Investigations into Lamarckism, Baldwinism and Local Search in Grammatical Evolution Guided by Reinforcement

Grammatical Evolution Guided by Reinforcement is an extension of Grammatical Evolution that tries to improve the evolutionary process adding break a learning process for all the individuals in the population. With this aim, each individual is given a chance to learn through a reinforcement learning mechanism during its lifetime. The learning process is completed with a Lamarckian mechanism in which an original genotype is replaced by the best learnt genotype for the individual. In a way, Grammatical Evolution Guided by Reinforcement shares an important feature with other hybrid algorithms, i.e. global search in the evolutionary process combined with local search in the learning process. In this paper the role of the Lamarck Hypothesis is reviewed and a solution inspired only in the Baldwin effect is included as well. Besides, different techniques about the trade-off between exploitation and exploration in the reinforcement learning step followed by Grammatical Evolution Guided by Reinforcement are studied. In order to evaluate the results, the system is applied on two different domains: a simple autonomous navigation problem in a simulated Kephera robot and a typical Boolean function problem

On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution

Jerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical narrative. I argue that Darwin was right on all counts. Until Darwin's "tautology," it had been believed that either (a) God had created all organisms as they are, or (b) organisms had always been as they are. Darwin revealed instead that (c) organisms have heritable traits that evolved across time through random variation, with survival and reproduction in (changing) environments determining (mindlessly) which variants were successfully transmitted to the next generation. This not only provided the (true) alternative (c), but also the methodology for investigating which traits had been adaptive, how and why; it also led to the discovery of the genetic mechanism of the encoding, variation and evolution of heritable traits. Fodor also draws erroneous conclusions from the analogy between Darwinian evolution and Skinnerian reinforcement learning. Fodor’s skepticism about both evolution and learning may be motivated by an overgeneralization of Chomsky’s “poverty of the stimulus argument” -- from the origin of Universal Grammar (UG) to the origin of the “concepts” underlying word meaning, which, Fodor thinks, must be “endogenous,” rather than evolved or learned

On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution

Jerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical narrative. I argue that Darwin was right on all counts. Until Darwin's "tautology," it had been believed that either (a) God had created all organisms as they are, or (b) organisms had always been as they are. Darwin revealed instead that (c) organisms have heritable traits that evolved across time through random variation, with survival and reproduction in (changing) environments determining (mindlessly) which variants were successfully transmitted to the next generation. This not only provided the (true) alternative (c), but also the methodology for investigating which traits had been adaptive, how and why; it also led to the discovery of the genetic mechanism of the encoding, variation and evolution of heritable traits. Fodor also draws erroneous conclusions from the analogy between Darwinian evolution and Skinnerian reinforcement learning. Fodor's skepticism about both evolution and learning may be motivated by an overgeneralization of Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus argument" -- from the origin of Universal Grammar (UG) to the origin of the "concepts" underlying word meaning, which, Fodor thinks, must be "endogenous," rather than evolved or learned

Universal Grammar: Wittgenstein versus Chomsky

Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, ‘Universal Grammar: Wittgenstein versus Chomsky’ in M. A. Peters and J. Stickney, eds., A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations (Singapore: Springer Verlag, 2017), ISBN: 9789811031342The motivations for the claim that language is innate are, for many, quite straightforward. The innateness of language is seen as the only way to solve the so-called 'logical problem of language acquisition': the mismatch between linguistic input and linguistic output. In this paper, I begin by unravelling several strands of the nativist argument, offering replies as I go along. I then give an outline of Wittgenstein's view of language acquisition, showing how it renders otiose problems posed by nativists like Chomsky – not least by means of Wittgenstein's own brand of grammar which, unlike Chomsky's, does not reside in the brain, but in our practices.Peer reviewe

Complex systems and the history of the English language

Complexity theory (Mitchell 2009, Kretzschmar 2009) is something that historical linguists not only can use but should use in order to improve the relationship between the speech we observe in historical settings and the generalizations we make from it. Complex systems, as described in physics, ecology, and many other sciences, are made up of massive numbers of components interacting with one another, and this results in self-organization and emergent order. For speech, the “components” of a complex system are all of the possible variant realizations of linguistic features as they are deployed by human agents, speakers and writers. The order that emerges in speech is simply the fact that our use of words and other linguistic features is significantly clustered in the spatial and social and textual groups in which we actually communicate. Order emerges from such systems by means of self-organization, but the order that arises from speech is not the same as what linguists study under the rubric of linguistic structure. In both texts and regional/social groups, the frequency distribution of features occurs as the same pattern: an asymptotic hyperbolic curve (or “A-curve”). Formal linguistic systems, grammars, are thus not the direct result of the complex system, and historical linguists must use complexity to mediate between the language production observed in the community and the grammars we describe. The history of the English language does not proceed as regularly as like clockwork, and an understanding of complex systems helps us to see why and how, and suggests what we can do about it. First, the scaling property of complex systems tells us that there are no representative speakers, and so our observation of any small group of speakers is unlikely to represent any group at a larger scale—and limited evidence is the necessary condition of many of our historical studies. The fact that underlying complex distributions follow the 80/20 rule, i.e. 80% of the word tokens in a data set will be instances of only 20% of the word types, while the other 80% of the word types will amount to only 20% of the tokens, gives us an effective tool for estimating the status of historical states of the language. Such a frequency-based technique is opposed to the typological “fit” technique that relies on a few texts that can be reliably located in space, and which may not account for the crosscutting effects of text type, another dimension in which the 80/20 rule applies. Besides issues of sampling, the frequency-based approach also affects how we can think about change. The A-curve immediately translates to the S-curve now used to describe linguistic change, and explains that “change” cannot reasonably be considered to be a qualitative shift. Instead, we can use to model of “punctuated equilibrium” from evolutionary biology (e.g., see Gould and Eldredge 1993), which suggests that multiple changes occur simultaneously and compete rather than the older idea of “phyletic gradualism” in evolution that corresponds to the traditional method of historical linguistics. The Great Vowel Shift, for example, is a useful overall generalization, but complex systems and punctuated equilibrium explain why we should not expect it ever to be “complete” or to appear in the same form in different places. These applications of complexity can help us to understand and interpret our existing studies better, and suggest how new studies in the history of the English language can be made more valid and reliable

Acquisition, Learning, or Development of Language? Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” Revisited.

En 1957 Skinner, en su obra Conducta Verbal, propuso una explicación sobre cómo se aprende un lenguaje. En 1959 Chomsky argumentó contundentemente la no aprendibilidad del lenguaje instaurando en el ámbito de la psicolingüística evolutiva la sustitución del término aprendizaje por el de adquisición. En la actualidad los modelos constructivistas describen la adquisición del lenguaje como un proceso de cambio ontogenético, gradual, complejo y adaptativo. Este nuevo marco teórico ha resultado especialmente idóneo para la re-lectura de la Conducta Verbal porque permite cierta recuperación de los mecanismos de aprendizaje skinnerianos. Esto se manifiesta en las recientes líneas de investigación que recuperan el refuerzo y la imitación (respuestas ecoicas) aunque localizándolos en las fases iniciales del proceso e incluyéndolos en una dinámica cognitiva que, al aumentar gradualmente su complejidad, puede llegar a obtener una gramática. Además, el nuevo marco teórico constructivista, al recuperar las vertientes funcionales y referenciales del lenguaje, puede aprovechar la clásica propuesta skinneriana sobre los tipos pragmáticos de conducta verbal, dotándola de un nuevo sentido.En 1957 Skinner, en su obra Conducta Verbal, propuso una explicación sobre cómo se aprende un lenguaje. En 1959 Chomsky argumentó contundentemente la no aprendibilidad del lenguaje instaurando en el ámbito de la psicolingüística evolutiva la sustitución del término aprendizaje por el de adquisición. En la actualidad los modelos constructivistas describen la adquisición del lenguaje como un proceso de cambio ontogenético, gradual, complejo y adaptativo. Este nuevo marco teórico ha resultado especialmente idóneo para la re-lectura de la Conducta Verbal porque permite cierta recuperación de los mecanismos de aprendizaje skinnerianos. Esto se manifiesta en las recientes líneas de investigación que recuperan el refuerzo y la imitación (respuestas ecoicas) aunque localizándolos en las fases iniciales del proceso e incluyéndolos en una dinámica cognitiva que, al aumentar gradualmente su complejidad, puede llegar a obtener una gramática. Además, el nuevo marco teórico constructivista, al recuperar las vertientes funcionales y referenciales del lenguaje, puede aprovechar la clásica propuesta skinneriana sobre los tipos pragmáticos de conducta verbal, dotándola de un nuevo sentido