[Corpora-List] ANC, FROWN, Fuzzy Logic

[Rob Freeman]

On Thursday 27 July 2006 20:13, John F. Sowa wrote:
> 
> Chomsky's fallacy was to take a mathematical formalism, namely
> Post production systems, and make the claim that they capture
> the fundamental nature of natural language.  If he had softened
> that claim to saying they were a promising model of an important
> aspect of language, he and his colleagues could have done the
> same research, but without inciting the religious wars.

John,

Quite what you think the relationship between mathematics and science should 
be, I can't tell. As long as it does not prevent you from accepting my 
conclusions it is probably not worth debating here.

However, I don't think Chomsky's rules ever had a chance of bearing out their 
promise, and I think we must understand the reason for this was not that he 
got the relationship between theory and practice wrong, he was right to 
insist that we reconcile the theory with the data (in his case the "data" 
that discovery methods did not give global rules, others were ignoring this, 
and have continued to do so, kudos to Chomsky.) The problem was that the 
particular theory he chose to believe insisted that he attempt to make his 
rules maximally complete (in terms of coverage), and thus by our theoretical 
understanding guaranteed they would be maximally uncertain.

It is only with reference to the correct theory we can understand that.

Knowledge may be subjective, it may even be ultimately random, but it is not 
totally without consequences. The theoretical choice Chomsky took made a 
difference.

It is not the case that we now see Universal Grammar as just one theory among 
equals, neither more right nor more wrong. That Chomsky and the others could 
have got on together and avoided the "linguistics wars" in content, as well 
as manner. Subjectivity does not mean every theory is right, it means we must 
concentrate on the issue of discovering what is right when.

With a new theoretical insight that there is a trade-off involved we can now 
remedy the problem. Since usually what we want is maximal certainty, we must 
look for ways to buy this by choosing maximal incompleteness (in terms of 
coverage), or specificity of generalization.

I am sure it is the technology for fitting a theory (a grammatical 
generalization in the case of language) to its purpose which will prove most 
useful, not any one generalization or another.

I'm saying this because I know you advocate a solution for the sister problem 
of this grammatical incompleteness, ontological incompleteness, what you call 
"knowledge soup", by simply enumerating numerous theories. I don't think this 
is workable. To be useful theories will have to be far too specific. I'm sure 
the only representation compact enough to make the necessary specificity of 
fit possible will prove to be something close to the raw data, a corpus in 
the case of language.

-Rob