[Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

[Terry]

Mike misrepresents what Geoffrey says here by using ellipsis, not a very
scientific thing to do! 

Geoffrey's example was a stone. And Geoffrey is right. No one has ever seen
a stone move upward.

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.

Terry

-----Original Message-----
From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of
Mike Maxwell
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2008 2:05 PM
To: CORPORA
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
 > ...those who investigate the natural sciences can _never_ observe
 > "negative instances"...
 > Nobody ever saw a stone released near the Earth's surface
 > doing other than accelerating towards the ground at about
 > 32 ft/sec2... yet Newton managed to work out how gravity
 > operates nevertheless

On the contrary, in order to come up with his laws, Newton had to ignore 
a good many counterexamples to the idea that objects accelerate towards 
the ground at 32 ft/sec**2: birds, leaves in the wind, the moon, for 
example--something which Aristotle, for example, had failed to do.

Also (IIRC) it was not until Galileo that people realized a cannon ball 
shot from a cannon fell throughout its trajectory (rather than moving 
horizontally until it ran out of speed, then falling to the ground--a 
perception repeated in modern cartoons).

In fact, all the scientists and philosophers for thousands of years 
before Newton had failed to come up with the right theory; whereas every 
child comes up with more or less the right theory in a matter of a few 
years, and that without standing on the shoulders of the giants who came 
before them.

 > So why, logically, would working out the grammar of a language
 > without negative instances be so much more impossible than working
 > out natural laws?

Maybe because languages are orders of magnitude more complex than 
Newtonian physics?
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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