[Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

[Mike Maxwell]

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

A comment from a top poster :-).

In most mailing lists, it's considered good etiquette to not post the 
entire message you're replying to.  And that's what I did.

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

I could argue that point (stones may bounce when they hit something, and 
the Moon is in essence a giant stone), but it misses the point.  Newton 
did not say his laws of motion applied only to stones; rather, they 
applied to *any* object, which meant that there had to be another 
explanation for apparent counter-examples like birds and leaves.  (For 
that matter, until Galileo, people didn't believe that light 
objects--small stones, for example--fell as fast as heavy objects.)

All this is getting rather far from the language issue, except that (1) 
the laws of Newtonian physics were not obvious to millions of people for 
thousands of years, precisely because there were counter-examples; and 
(2) language is far more complicated than Newtonian physics, yet every 
child learns one.  If you don't see a mystery there, then I'm mystified.

(The original post was about poverty of stimulus arguments, about which 
of course there are book-length treatments.)

> 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.

I'll disagree.

> Terry

-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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