…he has? Isn’t his modern term “minimalism”, where he tries to simplify things as much as possible? Regardless, continuing to study the field in no way implies that he’s backed down or meaningfully evolved his basic theories of Universal Grammars. He’s very much still confident in them.
Re: predictive processing, in what way does that relate to language…? Even if you apply it to language in a way not mentioned in the linked article at all, I don’t see even the rough shape of how it would refute (/be mutually exclusive with) generative grammars. Maybe I’m just missing something because I don’t know much neuro?
Re: building a bird… yeah that’s their point, you don't try to build a bird, you try to study birds. Chomsky cares about what we are, not building machines to do our drudgery. I don’t think I agree entirely with that singular focus, but you see the appeal, no?
Gina Kuperberg at Harvard has done extensive work on how predictive coding operates in language processing. Her lab has explored how people generate predictions during language comprehension and how this is reflected in neural activity.
I'll point out that neuroscientists have yet to find the "generative grammar" part of the brain but have seen evidence of a very large network of neurons...
Re: building a bird… I didn’t come up with the analogy and if we all want to stop talking about building birds I would be the first to agree.
But I can’t help by think about all of the whacky ideas like antigravity vital forces that biologists contrived to explain how birds could fly and that it took Bernoulli and the rigorous study of those principles that led to the airfoil… which is how birds actually soar through the air.
BTW, what the fuck happened to these forums in the last few years? It seems like most people base their opinions on how opposite they are to Sam Altman and Elon Musk’s as opposed to any geeky principles of discovery. I highly doubt that most of y’all would have been ardent supporters of generative grammar five years ago… but slap the word LLM on something and boy howdy!
It’s kind of nice, I learn quite a bit defending good ideas. All y’all get is fake internet points.
I fully understand any and all
downvotes! Have fun!
You got me, I believe in the most cited living academic’s theories on cognition to stick it to Elon Musk. So glad you used your geeky principles of discovery to divine that one…
Re: predictive processing, in what way does that relate to language…? Even if you apply it to language in a way not mentioned in the linked article at all, I don’t see even the rough shape of how it would refute (/be mutually exclusive with) generative grammars. Maybe I’m just missing something because I don’t know much neuro?
Re: building a bird… yeah that’s their point, you don't try to build a bird, you try to study birds. Chomsky cares about what we are, not building machines to do our drudgery. I don’t think I agree entirely with that singular focus, but you see the appeal, no?