[Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

[Geoffrey Sampson]

I haven't read the reference you mention, but it seems to me clear a
priori that "poverty of the stimulus" is not a valid argument.  That is
because those who investigate the natural sciences can _never_ observe
"negative instances", yet they nevertheless come up with good theories
of how the natural world functions.  Nobody ever saw a stone released
near the Earth's surface doing other than accelerating towards the
ground at about 32 ft/sec^2 -- we never see stones hovering in mid-air
or rising upwards, marked with asterisks to show that they are negative
instances -- yet Newton managed to work out how gravity operates
nevertheless (and philosophers of science have well-developed accounts
of how this theorizing process works).  So why, logically, would working
out the grammar of a language without negative instances be so much more
impossible than working out natural laws?

I would add that the claims made by "poverty of stimulus" linguists
about missing evidence in the language case are often just factually
wrong (and I have documented this at length in various of my own
writings).  But it is not necessary to make that point in order to
defeat the "poverty of stimulus" argument for innate knowledge of
language.  The comparison with natural science is enough on its own.

Geoffrey Sampson

 
............................................................
     Prof. Geoffrey Sampson  MA PhD MBCS CITP FHEA

     author of "The 'Language Instinct' Debate"

     Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
     Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QJ, England

     www.grsampson.net     +44 1273 678525
............................................................


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