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Learning has to start from some prior or inductive bias. The question is how much knowledge of how language works is built into childrens' innate priors. Chomsk
by canjobear 10y ago
Learning has to start from some prior or inductive bias. The question is how much knowledge of how language works is built into childrens' innate priors. Chomskyans have typically argued that the innate prior ("universal grammar") gets you almost all the way to understanding language, such that you only have to set a few parameters to get to fluent understanding of a real language.
- nyrulez 10y agoThanks, this makes the most sense to me. The problem more generally stated then for more fields is that how much abstraction do we carry innately and how much must be taught. Applies to math as well. It appears to me that ability to count is innate. But beyond that I don't know what else. Would be great to find out.
- Retra 10y agoI'd disagree that "counting" is innate. The mental recognition of scale and quantity may be innate, but "counting" seems to be a more elaborate matter of embedding scale and quantity recognition into an abstract mental or linguistic framework. That is, to count you need to understand number, but to make decisions about scale and quantity, you don't.
- cristianpascu 10y agoJust today I heard a little girl crying to her father (in romanian): "You are giving!" when she actually meant (by the situation and raised hands) "Give me the toy!".