mit's building 20
survey
replaced rewired
the view from building 20
[...]
Chase: When you say "know so much," you're talking about language?
Chomsky: Yes. You hear sentences now that are radically different from those you've heard in the past. But you can understand them. And if I shifted a couple of words around, you'd recognize it to be gibberish. That's what goes on in normal speech and when you look at it closely, you quickly discover that the properties of language that you and I have mastered, or any child has mastered -- even the most simple properties -- involve things for which we have had minimal, if any, exposure. That's true with the simplest part of language, like word learning. You learn the meaning of a word -- but meaning is a very complicated thing. A dictionary doesn't come close to defining any word. It only gives hints that you can use as an intelligent human. If you really try to give a precise characterization of a word like "house" or "chase," you'll find it's remarkably intricate.
Chase: Could you give me an example.
Chomsky: Take, say, the word "building." If I say that somebody sees Building 20, the building we're in, you know they are outside. Right?
Chase: Right.
Chomsky: The only way you and I could see Building 20, sitting where we are, is if there were a mirror outside that window, and we looked at the mirror and saw Building 20 reflected. That already tells us that a building, or a box, or a house, is not just the physical entity itself. Rather its exterior surface has a special status. There's other evidence that supports the same conclusion. Words like "house," "building," "airplane," and "box" have very strange properties which we come to know without any experience. Nobody ever taught us that if a house is brown, that means its exterior is brown. There's an immense amount that we know about words that we were never taught.
Chase: What does this mean?
Chomsky: What you know can only come from two sources -- inside and outside. If it doesn't come from what's outside us, from our experience, it's got to come from our inner nature. Having a language is something like having arms, not wings. Or like undergoing puberty. These properties are not simply due to the nutritional environment of the embryo.
[...]
...'I guess this will do'," says Jim Glymph of Gehry's firm. "It goes downhill from there."
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survey replaced rewired
- bill 5-19-2004 8:08 pm
the view from building 20
- bill 5-19-2004 11:24 pm [add a comment]
[...]
Chase: When you say "know so much," you're talking about language?
Chomsky: Yes. You hear sentences now that are radically different from those you've heard in the past. But you can understand them. And if I shifted a couple of words around, you'd recognize it to be gibberish. That's what goes on in normal speech and when you look at it closely, you quickly discover that the properties of language that you and I have mastered, or any child has mastered -- even the most simple properties -- involve things for which we have had minimal, if any, exposure. That's true with the simplest part of language, like word learning. You learn the meaning of a word -- but meaning is a very complicated thing. A dictionary doesn't come close to defining any word. It only gives hints that you can use as an intelligent human. If you really try to give a precise characterization of a word like "house" or "chase," you'll find it's remarkably intricate.
Chase: Could you give me an example.
Chomsky: Take, say, the word "building." If I say that somebody sees Building 20, the building we're in, you know they are outside. Right?
Chase: Right.
Chomsky: The only way you and I could see Building 20, sitting where we are, is if there were a mirror outside that window, and we looked at the mirror and saw Building 20 reflected. That already tells us that a building, or a box, or a house, is not just the physical entity itself. Rather its exterior surface has a special status. There's other evidence that supports the same conclusion. Words like "house," "building," "airplane," and "box" have very strange properties which we come to know without any experience. Nobody ever taught us that if a house is brown, that means its exterior is brown. There's an immense amount that we know about words that we were never taught.
Chase: What does this mean?
Chomsky: What you know can only come from two sources -- inside and outside. If it doesn't come from what's outside us, from our experience, it's got to come from our inner nature. Having a language is something like having arms, not wings. Or like undergoing puberty. These properties are not simply due to the nutritional environment of the embryo.
[...]
- bill 5-19-2004 11:45 pm [add a comment]
...'I guess this will do'," says Jim Glymph of Gehry's firm. "It goes downhill from there."
- bill 5-29-2004 12:28 am [add a comment]