[Corpora-List] ANC, FROWN, Fuzzy Logic

[John F. Sowa]

Linda, Rob, Chris, and Mark,

I agree with Rob on following point:

RF> As far as I know fuzzy logic is just a way of keeping
 > track of uncertain qualities, it does not explain the
 > underlying uncertainty.

I also agree that Greg Chaitin makes many good points, but
the connection between those points and this discussion is
not clear.

RF> the solution is to understand language to be fundamentally
 > a corpus and not a logical system of rules and classes over
 > that corpus.

The first half of that sentence doesn't say much, since Chomsky
also claimed that language is a corpus, but one that is generated
by rules.  Saying that the corpus is not generated by rules might
be a reasonable claim, but then it is necessary to answer Chris's
questions:

CB> how should we, as scientists, proceed in trying to derive
 > objective and generalizable knowledge about language from
 > corpora?
 >
 > once we have decided what to try and explain, what kind of
 > models we should use?

Mark itemized some good questions that linguists and other
cognitive scientists have been working on for years:

MPL> How is the process [of generating the corpus] learned?
 >
 > Does the process work identically in all humans?  If not,
 > how can we characterize the similarities and differences?
 >
 > Has the process always been the same phylogenetically? If not,
 > how can we characterize its origin and evolution?
 >
 > How does the corpus relate to our predictive models of the
 > process?
 >
 > How is the process implemented in wetware?

That gives us nine good questions from Chris and Mark, and
many of us who are tuned in to this list would love to see
satisfactory answers to them.

Perhaps complexity theory might be helpful in answering them,
but we need much more than a pointer to a paper in which Greg C.
doesn't address any of them.

John Sowa