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About this paper
Joshua S. Rule, Steven T. Piantadosi
A computational framework challenges Jerry Fodor's radical concept nativism, asserting that human minds, as resource-bound Turing-universal systems, genuinely learn new concepts through mechanisms like chunking, which increase practical expressive power, and by re-evaluating concept possession as a graded, information-theoretic metric that decreases the environmental information required for concept representation.
Key insights
- Human minds, as Turing-universal systems, possess maximal theoretical expressive power, but for resource-limited minds, chunking increases *practical* expressive power, enabling genuine concept learning.
- Concepts, when viewed as computational objects, inherently possess internal computational structure, even if composed of subconceptual primitives, challenging Fodor's 'atomic' concept claim.
- Concept possession is a continuous, information-theoretic metric, where learning occurs anytime the environmental information required to represent a concept decreases.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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