[Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

[Santos Diana]

Dear Geoffrey, (and all participating in this discussion)
could you please clarify what exactly is the argument here?

Am I right in assuming that the "poverty of the stimulus" argument that
you are discussing is an argument for the claim that one cannot learn a
language based only on positive evidence? 
(Is this the thesis that is implicitly being denied here?)

Although I cannot see how such a "poverty of the stimulus" can be
brought to justify innate faculties and not learning (i.e., I am fully
convinced that people _do_ learn languages by social interaction :-), I
also am not happy with the jump to compare natural language learning
with scientific research, that apparently some people in this list seems
to consider much easier than speaking... :-)

How many people have come to the Newtonian (or whatever scientific) laws
by positive evidence? On the contrary, almost every person has managed
to learn his or her natural language. Possibly the reason is because we
are co-creators, co-participants, and because as John Sowa has pointed
out as well, we do get both positive and negative evidence while
learning!

But I am missing Geoffrey's point about scientific discovery: to me it
is a very different affair, and while we are able to assess that a
person speaks correctly our language, we are not able to assess that
scientific theories about nature are correct...
Best,
Diana


> -----Original Message-----
> From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] 
> On Behalf Of Geoffrey Sampson
> Sent: 4. januar 2008 14:05
> To: corpora at uib.no
> Subject: [Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus
> 
> Mike Maxwell misses the point.  A flying bird may not be 
> accelerating towards the ground, but it is not _disobeying 
> natural laws_.  The fact that it does not move vertically 
> downwards merely means that the law of gravity is not the 
> only natural law, which is true, of course.  What happens in 
> nature depends on the interaction of many different laws.  I 
> was careful to mention a _stone_ released near the earth's 
> surface.  My point was that we do not observe instances of 
> events violating natural law (and marked as such); scientists 
> infer physical theories purely on the basis of observing 
> positive instances.
> 
> 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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