Rob,
I'm happy that we can conclude on a note of agreement:
JFS>> I don't know what hint you're suggesting. That no rule-based
>> system can ever be complete? I think that's obvious.
RF> I'm glad you see this, John. It is the point I was trying to make.
But I would soften the following claim by replacing "should" with
"might":
RF> Chaitin's work helps us understand why it should be so.
Chomsky's fallacy was to take a mathematical formalism, namely
Post production systems, and make the claim that they capture
the fundamental nature of natural language. If he had softened
that claim to saying they were a promising model of an important
aspect of language, he and his colleagues could have done the
same research, but without inciting the religious wars.
I don't believe that we should take another formalism, such
as Chaitin's or Kolmogorov's, and fall into a similar fallacy
of claiming that they explain the nature of NLs. Claiming
that those formalisms serve as a stimulating analogy is OK.
But I would change either or both occurrences of "is" to
"may be" in the following sentence:
RF> This is because natural language text is at some level
> Kolmogorov complex.
John
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2006 - 14:11:51 MET DST