Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.mathworks.com!uhog.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky
From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Message-ID: <1995Feb11.013632.5037@news.media.mit.edu>
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Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <3h66fb$c85@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D3n9IJ.GBz@hpl.hp.com> <D3so0B.A4L@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 1995 01:36:32 GMT
Lines: 303

In article <D3so0B.A4L@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff
Dalton) writes

>But of course the UG is uiversal: it's constructed to be universal.
>(Surely Chomsky et al change their account of the UG when they encounter
>something the current version gets wrong or doesn't explain.)  So
>it matters what Chomsky's theories look like: it matters that they're
>not incredibly _ad hoc_.
>
>-- jd

Yes, but there's something more serious even than that.  It seems to
me that the rhetorical act of labeling the observed regularities--such
as they are--as resulting from a "language instinct" has served to
produce some strange and drastic results.  Let's begin with the
problem of the unacceptability of an incompleted conjunction: what's
wrong with

"Whom did you see Mary and?"

A first problem is that an "and" conjunction can apply, as Terry
Winograd observed in his thesis, to any place in the referred-to
antecedent structure--namely, to something like "I saw Mary and
*Jack*" or to "I saw Mary and *so I ran away before she could see me*.
I don't think we're nearly so likely to have the same trouble with the
more restricted preposition ""with".  Consequently, it is not
surprising that all languages evolve, commonsensically or memetically,
rather than genetically, to discuorage that usage.

Why?  Because to resolve that particular ambiguity, you'd have to
compare the plausibilities of two different tree-searches over 
your mental representations of the situation you're envisioning.  In
the course of doing so, you'd need extra recursion or
short-term-memory capacities that young children might very likely not
have available during the language-learning stage of development.
Thus the illusion of an innate syntactic constraint would emerge from
limitations of other, quite non-linguistic limitations.  

Note that these need not be "built in" at all.  On the contrary, the
"constraint simply comes from something esle *not* being available.  
I'm sure teen agers could quickly learn to use "Who did you see Mary
and?" if the adults simply agreed not to use many utterances of
extended supra-verb conjunction that would naturally lead to
conjunctive questions like "Who did you meet and where did you go?

---

Now for my serious point.

*FLAME ON*

The most impressive feature of the UG movement is its extraordinarily
mind-numbing sterility with regard to making plausible theories.  Even
in the brilliant exposition of Pinker's book, a cursory scan shows no
concern whatever with the sorts of questions that I think would occur
to every other sort of scientist.  Suppose we take UG at face value.
Then wouldn't you expect to see theories about:

Yes, but there's something more serious even than that.  It seems to
me that the rhetorical act of labeling the observed regularities--such
as they are--as resulting from a "language instinct" has served to
produce some strange and drastic results.  Let's begin with the
problem of the unacceptability of an incompleted conjunction: what's
wrong with

"Whom did you see Mary and?"

A first problem is that an "and" conjunction can apply, as Terry
Winograd observed in his thesis, to any place in the referred-to
antecedent structure--namely, to something like "I saw Mary and
*Jack*" or to "I saw Mary and *so I ran away before she could see me*.
I don't think we're nearly so likely to have the same trouble with the
more restricted preposition ""with".  Consequently, it is not
surprising that all languages evolve, commonsensically or memetically,
rather than genetically, to discuorage that usage.

Why?  Because to resolve that particular ambiguity, you'd have to
compare the plausibilities of two different tree-searches over 
your mental representations of the situation you're envisioning.  In
the course of doing so, you'd need extra recursion or
short-term-memory capacities that young children might very likely not
have available during the language-learning stage of development.
Thus the illusion of an innate syntactic constraint would emerge from
limitations of other, quite non-linguistic limitations.  

Note that these need not be "built in" at all.  On the contrary, the
"constraint simply comes from something esle *not* being available.  
I'm sure teen agers could quickly learn to use "Who did you see Mary
and?" if the adults simply agreed not to use many utterances of
extended supra-verb conjunction that would naturally lead to
conjunctive questions like "Who did you meet and where did you go?

---

Now for my serious point.

*FLAME ON*

The most impressive feature of the UG movement is its extraordinarily
mind-numbing sterility with regard to making plausible theories.  Even
in the brilliant exposition of Pinker's book, a cursory scan shows no
concern whatever with the sorts of questions that I think would occur
to every other sort of scientist.  Suppose we take UG at face value.
Then wouldn't you expect to see theories about:

Yes, but there's something more serious even than that.  It seems to
me that the rhetorical act of labeling the observed regularities--such
as they are--as resulting from a "language instinct" has served to
produce some strange and drastic results.  Let's begin with the
problem of the unacceptability of an incompleted conjunction: what's
wrong with

"Whom did you see Mary and?"

A first problem is that an "and" conjunction can apply, as Terry
Winograd observed in his thesis, to any place in the referred-to
antecedent structure--namely, to something like "I saw Mary and
*Jack*" or to "I saw Mary and *so I ran away before she could see me*.
I don't think we're nearly so likely to have the same trouble with the
more restricted preposition ""with".  Consequently, it is not
surprising that all languages evolve, commonsensically or memetically,
rather than genetically, to discuorage that usage.

Why?  Because to resolve that particular ambiguity, you'd have to
compare the plausibilities of two different tree-searches over 
your mental representations of the situation you're envisioning.  In
the course of doing so, you'd need extra recursion or
short-term-memory capacities that young children might very likely not
have available during the language-learning stage of development.
Thus the illusion of an innate syntactic constraint would emerge from
limitations of other, quite non-linguistic limitations.  

Note that these need not be "built in" at all.  On the contrary, the
"constraint simply comes from something esle *not* being available.  
I'm sure teen agers could quickly learn to use "Who did you see Mary
and?" if the adults simply agreed not to use many utterances of
extended supra-verb conjunction that would naturally lead to
conjunctive questions like "Who did you meet and where did you go?

---

Now for my serious point.

*FLAME ON*

The most impressive feature of the UG movement is its extraordinarily
mind-numbing sterility with regard to making plausible theories.  Even
in the brilliant exposition of Pinker's book, a cursory scan shows no
concern whatever with the sorts of questions that I think would occur
to every other sort of scientist.  Suppose we take UG at face value.
Then wouldn't you expect to see theories about:

Yes, but there's something more serious even than that.  It seems to
me that the rhetorical act of labeling the observed regularities--such
as they are--as resulting from a "language instinct" has served to
produce some strange and drastic results.  Let's begin with the
problem of the unacceptability of an incompleted conjunction: what's
wrong with

"Whom did you see Mary and?"

A first problem is that an "and" conjunction can apply, as Terry
Winograd observed in his thesis, to any place in the referred-to
antecedent structure--namely, to something like "I saw Mary and
*Jack*" or to "I saw Mary and *so I ran away before she could see me*.
I don't think we're nearly so likely to have the same trouble with the
more restricted preposition ""with".  Consequently, it is not
surprising that all languages evolve, commonsensically or memetically,
rather than genetically, to discuorage that usage.

Why?  Because to resolve that particular ambiguity, you'd have to
compare the plausibilities of two different tree-searches over 
your mental representations of the situation you're envisioning.  In
the course of doing so, you'd need extra recursion or
short-term-memory capacities that young children might very likely not
have available during the language-learning stage of development.
Thus the illusion of an innate syntactic constraint would emerge from
limitations of other, quite non-linguistic limitations.  

Note that these need not be "built in" at all.  On the contrary, the
"constraint simply comes from something esle *not* being available.  
I'm sure teen agers could quickly learn to use "Who did you see Mary
and?" if the adults simply agreed not to use many utterances of
extended supra-verb conjunction that would naturally lead to
conjunctive questions like "Who did you meet and where did you go?

---

Now for my serious point.

*FLAME ON*

The most impressive feature of the UG movement is its extraordinarily
mind-numbing sterility with regard to making plausible theories.  Even
in the brilliant exposition of Pinker's book, a cursory scan shows no
concern whatever with the sorts of questions that I think would occur
to every other sort of scientist.  Suppose we take UG at face value.
Then wouldn't you expect to see theories about:

Yes, but there's something more serious even than that.  It seems to
me that the rhetorical act of labeling the observed regularities--such
as they are--as resulting from a "language instinct" has served to
produce some strange and drastic results.  Let's begin with the
problem of the unacceptability of an incompleted conjunction: what's
wrong with

"Whom did you see Mary and?"

A first problem is that an "and" conjunction can apply, as Terry
Winograd observed in his 1970 thesis, to any place in the referred-to
antecedent structure--namely, to something like "I saw Mary and
*Jack*" or to "I saw Mary and *so I ran away before she could see
me*". I don't think we're nearly so likely to have the same trouble
with the more restricted preposition ""with".  Consequently, it is not
surprising that all languages evolve, commonsensically or memetically,
rather than genetically, to discourage that usage.

Why?  Because to resolve that particular ambiguity, you'd have to
compare the plausibilities of two different tree-searches over your
mental representations of the situation you're envisioning.  In the
course of doing so, you'd need extra recursion or short-term-memory
capacities that young children might very likely not have available
during the language-learning stage of development. Thus the illusion
of an innate syntactic constraint would emerge from limitations of
other, quite non-linguistic limitations.

Note that these need not be "built in" at all.  On the contrary, the
"constraint" might simply come from something else *not* being
available. I'm sure teen-agers could quickly learn to use "Who did you
see Mary and?" if the adults simply agreed not to use many utterances
of extended supra-verb conjunction that would naturally lead to
conjunctive questions like "Who did you meet and where did you go?

Now I'll try to be more constructive.

*************FLAME ON***************

The most impressive feature of the UG movement is its extraordinarily
mind-numbing sterility with regard to making plausible theories.  Even
in the brilliant exposition of Pinker's book, my cursory scan reveals no
concern whatever with the sorts of questions that I think would occur
to every other sort of scientist.  Suppose we take UG at face value.
The rules are not learned, but they are already built into the brain,
except for the selection of certain "parameters".  Then there are an
obvious set of questions that you'd feel impelled to ask and in return
get at least some hypotheses about the nature of and the workings of
that machinery. Here are a few questions you'd think they'd ask:

1. What machinery  selects what clues from the ambient sounds and
"knows" precisely which parameters to set to what?  (In other words,
how can it parse before it can parse?)

2. What machinery connects those rules with a speaker's semantic
machinery?  

3. How might knowledge be represented so that those rules could be
applied to it?  What knowledge-structure manipulating procedures are
available for applying them.  

4. What limitations -- on processing complexity, cache memory
capacity, addressing space constraints, etc., constrain those other
processes?

5. When you hear an utterance, what sort of machinery must be engaged
to convert the expression into a knowledge representation?  

6. What sorts of searches are used to resolve the ambiguities.

By speaking about a language-instinct the UG people seem to feel that
they don't have to answer such questions, or even think about them.
However, there is a fatal non-sequitur there--because for each such
question you must again ask, what aspect of portion of *that* is built
in, and which parts of *that* must be learned? The crucial thing, it
seems to me, is this: I suspect that the brain does indeed have
certain constraints on representations that are not particularly
grammatical.  

In particular I conjecture that the observed regularities of
UG are not, in general linguistic at all, but mostly are side effects
of the constraints of type 4. 

The fanatically surface-behavioristic orientation if the
instinct-philosophers has prevented them even from formulating these
problems.  Chomsky is widely credited with having decisively refuted
the Skinnerian behaviorists, who abjured formulating any sort in
internal, mechanistic theories about what happens "inside".  (This is
the domain in which Lorenz and Tinbergen excelled, when the early
ethologists did indeed finally construct fairly plausible theories
about the internal; machinery of instinct--that is, the rather
beautiful theory of central excitatory agents, releasers, and the
reinforcing effects of consummatory acts--which make pretty good
models of what might happen inside an animal.)

The net result, 40 years later, is that Chomsky's followers seem to me
to be as pitifully unproductive, theoretically, as were Skinners.  So
far as I know, they've come up with no seminal mechanistic theories,
and are now as equally sterile a group of behaviorists as were the
generation they tried to supplant after the appearance of Skinner's
book on language behavior.

flame off*.


