky's theory, this is false. There are, indeed,
very many settings, but they do not cover the space of possibility.
Your final statement begs the question.

: Chomsky argues that language is not learned by inductive methods.
: But, after all, each induction merely sets a parameter.  There is no
: contradiction between learning by inductive methods and the setting
: of parameters.

Chomsky argues no such thing.

However you tune a piano, any piece you play upon it will sound like
a piano, and not like a trombone. That's all the UG implies.

Bo
