Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!grads.cs.ubc.ca!leblanc
From: leblanc@grads.cs.ubc.ca (David LeBlanc)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Intelligence (was: IQ), Categorization (was: Racism)
Message-ID: <4562@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 26 Jul 89 23:00:30 GMT
References: <3549@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> <4431@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <3557@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca
Reply-To: leblanc@grads.cs.ubc.ca (David LeBlanc)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 37

In article <3557@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) writes:
#* From article <3549@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>, by markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins):
#*
#* ... The fact that we can do it (learn language) "effortlessly" is a
#* reflection on the emormous power of our minds that too many people deny in
#* themselves. ...
#
#* In article <4431@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) writes:
#* Since no one understands the nature of human languages or how they are
#* learned...
#(... we can make no such definitive conclusions ...)
#
#This is begging the question ...
#
#* There is probably a fallacy of thought embedded in this line of
#* speculation that proceeds from the difficulty of characterizing language
#* and how it is acquired...
#...
#* ...It must be very hard for bodies to learn to behave (gravitationally),
#* or they must be wonderfully gifted to be able to learn this
#* lesson.
#* 			Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu
#
#The fallacy clearly lies in the analogy.  Gravitational bodies cannot "learn"
#how to interact by different laws of physics (say electromagnetically).  Their
#"knowedge" is static.
#
The mind as a whole is not static, the inate parser probably is. Current 
linguistic theory states that people are born with an inate parsing mechanism
which is then 'fine tuned' by exposure to language(s) to operate for that
language(s). Whether this 'fine tuning' sets parameters or learns rules (or
some combination thereof), the parsing mechanism remains static.
I would say that the fact we learn language 'effortlessly' is an indicater
that language acquisition is trivial (and a function of the inate parsing
mechanism) rather than "a reflection on the enormous power of our minds ...". 

David LeBlanc