Re: Pinker's Critique of Neural Nets

From: Lyne Katherine (
Date: Fri May 24 1996 - 12:09:07 BST

Neural nets are suggestions for the woking of the brain. It was
suggested that, due to a combination of levels and systems, neural nets
could perform tasks in the same way that a human brain does, including
learning and producing output. Pinker however argued that neural nets
could not be an accurate represention of the brain as they were unable
to cope with applying rules. The nets are capable of recognising and
working with examples that they have already met but they are unable to
apply rules to new, unseen examples. For example, humans are able to
cope with the rules of grammar. In applying the rules, a human would
say in a sentance that "he walks" present tense, but "he walked" past
tense. They would also be able to remember that "I go" goes to "I went"
with an irregular. Pinker argued that this ability to recognise and
apply special cases was the only quality that hu8mans and neural nets
share - because nets are unable to apply the normal rules of grammar or
any other example. This could be due to lack of feedback - the net can
never know that the rule it has applied is correct. It can only work
with examples that it has seen before and recognises.

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