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From: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Modelling reinforcement
Message-ID: <1342@ucl-cs.uucp>
Date: 28 Dec 90 17:29:46 GMT
Sender: news@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Lines: 33


A.N.Other said

* This is like carping that physicists study the properties of electrons
* outside of their use in computers and power systems.  If Bohr,
* Einstein, and Planck _inter alia_ had not thought about ``what
* electrons are'', we would have a much poorer conception of ``what
* electrons are for''.
*
*    Chomsky's formal grammars are useful for computers, but for human
*    languages, his approach has been discarded in favor of "pragmatics,"
*    a school which analyzes language explicitly in terms of its uses.
*
* This will come as quite a surprise to the folks on sci.lang, and as
* for me -- you can only imagine my shock to discover that mathematical
* linguistics is as dead as the pyramids.  Thanks, Ben, for clueing me
* in on this; I guess I'll have to change fields as soon as possible.
*
* Seriously, though, you might familiarize yourself with a field before
* pontificating about it.

It was Milikan who first measured the charge on the electron, just
before "Bohr, Einstein, and Planck _inter alia_" and he falsified his
records.  A close examination of one hundred odd experiments in his
notebooks showed that he only reported about half.  If he had reported
the full results his thesis would have been "the electron, as a single
discrete unit, does not exist".

A very pragamatic scientist, Milikan.

Gordon Joly +44 71 387 7050 ext 3716 Internet: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk
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