On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 3:25 PM, And Rosta
<and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:
John E. Clifford, On 30/10/2011 18:38:
Whatever else it does ( and I confess to not following most of the
subsequent discussion), xorxes' story raises one of the great
problems for the Aristotelian wing: how do we get to generalizations
from limited instances? Children who have seen only chihuahuas,
somehow recognize terriers and spaniels as dogs, for example. Xorxes
suggests the Platonic answer: we are directly aware of the kind when
we see the instance (well, some of us, anyhow).
Is that Xorxes's answer? I'd have thought his answer is rather that people strive to form inductive generalizations, as in fact is abundantly attested by child language, e.g. the child that calls the moon 'ball', or (as my son did) an overhead lamp 'moon'.
I would tend to agree with that. I think the natural tendency for the language brain is to overgeneralize, and the limits of the of the categories have to be extrinsically learned from other users of the lanaguage.
--gjeyspa