[Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

[Mike Maxwell]

Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
 > ...those who investigate the natural sciences can _never_ observe
 > "negative instances"...
 > Nobody ever saw a stone released near the Earth's surface
 > doing other than accelerating towards the ground at about
 > 32 ft/sec2... yet Newton managed to work out how gravity
 > operates nevertheless

On the contrary, in order to come up with his laws, Newton had to ignore 
a good many counterexamples to the idea that objects accelerate towards 
the ground at 32 ft/sec**2: birds, leaves in the wind, the moon, for 
example--something which Aristotle, for example, had failed to do.

Also (IIRC) it was not until Galileo that people realized a cannon ball 
shot from a cannon fell throughout its trajectory (rather than moving 
horizontally until it ran out of speed, then falling to the ground--a 
perception repeated in modern cartoons).

In fact, all the scientists and philosophers for thousands of years 
before Newton had failed to come up with the right theory; whereas every 
child comes up with more or less the right theory in a matter of a few 
years, and that without standing on the shoulders of the giants who came 
before them.

 > So why, logically, would working out the grammar of a language
 > without negative instances be so much more impossible than working
 > out natural laws?

Maybe because languages are orders of magnitude more complex than 
Newtonian physics?
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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