Grammar with a "G"

Rob Freeman r.j.freeman at usa.net
Tue Mar 30 04:15:35 UTC 1999


Sydney M Lamb wrote:

> ...do you really want to claim that the brain
> goes back to square one each time and just starts from the examples plus
> the ability to analogize, and doesn't remember the results of such
> processing performed earlier, and doesn't build generalizations?

Yes, I do. Well, rather, I think those generalizations are the same things as
concepts, so every time you need a new concept you need to build a new generalization.

> >  ... . Of what I regard as 'real' perhaps I can mention
> > the high spots here. ...
> > Parallel Distributed Processing stuff goes without
> > saying (mostly some interesting experiments with finite
> > word classes: English Past Tense etc.), but that carries
> > it's own psychological baggage around with it, and
> > some limitations of method too (the finite class bit),
> > so I wouldn't want to emphasize it here.
>
> Oops!! I now have to ask, what kind of reality you have in mind. The PDP
> stuff has practically zero neurological plausibility, hence can hardly be
> regarded as able to come up with anything realistic.  (At least, I'm happy
> to observe that you "wouldn't want to emphasize it here.")

I agree, they have flaws.

> > > ...my view (now expressed more fully in my new book)
> > > includes a warm spot for analogy (cf. Chap. 14); But it also includes the
> > > position that analogy is a mechanism and that what results from its
> > > operation is new network structure...
> >
> > A rose by another name? Funny, I would have said a
> > _network_ is a mechanism, and what results (very naturally, though
> >  not exclusively) from its operation is often analogy!
>
> I come very close to agreeing with this...
>
> ...But there is
> an example which can clarify, on pp. 212-213 of 'Pathways of the
> Brain'.  It proposes a simple process of building new connections in the
> developing system of a typical child, just in the most directly available
> way to the system at that point, which results in the child's producing
> 'brang' as the past tense of 'bring'.

I would suspect the action of analogy, or at least similarity, least-squares, or some
such thing, in the nature of 'the most directly available way'.

> > ...if we agree to define the 'truth' as a theory we can do something
> > with (wrt a given problem) we are in agreement on the distinction
> > between 'God's Truth' and 'Hocus Pocus' (wrt a given
> > problem).
>
> ...For a person interested in God's Truth, that isn't good enough --
> such a person wants to know, to at least some extent, what is Actually
> There.

Then you will need the 'eye of God', because you will only ever see it filtered
through your education and your brain, and you too, like me and everybody else, will
be seeing mostly both. Personally I'm happy to resign myself to debating useful
abstractions, with the emphasis on _useful_.

Rob



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