[Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

[John A Goldsmith]

Here's my two cents' worth: in the cases that I can think of, in the 
natural and laboratory sciences,
the scientist takes the laws and hypotheses being tested to predict a 
distribution of results (distribution in the
probabilistic sense), and s/he then compares the results---which are 
more positive rather than negative,
but aren't /just /positive---
with the predicted distribution. From such a perspective, there isn't a 
sharp distinction between looking for
negative and positive evidence. I'm not a physicist, but we read about 
theories in physics being
tested in accelerators in which particles are driven to a very high 
energy level, high enough to allow for
hypothetical large-mass particles to arise spontaneously (e.g., the 
Higgs boson). To the extent that the
theory making the prediction is tight, then predictions are relatively 
tight that we should see evidence of
the particle arising soon after our particles have reached a certain 
threshold energy. To the extent that
the theory is a bit soft, we cannot conclude that the proposed particle 
doesn't exist till we have gone
up well past the energy level where we had expected to see the particle.

If one accepts the goal of a theory to be to predict distributions of 
data, then there isn't a sharp distinction
between positive and negative evidence. Loosely speaking, though, if we 
drive the energy of the particles
very, very high and see no evidence of the predicted particle, at some 
point it's not unreasonable to say
that we have negative evidence indicating that the particle just ain't 
there.

John Goldsmith


Mike Maxwell a écrit :
> Terry wrote:
>   
>> Mike misrepresents what Geoffrey says here by using ellipsis, not a very
>> scientific thing to do! 
>>     
>
> A comment from a top poster :-).
>
> In most mailing lists, it's considered good etiquette to not post the 
> entire message you're replying to.  And that's what I did.
>
>   
>> Geoffrey's example was a stone. And Geoffrey is right. No one has ever seen
>> a stone move upward.
>>     
>
> I could argue that point (stones may bounce when they hit something, and 
> the Moon is in essence a giant stone), but it misses the point.  Newton 
> did not say his laws of motion applied only to stones; rather, they 
> applied to *any* object, which meant that there had to be another 
> explanation for apparent counter-examples like birds and leaves.  (For 
> that matter, until Galileo, people didn't believe that light 
> objects--small stones, for example--fell as fast as heavy objects.)
>
> All this is getting rather far from the language issue, except that (1) 
> the laws of Newtonian physics were not obvious to millions of people for 
> thousands of years, precisely because there were counter-examples; and 
> (2) language is far more complicated than Newtonian physics, yet every 
> child learns one.  If you don't see a mystery there, then I'm mystified.
>
> (The original post was about poverty of stimulus arguments, about which 
> of course there are book-length treatments.)
>
>   
>> It is pointless to change the meaning of what people say if you want to make
>> progress. Otherwise what you are doing is simply rhetoric. And this, in
>> spite of what he may say to the contrary, is what Mike is doing here.
>>     
>
> I'll disagree.
>
>   
>> Terry
>>     
>
>   

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