Wait, that's not true, is it? Chomsky's UG is not the English grammar we know and hate, but a more abstract one which will probably be satisfied by literal transcripts, etc. No?
> 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?
I didn't think that was the crux of the "poverty of input" argument (unless I am parsing the above wrong). I thought the argument was that the child just does not get enough structured/staged input in terms of sentences to exhibit the unerringly grammatically consistent development of her linguistic capabilities. Or rather, here is what I understand of it:
a) the child gets only grammatically (in the UG sense) sentences thrown at it. It does not get examples of wrong sentences.
b) the correct sentences a child encounters in the crucial stages of language acquisition are just not enough for it to learn a general algorithm for grammar that can produce the rich variety of grammatically correct sentences.
And then, to justify the innateness claim, the following is added:
c) more: startlingly, the child from the get go utters (when she does) grammatically correct sentences.
>> 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.
That's a fair summary of what I was saying. One more thing: just as in the Creator theory, but to a lesser degree, the postulated entity offers no explanatory benefit, and if some child behavioural psychologists are to be believed, it has negative predictive benefit.
> 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.
But the presence of planets, as entities that can affect the orbit of other stellar objects, as also the general framework that things affect other things (gravity), are independently established notions, yes?
--ravi