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Towards a new empiricism| old_uid | 2768 |
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| title | Towards a new empiricism |
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| start_date | 2007/05/07 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The 17th century debate between the empiricists and the rationalists
was a disagreement between friends?between colleagues who were jointly
fighting for science and against Scholasticism. Empiricism has
traditionally favored quantitative theories of evidence, and attempted
to reinterpret kinds of knowledge that do not require evidence (such as
mathematics) in such a way that they can be seen as developments of
logic rather than empirical science. Rationalists and empiricists have
both sought simplicity in scientific description: rationalists have
accounted for this on the basis of the nature of the human mind, while
empiricists have attempted to find an account that lies outside of the
accidental structure of the mind. In recent years, some kinds of
Bayesian analyses have succeeded in pushing the empiricist program
forward, notably approaches employing Minimum Description Length
analysis (Rissanen 1989). In this framework, the algorithmic complexity
of a grammar can be calculated, in ways very similar to those of the
Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (Chomsky 1955), and used as the
basis for a probability distribution over grammars. It then becomes
possible to give an abstract, but empiricist, definition of the best
analysis of a finite set of linguistic data. We will sketch how this
can be done, and how its results can be computationally implemented,
illustrated by a computer program that learns morphological structure
automatically. |
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| responsibles | Aroui |
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