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I think that's a very good analogy, and no, I wouldn't say my brain would "know" Newton's formulas. However, I will still say my brain "knows" grammar. The di
by yongjik 11y ago
I think that's a very good analogy, and no, I wouldn't say my brain would "know" Newton's formulas. However, I will still say my brain "knows" grammar. The difference is complexity.
Even if you consider spins, throwing a ball is only about 9 degrees of freedom. It is too small to make good prediction on how the brain works, so Occam's razor dictates that it probably doesn't solve a differential equation. (Also I could try throwing a baseball, and I'll find that I have to re-learn everything, so it's reasonable to assume that my brain was "optimized" to just throw one particular kind of balls to a particular height.)
Human language is so mind-bogglingly complex that even if you just restrict yourself to a dozen words you can easily utter sentences that were never spoken in entire history of English. Yet my brain has no problem dealing with that.
Sure, we could say that it's all statistical relation, but those relations have to stack (almost) recursively and connect phrases that are a dozen words apart. At what point do we stop calling them a heap of relations and instead call it what it is, i.e., grammar?
- brenschluss 11y agoLet's make it complicated, then: if you're great at walking a tightrope on a windy day, is your brain storing a model of your muscular+skeletal structure and live-computing a kinematics physics model + wind simulation to simulate how you should be walking across that tightrope? My point was that Newton's formulas are simplified models of how the world works. As a result, just because you know how to throw a ball doesn't mean you "know" Newton's formulas. Similarly, just because you know how to speak doesn't mean you "know" grammar. The question to ask to help us answer this question would be: is grammar a simplified model of language?[1] [1] This depends on whether you're a linguistic prescriptivist or descriptivist.
- mbrock 11y agoI don't think that question has that much to do with prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivists want to use the study of grammar to uphold certain linguistic norms; descriptivists find that language works fine without expert supervision; neither is a stance on the scientific origin of linguistic structure. You could be a prescriptivist and believe that grammar is a simplified model: you would just want that model to carry normative weight (e.g. for conservative reasons, or to promote standardized national language, or whatever reason).