Sympathy or not, the position that meaning of natural language can be inferred from the symbolic form alone wasn’t obvious to me in the past, as this is certainly not how humans learn language, and I don’t know any evidence that someone else thought this plausible before machine learning made it evident. It’s always easy to make something sound obvious after the fact, but that doesn’t mean that it actually was obvious to anyone at the time.
Plenty of linguists and connectionists thought it was possible, if only to show those damned Chomskyans that they were wrong!
To be specific, some of the radical linguists believed in pure distributional semantics, or that there is no semantics beyond syntax. I don’t know anyone in particular, but considering how often Chomsky, Pinker, etc were fighting against the “blank slate” theory, they definitely existed.
The following people likely believed that it is possible to learn a language purely from reading using a general learning architecture like neural networks (blank-slate):
James L. McClelland and David Rumelhart.
They were the main proponents of neural networks in the “past tense debate”. Generally, anyone on the side of neural networks in the past tense debate probably believed this.
B. F. Skinner.
Radical syntacticians? Linguists have failed to settle the question of “Just what is semantics? How is it different from syntax?”, and some linguists have taken the radical position “There is no semantics. Everything is syntax.”. Once that is done, there simply is no difficulty: just learn all the syntax, and there is nothing left to learn.
Possibly some of the participants in the “linguistics wars” believed in it. Specifically, some believed in “generative semantics”, whereby semantics is simply yet more generative grammar, and thus not any different from syntax (also generative grammar). Chomsky, as you might imagine, hated that, and successfully beat it down.
Maybe some people in distributional semantics? Perhaps Leonard Bloomfield? I don’t know enough about the history of linguistics to tell what Bloomfield or the “Bloomfieldians” believed in exactly. However, considering that Chomsky was strongly anti-Bloomsfield, it is a fair bet that some Bloomsfieldians (or self-styled “neo-Bloomsfieldians”) would support blank-slate learning of language, if only to show Chomskyans that they’re wrong.
Sympathy or not, the position that meaning of natural language can be inferred from the symbolic form alone wasn’t obvious to me in the past, as this is certainly not how humans learn language, and I don’t know any evidence that someone else thought this plausible before machine learning made it evident. It’s always easy to make something sound obvious after the fact, but that doesn’t mean that it actually was obvious to anyone at the time.
Plenty of linguists and connectionists thought it was possible, if only to show those damned Chomskyans that they were wrong!
To be specific, some of the radical linguists believed in pure distributional semantics, or that there is no semantics beyond syntax. I don’t know anyone in particular, but considering how often Chomsky, Pinker, etc were fighting against the “blank slate” theory, they definitely existed.
The following people likely believed that it is possible to learn a language purely from reading using a general learning architecture like neural networks (blank-slate):
James L. McClelland and David Rumelhart.
They were the main proponents of neural networks in the “past tense debate”. Generally, anyone on the side of neural networks in the past tense debate probably believed this.
B. F. Skinner.
Radical syntacticians? Linguists have failed to settle the question of “Just what is semantics? How is it different from syntax?”, and some linguists have taken the radical position “There is no semantics. Everything is syntax.”. Once that is done, there simply is no difficulty: just learn all the syntax, and there is nothing left to learn.
Possibly some of the participants in the “linguistics wars” believed in it. Specifically, some believed in “generative semantics”, whereby semantics is simply yet more generative grammar, and thus not any different from syntax (also generative grammar). Chomsky, as you might imagine, hated that, and successfully beat it down.
Maybe some people in distributional semantics? Perhaps Leonard Bloomfield? I don’t know enough about the history of linguistics to tell what Bloomfield or the “Bloomfieldians” believed in exactly. However, considering that Chomsky was strongly anti-Bloomsfield, it is a fair bet that some Bloomsfieldians (or self-styled “neo-Bloomsfieldians”) would support blank-slate learning of language, if only to show Chomskyans that they’re wrong.