Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!aurora!labrea!alan!tutiya
From: tutiya@alan.STANFORD.EDU (Syun Tutiya)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Message-ID: <2116@alan.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 3 Feb 88 02:37:00 GMT
References: <1671@russell.STANFORD.EDU> <3532@bcsaic.UUCP> <158@glenlivet.hci.hw.ac.uk> <3725@bcsaic.UUCP>
Reply-To: tutiya@alan.UUCP (Syun Tutiya)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 43

In article <3725@bcsaic.UUCP> rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) writes:
>Still,
>it seems to have little to do with the problems that AI researchers busy
>themselves with.  And it has everything to do with what language
>scholars busy themselves with.  Perhaps the participants realize
>instinctively that their views make more sense in this newsgroup.

I am no AI researcher or language scholar, so find it interesting to
learn that even in AI there could be an argument/discussion as to
whether this is a proper subject or that is not.  Does what AI
researchers are busy with define the proper domain of AI research?
People who answer yes to this question can be safely said to live in
an established discipline called AI.

But if AI research is to be something which aims at a theory about
intelligence, whether human or machine, I would say interests in AI
and those in philosophy is almost coextensive.

I do not mind anyone taking the above as a joke but the following
seems to be really a problem for both AI researchers and language
scholars. 

A myth has it that variation in language is a matter of what is called
parameter setting, with the same inborn universal linguistic faculty
only modified with respect to a preset range of parameters.  That
linguistic faculty is relatively independent of other human faculties,
basically.  But on the other hand, AI research seems to be based on the
assumption that all the kinds of intellectual faculty are realilzed in
essentially the same manner.  So it is not unnatural for an AI
researcher try to come up with a "theory" which should "explain" the
way one of the human faculties is like, which endeavor sounds very odd
and unnatural to well-educated language scholars.  Nakashima's
original theory may have no grain of truth, I agree, but the following
exchange of opinions revealed, at least to me, that AI researchers on
the netland have lost the real challenging spirit their precursors
shared when they embarked on the project of AI.

Sorry for unproductive, onlooker-like comments.

Syun
(tutiya@csli.stanford.edu)
[The fact that I share the nationality and affiliation with Nakashima
has nothing to do with the above comments.]