asmeurer 5 days ago

It's amusing that he argues (correctly) that "there is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top," but then claims that LLMs cannot tell us anything about language because they can learn "impossible languages" that infants cannot learn. Isn't that an anthropomorphic argument, saying that what a language is inherently defined by human cognition?

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tgv 5 days ago

When Chomsky says "language," he means "natural/human language," not e.g. /[ab]*/ or prime numbers.

foobarqux 5 days ago

Yes, studying human language is actually inherently defined by what humans do, just -- as he points out, if you could understand the article -- studying insect navigation is defined by what insects do and not what navigation systems human could design.