debunking chomsky's poverty of the stimulus

Melody, a researcher in cognitive science at Stanford, has posted a detailed discussion of the problems with Chomsky's famed povery of the stimulus argument from the perspective of the last 40 years of computational learning models. Hindsight is always 20-20 right?

Money quote:

....there are at least two goals of modeling in cognitive science : 1) to discover the best computational method of accounting for a given phenomena, 2) to discover the best account that is also psychologically plausible. The goal has never been to rule out a whole class of models on the basis of one ill-starred example.  Because — quite frankly — models don’t deal in ‘logical possibilities.’  They are not mathematical or logical proofs.  Step 3 in Miller and Chomsky’s paper is a pseudo-scientific non sequitur.

The whole post is well worth reading.

Interesting...

Neuroskeptic has pledged to avoid the word interesting in his blog posts because it begets intellectual laziness:

Sadly it's easier to just call something interesting than to explain why it is. Partly this is because "interesting" (or "fascinating", "thought-provoking", "intriguing", "notable" etc.) is just one word, and it's easier to write one word than a sentence. More important is the fact that you probably don't know why you're interested by something until you do some thinking about it.

Reading this, I couldn't help but be reminded of a conversation between two of my academic advisers, quite early in my graduate linguistics studies, about Chomsky's use of the word "interesting" in that he tended to use it as an insult.  We had formed a reading group one summer to discuss The Minimalist Program and discovered that Chomsky would boldly proclaim that one topic was "interesting" while another was not, seemingly by fiat, with little or no explanation. Our group consensus was that what he really meant was that a linguistic topic was "interesting" if it helped him make his argument; it was "uninteresting" if it did not (we came to the same conclusion about his notion of "narrow syntax", btw; this wiki page lists a variety of other criticisms).