On Saturday 28 April 2007 09:02, Benjamin Goertzel wrote:
> In other words: I became convinced that in the developmental approach, if
> you want to take the human child language learning metaphor at all
> seriously, you need to go beyond pure language learning and take an
> experientially grounded approach.

Yes and no. I think it's possible for an appropriately structured formal 
system to support a fairly substantial discourse based entirely on its 
"noumena", e.g. write a system that you can talk to about plane geometry, 
e.g.

"Construct a normal to line A through point P"
"OK"
"Now construct another one"
"I can't find a distinct one"
"What do you conjecture?"
"That there is only one normal through any given point"

However, in practice, I agree with Ben. The key lack in SHRDLU was that it 
couldn't extend its model (technically, it was a purely noumenal agent as in 
the above).  To learn and extend your model, which children do as part and 
parcel of learning language, you *do* need phenomenal input.

Josh

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