[Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

[idcl]

Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
But my main point is that, _even if we
accept the claim that the child's data contains only positive and no
negative information_, it CANNOT be the case that this makes it
logically impossible to infer a grammar (that is a general theory using
a limited range of principles to account for the numerous individual
observed instances), because the natural sciences routinely produce
general theories to account for empirical observations, and we know that
natural scientists _never_ observe events violating physical laws.  

[[Iain]] 
It seems to me that the scientific method is about trying to find cases
which violate one's proposed hypothesis and if one fails then one accepts
that the hypothesis is not disproven (and we can never 'prove' scientific
laws).

So Newton and his predecessors proposed all sorts of theories about gravity
('stones fall faster when they are coloured red') which were successively
disproved until all that was left were the laws that Newton came up with
which could not be disproven (until Einstein, of course).

This is much the same as one of my children saying 'Me wants pudding' and
getting a fierce look.

In short science does learn from negative stimuli - experiments which show a
hypothesis is false.

Iain


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