Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michael Dawson has written an introductory book on Cognitive Science2. In the introduction of the book he tells us a story about a coffeeroom on the top floor of the Humanities and Social Science Building of Western Ontario University. From there you get a picturesque view of the surrounding woods, get very good coffee and very stimulating conversation. Whatever may be the hour of the day, you are sure to find a handful of faculty members talking shop. For a student those shop-talks turn out to be particularly illuminating. Next he wants us to imagine a mythical coffee room frequented by both Freud and Skinner, and asks us a very important question. Given their wildly different world-views, would Freud and Skinner have enough in common to shop talk? Probably in the interest of the peace in the coffee room, they would visit the place at different times. Similar would have been the outcome, had Chomsky and Skinner visited the coffee room at the same time. But suppose Bhartrhari, the famous Grammarian philosopher of India, had travelled by time machine and arrived at the coffee room while Chomsky was there. Both of them would engage in animated conversation and they would find, I think, that they are kindred naturalist souls. They could discuss to the point of distraction how human beings acquire language, how human communication takes place, how would they reconcile the linguistic facts with established results of the hard sciences, should they try to reduce linguistic elements to neurobiological matter and so on. They can even join hands to fight their common enemies - the conventionalists in linguistic theories.INaturalism, it appears, is the order of the day. Even philosophers who always thrived in a normative atmosphere seem to be adapting themselves to the so-called turn. Many linguists have also jumped onto the bandwagon. To the dismay of their conventionalist opponents, these naturalist linguists have gone on to describe language as a natural object, as an instinct or as a biological endowment more or less immune to cultural influences. Some are again in search of a language specific/grammar specific single gene, which they think will provide us with a definitive explanation of how speech and language develop in humans. Actually literature in the area is vast and the topic is too deep to handle in an article. Let me, therefore, circumscribe my paper and narrow it down mainly to the discussion of of the Chomskyan variety. In the first part of my paper, I propose to give a brief account of varieties of with a view to understanding and assessing Chomsky's brand of naturalism. In the end, I shall briefly compare Chomsky's view with that of Bhartrhari.IIPeter Strawson3 in his 1983 Woodbridge Lectures rightly pointed out that the term naturalism is elastic in its use. He distinguished between two main varieties: hard or reductive and soft or liberal naturalism. Hard views human beings with their different endowments as mere objects - parts of nature - to be described, analysed and causally explained. They think that it is possible to have an absolute and pure objective view of human beings and behaviours. Soft naturalists, on the other hand, are ready to accommodate subjective dispositions and personal attitudes within general naturalistic framework. While the former champions objectivity, unity and historicity, the latter is in favour of appropriate relativisation within a stable, overarching framework. Eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of human nature call for relative valorisation and historyspecific assessment. The liberal naturalists, therefore, draw our attention to the poverty of hard and make us aware of the pitfalls of what is known as scientism in a pejorative sense.There is another way of distinguishing between and in recent literature4. The main division is methodological and substantive; the former has as its important sub-varieties (a) Replacement Theory and (b) Expansionist/Normative Theory, while the latter may be subdivided into Ontological and Semantic. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".