A discover the interviews and videos of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence (AI), including Geoffrey Hinton, exaggeratedly referred to as his “father”, it seems that an illustrious scientist has become the man to be killed, a real scarecrow and outdated target ideal: the linguist Noam Chomsky.
Let us remember that this one, the last Mohican of AI origins, those of the 1950s and 1960s, proposed a vision of language anchored in a set of abstract rules, buried in our neuronal connections, and possessed by humans from their birth.
It is these same rules, especially those responsible for the grammar and syntax of languages, that he endeavored to explain and extract in order, ideally, to reproduce them in software responsible for understanding and producing texts. .
The debate on the origin of language rules
Please, let’s not throw the water of the original AI with the baby Chomsky, because it is still these same syntactic rules that we find at work in the grammatical correctors of word processors, or in the origin of programming languages to which AI owes, despite everything, its birth. Even if ChatGPT, which owes them everything, could yet make programmers disappear tomorrow!
As Noam Chomsky became the scientist celebrated for his study and understanding of our practice of language, he found himself opposed, almost fifty years ago, at the Royaumont center, from October 10 to 13, 1975, to another fantastic intellectual figure of the time, the Swiss cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). Beyond the restricted circle of linguists, this debate has considerably marked the epic of contemporary philosophy.
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These two thought leaders disagreed on the origin of language rules – universal and innate for Chomsky, learned essentially through experience and practice for Piaget. What the latter insisted on throughout his existence is the extraordinary capacity and plasticity of our brain (especially that of children) in order to bring out the abstractions (such as syntax) necessary for perception, understanding and the appropriate mastery of this reality that surrounds us.
Conceptual similarities and fundamental abstractions
The concepts and abstractions necessary for the child to “practice” this world and the language, which allows him to describe and communicate it, are gradually learned in that they allow him to correct errors and make sense of the regularities which are hidden behind his experience of the world.
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