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I don't know who these people who claim that Chomsky is "wrong" are, but it sounds like coming from some newbies who just finished reading a couple of papers on
by cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
I don't know who these people who claim that Chomsky is "wrong" are, but it sounds like coming from some newbies who just finished reading a couple of papers on machine learning, thinking they know the entire field of AI.
From my experience most people who say Chomsky is wrong have in most cases never actually read Chomsky's papers. Trust me it's really hard to finish any of his actual papers, even as someone who majored computational linguistics. I'm pretty sure 99% of people on this thread who are throwing around the term "generative linguistics" casually have no idea what it actually is in detail. Maybe they read some wikipedia article, maybe they watched a 45 minute Youtube video of some famous guy talking about it.
I see it as a same phenomenon as people criticizing that "Blue ocean" theory is wrong, "Black swan" theory is wrong, "Lean startups" theory is wrong, all without actually having read and thought about any of those books and basing their criticism on the shallow knowledge they picked up from blogs, which even I have been guilty of.
My thought: The approach by Chomsky and others in this field may not be in fashion nowadays, but it does provide a significant foundation on top of which many others build their theories. Also for these significant theories there is no "right" or "wrong", the whole point is the theory does exist and it gives us something to think about. Saying Karl Marx was wrong is a foolish thing to say because right or wrong is not what matters. Maybe thousands of years later in the future things may change and communism may end up becoming the perfect ideology for our society then. It's all contextual.
- jugbandjames 10y agoI'd say his research methods are wrong. Limiting your research to so-called competent speakers is cherry picking data, in my view.
- Natanael_L 10y agoDepends on what your goal is. You won't be able to generalize to the wider population, but you'll still be able to learn a lot.
- nhebb 10y agoI don't know anything about AI or machine learning, but your comment reminded me of this: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html HN discussion of related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4290604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4290604
- dilemma 10y agoThat essay misses the point its trying to refute. It references Chomsky talking about the nature of language and by extension the human mind. It then turns to talking about how search engines work, which is an unrelated topic.
- mcguire 10y agoOn the other hand, if your idea of "the nature of language" doesn't include how listeners understand a statement then you are probably not thinking about the nature of language.
- dilemma 10y agoHuman minds are not search engines. They do not run code.
- Isamu 10y agoNorvig's essay references Chomsky literally talking about "trying to apply statistical models to various linguistic problems", which is surely what today's search engines do.
- dilemma 10y agoIt does, but the fact that search engines use statistical models has no overlap with how human language faculties work.