[curuinor]

Connectionist models have lots of theory by theoreticians explicitly pissed off about Chomsky's assertion that there is an inbuilt ability for language. Jay McClelland's office had a little corkboard thingy with Chomsky mockery on the side, for example. Putting forth even the implicature that the present direct descendants are intellectual descendants of Chomsky is like saying Protestants are intellectual descendants of Pope Leo X.

[seanlinehan]

Perhaps a failure of communication -- I was indeed attempting to say that Chomsky was wrong and his ideas were interesting, but more or less a dead end.

[suddenlybananas]

>Jay McClelland's office had a little corkboard thingy with Chomsky mockery on the side, for example.

I've never understood why the idea of linguistic nativism is so upsetting to people.

[cwmoore]

Indeed, operating human lips, teeth, tongue, and larynx is far beyond language models.

[bbor]

Apologies if I'm stepping on a joke, but just in case: Nativism is about cognitive capacities, not sensorimotor ones. All apes could easily communicate just as well as Helen Keller, yet none of them have ever asked a question, much less written a book!

[cwmoore]

No joke. Same sensorimotor neurons in the human speech apparatus have cognitive analogues, developed together over vast expanses of history.

[pixl97]

Give language models 500 million years and lets revisit this. One of the reasons robots are harder to reach parity than higher intelligence, evolution has been cooking it a long time.

[bbor]

Well that anecdote is referencing the Scruffies v. Neat war[1], within which the nativism debate was merely a somewhat-archaic undercurrent.

IMHO, a lot of the more specifically anti-nativist sentiments of today are based in linguistics itself rather than philosophy, CS, or CogSci, where again it is part of a broader (and much dumber) debate: whether linguistics is the empirical study of languages or the theoretical study of language itself. People get really nasty when they're told that they work in an offshoot field for some reason, which is why I blame them for the ever-too-common misunderstandings of Chomsky -- the most common being "Universal Grammar has been disproven because babies don't speak English in the womb".

If Chomsky weren't so obviously right, this would be a worrying development! Luckily I expect it to be little more than a footnote in history, so it's merely infuriating rather than depressing.

[1] Minsky, 1991: https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article...