pangloss comments on The ideas you're not ready to post - Less Wrong

24 Post author: JulianMorrison 19 April 2009 09:23PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (253)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 20 April 2009 01:58:04AM *  13 points [-]

We are Eliza: A whole lot of what we think is reasoned debate is pattern-matching on other people's sentences, without ever parsing them.

I wrote a bit about this in 1998.

But I'm not as enthused about this topic as I was then, because then I believed that parsing a sentence was reasonable. Now I believe that humans don't parse sentences even when reading carefully. The bird the cat the dog chased chased flew. Any linguist today would tell you that's a perfectly fine English sentence. It isn't. And if people don't parse grammatic structures to just 2 levels of recursion, I doubt recursion, and generative grammars, are involved at all.

Comment author: pangloss 20 April 2009 08:18:02AM 3 points [-]

i believe that linguists would typically claim that it is formed by legitimate rules of English syntax, but point out that there might be processing constraints on humans that eliminate some syntactically well formed sentences from the category of grammatical sentences of English.