[Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

[Yorick Wilks]

I am sure Iain's observation is the key one that should shut this  
correspondence down:

*all uttered strings are (positive) data (to linguistic enquiry)
*all events are (positive) data (to physics)

BUT

*some linguistic strings refute some grammatical hypotheses (without  
implausible gymnastics)
*some events refute some physical theories (ditto)

so that's it--honour saved on all sides,and linguistics is like  
science, with the proviso that there are negative-events-FOR-SPECIFIC- 
THEORIES!

The all-time favourite is surely the Michelson-Morley experiment  
(1906?) which showed there was no ether drag and so no ether
Yorick Wilks

!
On 4 Jan 2008, at 15:01, idcl wrote:

> 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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