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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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References: <3gtu3i$rf3@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3h69pv$en3@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D3LuE8.3tq@spss.com> <3h6k27$l59@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 01:08:17 GMT
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In article <3h6k27$l59@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>In <D3LuE8.3tq@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>>Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> 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.
>
>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.

Do you think that you can say anything you like, call it "Chomsky's
argument", and thereby refute Chomsky?

What makes the erection of this straw man particularly frustrating is that
I just *told* you facts about Chomsky's position that refute it.
Chomsky does *not* say that learning a language is nothing but setting
parameters.  He says... but who cares anyway?  

I keep forgetting this is Usenet, I guess.
