Comment by tgv
4 days ago
I never agreed with his views on syntaxis, but the (his?) idea that large parts of our language capabilities are innate is almost beyond doubt. Are people still arguing against it?
4 days ago
I never agreed with his views on syntaxis, but the (his?) idea that large parts of our language capabilities are innate is almost beyond doubt. Are people still arguing against it?
I think it's about the details. Chomsky argued a lot of grammar must be innate but the ability of LLMs to do grammar quite well with only a basic artificial neural network argues against that.
Are you familiar with the 'poverty of stimuli' argument? The amount of language we get to process, all aural, is the tiniest of fractions of the amount of data an LLM gets to train on. And in much less processing time, too. So no, LLMs do not argue against that.
I've heard of it but I'm not sure I buy it. I mean you can get examples of most grammatical constructs in a language in a few pages of text or few hours of speech. It takes a long time to go from "mama" to "I feel if I were in Chomsky's position I might have examined LLMs more" say, during which kids would be exposed to a lot of language.
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universal grammar is probably partially correct but Chomsky's position is too wide-sweeping. Grammar just doesn't demand the kind of complexity and precision that he implies.
IMO the problem is that his theories are elaborate logical justifications to sugarcoat some cringe supremacy beliefs about languages and politics. The sugar has always been useful but the core is pure poison.
Chomsky doesn't have any supremacist ideas about language, AFAIK. And I doubt his political views can be classified as such either. What poison do you speak of?