Re: How much intelligence?

"chadmaester" <chad.d.johnson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But what if the properties of natural language are progressively
learned? The approach you are suggesting seems to be more top-down
rather than bottom-up - i.e., the rules are in place from the
beginning. The one I'm suggesting is more bottom-up, and the rules
would not be in place initially. Would you agree?

Wouldn't you say that learning the rules and properties of language is
heavily dependent on pattern recognition? An infant hears a word over
and over, and they hear phrases over and over, and they themselves
(unsupervised) try putting different words and phrases together that
they hear. When they hear something that sounds like a positive
response (i.e., someone seems to understand them) they are likely to
try that or a similar combination again; contrarily if they hear a
negative one, they are less likely to use that again - in that case
they also learn that that is NOT a rule, thereby refining the rules
they've learned. What do you think? Am I on the right track?

I think you are. But you are talking about a behaviorist approach to
language and there are a large body of people that think language is much
more than that. I'm not one of them.

If you want to read a classic reference on the Behaviorist approach to
language, you might check out B.F.Skinner's 1957 book "Verbal Behavior".
I've never read it but it's one of the many books I hope to get around to
at some point.

http://www.bfskinner.org/BookDetail.asp?sku=19

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How much intelligence?
    ... The approach you are suggesting seems to be more top-down ... The one I'm suggesting is more bottom-up, ... Wouldn't you say that learning the rules and properties of language is ... I've never read it but it's one of the many books I hope to get around to ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: How much intelligence?
    ... But what if the properties of natural language are progressively ... The approach you are suggesting seems to be more top-down ... The one I'm suggesting is more bottom-up, ... and over, and they hear phrases over and over, and they themselves ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: How much intelligence?
    ... The approach you are suggesting seems to be more top-down ... The one I'm suggesting is more bottom-up, ... Wouldn't you say that learning the rules and properties of language is ... "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior" in Language, 35, No. 1 ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: How much intelligence?
    ... The approach you are suggesting seems to be more top-down ... The one I'm suggesting is more bottom-up, ... Wouldn't you say that learning the rules and properties of language is ... "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior" in Language, 35, No. 1 ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: Trigraphs forever
    ... language, and what it means to "use" that language. ... and the approach you are suggesting makes ... the Swedish variants of ISO 646), ... anyway, even with trigraphs. ...
    (comp.std.c)
Loading