Re: Chomsky - what did he actually say?
- From: "Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 14:19:32 -0400
"HMSBeagle" <jsbach@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:5cuv33t7bdd0n9lcgn7ge92hh4bkjqpafi@xxxxxxxxxx
On 4 May 2007 13:43:53 -0700, "J.A. Legris" <jalegris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On May 4, 10:29 am, Wolf <ElLoboVi...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Allan C Cybulskie wrote:
On May 4, 4:01 am, HMSBeagle <jsb...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Someone please intervene here. Lay this issue to rest.
Post relevant citations to books if you can.
Neil W Rickert <rickert...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Perhaps I still wasn't clear. My position is that natural languagesRight. This paragraph demonstrates what you meant by "complex".
are not grammatical systems, and that brains are not following
grammar rules. Grammars are invented by linguists, and imposed
on languages, to help those linguists in their systematic study of
languages. But the grammars never quite fit (much as Boyle's law
doesn't quite fit). You get ever more complex grammars when you
try to fix up your grammar to make it closer to fitting, instead
of simply accepting that languages don't fit our imposed grammars.
"Complex" to you means the ENTIRE GRAMMAR SYSTEM is complex after you
collect all the rules up in a pile.
That is not what I meant when I used it. What I meant was a singular
rule of grammar, taken all by itself in one single sentence is
complex. In fact, it is more complex than it needs to be.
So when the smoke clears, either HMSBeagle has read Chomsky
incorrectly, or Neil W Rickert has read him incorrectly. It is
certainly one of us, and we will have to go to his actual writings to
find out which one of us it is!
Chomsky said (paraphrased) "There is no way a child could have simply
learned the complexities of language by itself using imitation alone.
There must be a deep grammar in the genes of toddlers."
And I hope we don't disagree on THAT point since I'm going to
springboard off it now with this:
[1] Did Chomsky mean this complexity is in the GRAMMAR SYSTEM taken
as
a whole?
[2] Or did he mean the particular grammar rules in isolation, taken
one at a time, are extremely
complex/non-intuitive/wasteful/hard-to-compute ?
HMSBeagle claims [2] is what Chomsky said. Rickert says Chomsky
said [1].
Who is right about Chomsky? I ask all of you.
I don't have time to craft a full response right now, but if I'm
remembering my Chomsky right I think that phrasing the questions the
way you do is already wrong. Basically, Chomsky's arguments about
innate languages are that there are innate regularities in all (or
most) natural languages and that these regularities -- as well as the
other aspects -- cannot be learned from imitation because there is a
poverty of stimulus in terms of language that they would have been
exposed to before they learn a language. The regularities and
deviations will be captured in grammatical and linguistic analysis of
natural languages, but I don't think that Chomsky ever argues that
those rules just ARE what he's talking about; his big argument is
about regularities between completely different languages with
therefore different "grammars".
<start sarcasm>
Basically, Kirchmeir's argument about innate walking and running is that
there are innate regularities in all (or most) walking and running
observed in toddlers, and that these regularities -- as well as other
aspects such as crawling and climbing -- cannot be learned from
imitation because there is a poverty of stimulus in terms of walking and
running that toddlers would have been exposed to before they learn to
walk and run.
<end sarcasm>
If we read Chomsky as claiming that there is an innate language learning
system, then his claim is almost trivially true. There are all kinds of
innate learning systems in all kinds of animals. We tend to classify
animals with more, and more complex, learning learning systems as more
intelligent. (That's a hint for AI.) But all such learning systems
exhibit an intricate interplay between genes and environment, between
nature and nurture.
Chomsky's claim is overblown because he had a poor understanding of
conditioning, a do those who believe he made a valid claim. He believed
that behavourists claim that one can produce any behaviour in any
animal. That is clearly nonsense.
Strawman alert. I'm quite sure that nobody in their right mind
believes that animals can be conditioned to produce behaviours of
which they are incapable, including Chomsky.
I was getting the feeling that Allan really meant to say that
behaviorism claims an animal's brain can associate any behavior with
any stimulus in an unbiased way. This turned out to be false, which is
the famous example used to debunk behaviorism. The failures usually
take place in stimuli having to do with taste and olfaction.
First of all, most behaviorists would chuckle (i.e., laugh at you) at the
notion that they claim that the brain "associates" anything (it is the
environment or the experimenter that "associates things"). Second, leaving
aside "the brain associates" nonsense, nobody ever claimed that any response
can be controlled by any stimulus (to paraphrase your trash) or that any
reinforcer can alter the probability of any response etc. Nobody. Since
nobody ever argued what you are asserting, the fact that it is false is of
little moment. And the "Garcia Effect" is only one the things that have been
said to "debunk behaviorism." The other so-called "constraints on learning"
have nothing to do with taste or olfaction. The Brelands published the silly
"Misbehavior of Organisms" and they reported two similar failures to get an
animal to do what they wanted. Both involved the same trick; a pig was
trained to pick up a wooden coin and put it in a piggy bank - the reinforcer
was food. The behavior was trained but very quickly the pig started to
"root" the coin along the ground - can you explain this effect (hint: it is
ironic)? A similar thing happened when they attempted to train racoons to do
the same thing. The behavior was, in fact, established, but the 'coons soon
took to rubbing the coin vigorously between their paws. Explanation? In the
'70s this trend continued, but the claims were sometimes more dubious. I
remember Bolles' claim that Sidman Avoidance was extremely difficult to
train. I found this particularly amusing because Sidman Avoidance was one of
the first things I trained rats to do as an undergrad (in the lab I was in
as an undergrad, we actually trained the avoidance instead of just throwing
the animal in a chamber with the procedure running). It is true, though,
that Sidman avoidance is more difficult to establish than shuttlebox
avoidance, but literally thousands of rats have been so trained.
Undergraduate textbooks still sometimes claim that so-called negative
automaintenance is permenant - but it is not even longlasting. Oh yeah -
then there was the claim that pigeons could not be trained in Sidman
Avoidance where a key-peck was the response. At least that one IS difficult,
but not impossible. BTW, "behaviorism" could be regarded simply as the view
that behavior can be treated as a subject matter in its own right rather
than as a symptom of activity in the mind or brain. And also, BTW, there is
no compelling evidence that taste aversions are anything but an example of
classical conditioning.
However, I'll bet that many behavourists believe (or at least hope)
that animals can be conditioned to produce any behaviour of which they
*are* capable. For example, zebra finches might be "capable" of
uttering their songs backward, in the sense that all the required
musculature and orifices are available, but good luck trying to
condition it. Analogously, if you tried to raise human children in a
"culture" where questions are formed by reversing the whole sentence,
you would have to apply severe behavioural control measures to succeed
and once the control was released the kids would likely regularize the
artificial grammar and revert back to the forms observed in actual
human languages. This is not to say that human languages are
adequately described by formal stuctures, but they most definitely
exhibit signs of innately determined structure that is exquisitely
sensitive to some eliciting patterns of stimuli and resistant to
others.
And not just "innately determined structure" but the brains of animals
appear to illicit innate dispositions and innate BEHAVIORAL
tendencies.
Usually it is stimuli that are said to elicit behavior. I can't really make
out what you are trying to argue, but it appears stupid (which is hardly
surprising coming from you).
.
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