Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.mathworks.com!hookup!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!adam.cc.sunysb.edu!psinntp!psinntp!scylla!daryl
From: daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Message-ID: <1995Feb12.134525.22231@oracorp.com>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Inc.
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 13:45:25 GMT
Lines: 32

rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

>In <D3p5v3.FD9@hpl.hp.com> curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry) writes:
>
>>>>: In <D3LF78.C8n@hpl.hp.com> curry@hpl.hp.com (me) writes:
>>>>I find the work on Creoles, both spoken and signed, to be very
>>>>strong suggestive evidence, at the very least.
>
>>Neil Rickert (rickert@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
>>> This evidence is completely compatible with the idea that language is
>>> used for communicating particular types of information, and that the
>>> syntax chosen is a particularly simple way of meeting this
>>> communication objective.
>
>>This argument is a plausible explanation for the commonality
>>of certain nouns and verbs across languages. It's quite a
>>stretch to claim that it explains regularities of grammar.
>
>This thread originated with my suggestion that language does
>not actually have a grammar.  That is, what is reported as
>grammar is merely a descriptive theory reporting regularities
>which originate from other causes.



I agree with Bo---commonality in the type of information being
communicated might explain the sorts of words appearing in a language,
but it doesn't explain the structure of sentences.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY
