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From: harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Pinker & Prince Reply (long version)
Keywords: connectionism, symbolic rules, learnability, past tense formation
Message-ID: <2831@mind.UUCP>
Date: 2 Sep 88 19:06:20 GMT
References: <2816@mind.UUCP> <2817@mind.UUCP> <2818@mind.UUCP>
Organization: Cognitive Science, Princeton University
Lines: 32



Posted for Pinker & Prince [pinker@cogito.mit.edu] by S. Harnad
--------------------------------------------------------------
In his reply to our answers to his questions, Harnad writes:

	-Looking at the actual behavior and empirical fidelity of 
	 connectionist models is not the right way to test
	 connectionist hypotheses;

	-Developmental, neural, reaction time, and brain-damage data
	 should be put aside in evaluating psychological theories. 

	-The meaning of the word "learning" should be stipulated to
	 apply only to extracting statistical regularities 
	 from input data.

	-Induction has philosophical priority over innatism.

We don't have much to say here (thank God, you are probably all
thinking). We disagree sharply with the first two claims, and have no
interest whatsoever in discussing the last two. 

Alan Prince
Steven Pinker
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted for Pinker & Prince by:
-- 
Stevan Harnad   ARPANET:  harnad@mind.princeton.edu         harnad@princeton.edu
harnad@confidence.princeton.edu     srh@flash.bellcore.com      harnad@mind.uucp
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CSNET:    harnad%mind.princeton.edu@relay.cs.net