tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post3828938452176303424..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: How I spent my summer vacationNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-26262703988829700262016-02-17T09:55:28.869-08:002016-02-17T09:55:28.869-08:00Many many thanks to you for writing this amazing p...Many many thanks to you for writing this amazing post.<br /><br /><b><a href="http://www.catalunyacasas.fr/" rel="nofollow">Golf Espagne</a></b><br />Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04795273083138271459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-84406934983970039162015-09-04T07:33:25.431-07:002015-09-04T07:33:25.431-07:00Putnam was my thesis advisor and is a very smart g...Putnam was my thesis advisor and is a very smart guy, much smarter than I am at any rate. But his comments on this topic have always struck me as both misinformed and rudely dismissive. First of all, it is not at all clear that Chomsky has anything to say about the fund of concepts natively available to us. This is much more Fodor's bag. What Chomsky does assume is that there are natively provided restrictions on the form of grammars and that this has an impact on how sentences are understood and pronounced. Nothing that Putnam says in his note bears on this.<br /><br />Second, he really doesn't discuss Fodor's point, which makes an important distinction between concept acquisition and belief fixation. Fodor's point is that there is a deep sense in which ALL theories of learning assume that it is a process of selection from a pre-specified set of available options. If this is so, then we don't acquire new concepts though we may fix new beliefs. He thinks that there is a way out of this if we could decompose all concepts to a primitive base, but he, like Putnam, doesn't believe that this is viable. Now Putnam thinks that this is absurd. Say he is right. What he has not shown is that Fodor's argument is wrong, only that we don't understand how acquisition works. Fodor might agree. Recall, his is a conditional claim.<br /><br />So Putnam's remarks are no more sensible now than they were when he first made them. The real problem being that he doesn't really address the points that either Chomsky or Fodor made.<br /><br />Two last points:As Chomsky has rightly noted, there is no "innateness controversy." There can't be. EVERYONE assumes some innate bases for acquisition and learning. We call these biases now. The question is not whether but which. Putnam's argument from incredulity is, again, irrelevant to this point. Second, Chomsky's view on evolution given his more recent (20 years!) minimalist musings are much more interesting than Putnam's caricature. As I've discussed this a lot elsewhere on the blog I will leave these comments with this bare assertion here.<br /><br />So, what do I think? That a really smart guy has decided not to engage with the issues for reasons that have always befuddled me.Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-9838377737085218132015-09-03T12:46:31.291-07:002015-09-03T12:46:31.291-07:00Hi Dr. Hornstein,
Have you read Hilary Putnam'...Hi Dr. Hornstein,<br /><br />Have you read Hilary Putnam's latest blog post http://putnamphil.blogspot.com/? How would you disagree?<br /><br />Thanks!<br /><br />ChristophChristophhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13906613266182537540noreply@blogger.com