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    The poverty of the stimulus argument gives no more suppor... — Carmelics
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    Home/Skepticism
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    The poverty of the stimulus argument gives no more support to a nativist (UG-based) theory than to alternative non-nativist theories.

    Philosophy of LanguageSkepticism
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Bayesian learners (Perfors et al. 2011) can infer hierarchical phrase structure from distributional data without innate syntactic constraints.
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    • 2.If non-nativist models demonstrably converge on adult grammars from realistic input, the poverty of the stimulus loses its force as an argument for UG specifically.
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    • 3.The explanatory burden falls on nativists to show UG is uniquely necessary, not merely compatible with observed acquisition patterns.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Pullum and Scholz (2002) showed that the primary linguistic data children receive is richer than Chomskyan poverty-of-stimulus arguments presuppose.
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    • 2.If the stimulus is not genuinely impoverished for the relevant constructions, the logical gap that UG is invoked to bridge does not exist, leaving nativist and non-nativist theories on equal empirical footing.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.The argument is purely negative against Popperian learning strategies.
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    • 2.Alternative theories (e.g., learners formulating grammatical hypotheses based on statistical information about the primary linguistic data and rejecting them for reasons other than outright falsification, such as lack of explicit confirmation or incoherence with other parts of the grammar) are equally compatible with the argument's negative conclusion.
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    Related

    Alternative theories (e.g., learners formulating grammatical hypotheses based on...Bayesian learners (Perfors et al. 2011) can infer hierarchical phrase structure ...If non-nativist models demonstrably converge on adult grammars from realistic in...If the stimulus is not genuinely impoverished for the relevant constructions, th...
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    Pullum and Scholz (2002) showed that the primary linguistic data children receiv...The argument is purely negative against Popperian learning strategies.The explanatory burden falls on nativists to show UG is uniquely necessary, not ...

    Similar

    Tomasello's theory contrasts strongly with the nativist approach.81%If the innateness of UG as a whole is to be supported by poverty of th...81%The Chomskyan poverty of the stimulus argument is quite weak.80%The poverty-of-stimulus argument does not establish that Universal Gra...80%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: innateness-language
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    Thus arise two problems for the Chomskyan argument. First, it is not all that surprising to discover that if language learners employed a method of conjecture and refutation, then language could not be learned from the data. In other words, the poverty of the stimulus argument doesn't tell us much we didn't know already. Secondly, and as a result, the argument is quite weak: it makes the negative point that language acquisition does not occur via a Popperian learning strategy, but it favo
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit