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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: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 23:45:33 GMT
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I think we may be running out of gas here.

: In <D3yHxq.5nG@hpl.hp.com> curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry) writes:
: >But not all structures which suffer from "processor overload"
: >are ungrammatical. People quickly get lost with recursive
: >center-embedded clauses such as "This is the cheese that the
: >rat that the cat that the dog bit chased ate", though they
: >are perfectly grammatical.

Neil Rickert (rickert@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
: In my opinion there is something seriously wrong with this argument.

There is? If grammar is to be quantitatively specified,
it's the first I've heard of it. Are you seriously claiming
that any sentence which is too complicated for you (for
anyone? for the man in the street?) to understand, is
thereby ungrammatical?

: Pinker devotes a whole chapter to the language mavens, criticizing
: them for daring to specify what is grammatical.  Instead grammatical
: is supposed to be what people can handle.

You misread Pinker completely. "grammatical" is the forms people
actually use, not "what they can handle". But it's categorical, not
quantitative.

The point is that a construction which is categorically grammatical,
can be multiplied into a quantitative overload. If you include
a prohibition of such overload in your *definition* of "grammatical",
then a mapping of grammar onto (a subset of) actual "brain registers"
will become trivially true. But this would be a bizarre definition.

: >I'm not defending "Chomskyists", or the research agenda of linguists.
: >You will surely agree that the truth of the UG hypothesis
: >does not depend upon the personal merits of its adherents.

: It is not at all clear that there is such a thing as "the truth of
: the UG hypothesis".  Putnam has an argument in the appendix to his
: "Representation and Reality", which makes the case that there may be
: no fact of the matter as to what is the purely internal functional
: organization of a system.

UG has little or nothing to say about "purely internal
functional organization", which is precisely what Minsky
was criticizing. UG describes observed behavioural regularities.
I don't see what Putnam has to do with it.

I'll sign off now and digest this a little bit, since we seem
to have said everything substantial we have to say.

Bo
