Computational models and Rethinking innateness

Abstract

On the whole, I quite like both the target book (RI) and the review by Matthew Rispoli, but there are some additional observations that might be of interest to the readers of this journal. The whole concept of ‘truth through disputation’ is alien to my scientific tradition and I agree with Rispoli that RI is not helped by the polemical tone.

There is a companion volume and software suite by Kim Plunkett & Jeff Elman (1997), Exercises in rethinking innateness, which we have used in an undergraduate cognitive science course. This is, in my opinion, the best source for understanding the main point of RI, which I summarized for the class as: the book tries to show that PDP learning techniques have advanced to the point where we need not assume that tabula rasa learning of language must be ruled out. The Exercises in RI book and particularly doing the on-line examples give the students direct intuition about this claim. Our students were impressed by the Tlearn system, but understood its limitations and were not convinced either of the main claim of RI or of the radical nativist alternative.