[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computational linguistics

[Elzbieta Dura]

Thanks John for the summary of Chomsky's postulates and inspirations.

For me the biggest problem is that the research which departs from a highly
uncertain assumption about a language shared by all humans did not leave
room for the research allowing for the doubt of whether we really do
understand each other. And what Chomsky described was not "language in
general" only the English language.

Elzbieta Dura


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: den 5 juli 2007 00:09
To: Steve Finch
Cc: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Chomsky and computational linguistics

Steve,

The goal of any science is to understand the subject matter,
and the goal of engineering is to apply such understanding to
solve practical problems.  Paradigms can be useful means toward
either goal, but they are not the ultimate goal.

 > If your goal is to produce a theory of the structure of language
 > in terms of the sort of theories of syntax that Chomsky pioneered
 > and in the paradigm which he introduced, all of which are
 > insightful and great achievements, I have seen very little evidence
 > that the sort of study that goes on in corpus linguistics has very
 > much insightful to add to that enterprise.

As I said in my previous notes, I agree that Chomsky had developed
some very insightful techniques and paradigms that have deepened
our understanding of many aspects of language.  That is good.

But he lost sight of the ultimate goal:  understanding language.
By his dogmatic insistence on enforcing a single paradigm, he caused
a great deal of harm to the entire science and to its engineering
applications by blocking other people with different insights from
developing and exploring other, potentially more fruitful paradigms.

In my earlier note, I quoted Peirce's "first rule of reason":

    Do not block the way of inquiry.

And I cited Eugene Wigner as a model to emulate:  a scientist who
continued to produce new results within the paradigm he knew very
well, but who did not try to block other scientists from developing
their own insights in their own way.

John Sowa