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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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Date: Mon, 23 Jan 1995 04:13:01 GMT
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In article <jqbD2KMq0.I9v@netcom.com> jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter) writes:
>In article <D2KEnD.9px@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
>Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>Hmmm ... what do you suppose would happen to you if you tried?  If you find
>>>yourself unable to do so, does this say anything about your free will?
>>>[These questions are meant to be rhetorical and facetious.]
>>
>>So why do you bother with them?  This is not rhetorical.
>
>Why not, Jeff?  Did you take them as some sort of personal attack, or
>something?

No, I was just wondering why you bothered.  So I asked.  What's the
problem?

>I simply thought that "... cannot bring myself to ..." was an interesting
>turn of phrase that could be connected to discussions of free will, and
>that you or others might not have noticed, and that by bringing it to your
>attention it might lead you to have pleasant, amusing, and/or interesting
>thoughts.  But I suppose I should have known better.

Well, you seem to have answered my question in any case.

>It is because interpretation is uncertain that I said "I'm not sure", Jeff.
>But I do have a sense of the implications of some of your statements, even if
>you didn't intend those implications.  Oftentimes, here, when faced with the
>unintended implications of their statements, people claim that they were
>misinterpreted, rather than face the possibility that their premises or
>arguments may be in error.

Sure, sometimes.  But why take that line?  

>>But what you're actually saying is that we have what I'll call an
>>"acceptance grammar" (the rules we learned not to violate, whether as
>>explicit rules or not) and an "approximate" grammar that governs
>>what sentences we might actually produce.  And the suggestion is that
>>we would accept a larger language than we would produce.  Is that right?
>
>Yes.  (I could say something silly about distortion and strong
>misinterpretations that make my statements look ridiculous and obviously
>wrong, but unlike some others I don't think that is the primary mechanism at
>work.)

When you find me doing that, please let me know.

>>If so, you're probably correct, but I'm not sure what the significance
>>of your observation then is.
>
>At the very least it indicates that there is something individual,
>rather than universal, about our "production grammars".  I'm not sure of
>the significance either; it just seemed like something worth noting.

Ok, fair enough.

I think we've more or less converged on the rest.

-- jeff


