> If I understand it right, Chomsky and Co say that there just aren't
> enough inputs into the system (the system here being a child during
> say the ages of 8 months to 3 years, as she or he goes about acquiring
> language) too limited to account fully for the richness (and I am
> guessing accuracy) of the child's language capability.
It's not so much that they're limited as it is that they're ungrammatical -- how do you construct a grammar from ungrammatical data? Reading unedited literal transcripts of people's conversations -- e.g. the Watergate tapes -- is instructive here.
Put a different way, how does the kid figure that some of what he's hearing is grammatical and some is not, and which is which?
It seems quite unlikely that a statistical approach could do it -- that would involve a combinatorial explosion, surely.
> At least until a few years ago, the argument from ID proponents was
> that the eye was just way too complex in structure to have just
> appeared in entirety to fulfil its function.
So -- have I got this right -- you see the postulated language capacity as being like the postulated Creator? I guess one postulated unseen entity is in some respects much like another -- all these chimaerae bombinantes in vacuo are, as it were, cousins -- but the postulated language capacity seems to require a smaller leap of faith. In fact it looks to me a bit like postulating a hitherto unseen planet based on perturbations in the orbit of one you *can* see.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org