the Trask-Hubey debate

[H.M.Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry Trask wrote:
>
> On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, H. M. Hubey wrote:
>
> > That is the real reason I post what I do. There are computer programs that
> > paint and compose music. Is it really that hard to believe that linguistic
> > reconstruction is no less structured?
>
> There is no comparison.
>
> *Any* piece of paintwork we might produce counts as a painting.  And
> *any* piece of music we might produce counts as music.  But it is *not*
> true that any "reconstruction" we might produce counts as a
> reconstruction.
 
Any piece of paintwork does not count as painting. The painters have
their
own black magic guild which decides what is art and what is not. Does
that
ring a bell?
 
Besides, art and music were almost the last refuge for anti-AI crowds
who thought they finally found something computers could not do but
which "intellectuals" could do. Of course, they also deemed that doing
math (and physics, and engineering, and compsci and ....) was
mechanistic,
rote, deterministic, rule-following, algorithmic stuff that computers
could
do, and "real intellectual activity" was things like playing chess,
painting,
writing poetry, composing music etc. Now they have no place to hide
because
what we see is that they are also about rules.
 
And now during the last hurrah of anti-AI frenzy you are picking up the
mantle and expect to convince me with decades old arguments which have
already been blasted to smithereens.
 
 
> A linguistic reconstruction is an attempt at recovering a real but
> unrecorded piece of prehistory, and it is not an attempt at producing an
> original work of art.
>
> I have little doubt that it would be possible to write a computer
> program that would chomp its way through any pile of linguistic data we
> chose to dump into it and spit out some kind of result, according to its
> instructions.  But I see no reason to suppose that such a result would
> be anything but meaningless.
 
I have no doubt that I can write a program to do exactly what you claim
can't be done, just as I had no doubt that music creation or art
creation could be automated. I also have no doubt that people like
Starostin
already have made much progress with his electronic and machine readable
database of languages and etymologies. I also have no doubt that soon
lots of
others will be doing it.
 
I also have very small doubts that I can write a program that can take
n words from language A, and m from language B and write a program that
can change one set into the other (at least enough of them to dumbfound
the skeptics and force them to having N new looks into the "comparative
method") using only regular sound changes. The only problem is that I
don't have the time or energy to put into such a useless demonstration.
It will probably be done by someone (like Starostin) or someone else
who is upset at the way linguists spurn statistics and math. After all,
it the only thing that will make people sit up and take notice there is
no better way than to demolish their toy :-)
 
> > I bring this up, because for a long time the anti-AI crowd used
> > arguments similar to those offered often on linguistics lists for
> > why AI would be impossible.
>
> I do not believe this is true.
 
See,
 
Hubey, H.M. (1996) "Topology of Thought", CC-AI: Journal for the
Integrated STudy of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science,
and Applied Epistomology", vol 13, No.2-3, pp.225-292.
 
 
> Larry Trask
> COGS
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 9QH
> UK
>
> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
 
--
Best Regards,
Mark
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