Re: Cangelosi/Harnad Symbols

From: Andras Lorincz (alorincz@matavnet.hu)
Date: Thu May 18 2000 - 11:41:32 BST


>la> How about the first two words learned, say 'dad' or 'mam'?
>la> BTW, my son is different. In his case the first word was 'auto'
>la> and he meant it.

sh>Dad, mum and auto are trivial categories. Try chicken-sexing, or
sh>naming all the people you've seen...

As far as I see you define two types of categories:
(1) you can tell the difference based on special higher order features
(2) you can separate individual elements of the categories but can not "tell" the difference
Under these conditions you say (??) that (2) requires "toil" and can not gain anything by "theft".
In my view the point is that if we work with two categories then there is no difference between
trial-and-error or naming. We need more than two categories to see the difference.
Assume that we have a space with parameters and according to the parameters we
have four different categories with sharp decision surfaces. One person is given trial-and-error
feedback (whether he has chosen the good category or not), and another person is given the
name of the category (this latter corresponds to your example with the students and the teacher).
Who will be faster in learning the proper categorization?

Regards,
Andras



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