LB393 伊津

(p.393 para. 3)

Recognition of syntactic patterns cannot be accomplished on basis of probability statistics (Chomsky and Miller, 1963; Chomsky 1963; Miller and Chomsky, 1963). The rules that underly syntax (which are the same for understanding and speaking) are of a very specific kind, and unless man or mechanical devices do their processing of incoming sentences in accordance with these rules, the logical, formal, analysis of the input will be deficient, resulting in incorrect or random responses. When we say rules must have been built into the grammatical analyzer, we impute the existence of an apparatus with specific structure properties or, in other words, a spectic internal organization.
In a certain sense all organisms are self-organizing systems. And, therefore, the question that faces us is, “What is the degree of freedom with which the specific organization necessary for language processing comes into being.” If the freedom were unlimited, the nature of man would unlimited in its capacities. This must be rejected for obvious reasons. There is no other organism with unlimited capacities and we no longer believe that man in different from other creatures in such fundamental ways. In fact, there is no possible way in which we could think of a device, natural or artificial, that is free from all structural limitations. At best we may assume that a certain mechanism has the capacity to organize itself in more than one way (that is, depending on certain conditions of input, it may eventually be operating in any one of a number of possible modes). This formulation makes it clear that in any case we must assume a biological matrix with specifiable characteristics that determines the outcome of any treatment to which the organism is subjected. Thus the search for innate properties is well within the scope biological inquiry.