[Heartlogic-dev] Re: more RE procedural adequacy?

[Joshua N Pritikin]

Today I was reaching further down into the depths of my TODO list
and found this:

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 05:52:52PM -0600, William L. Jarrold wrote:
> [to Carbonell, you wrote]
> ...You suggested that, alongside alongside explanatory and
> descriptiave adequacy, procedural adequacy become a new rubric by
> which to evaluate psychological theories.  We like this point and want
> to follow its development in the literature.

OK, here's something interesting.  I was somewhat confused about
"adequacy" in general, but this snippet seems to help:

Grammar theories

In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relavent to the
construction and evaluation of theories of grammar.  The first was the
distinction between competence and performance.  Chomsky noted the
obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make
linguistic errors (e.g.  starting a sentence and then abandoning it
midway through).  He argued that these errors in linguistic performance
were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge
which allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences);
according to this argument, the linguist can study an idealised version
of the language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis.  The second
idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of grammar.  Chomsky
made a distinction between grammars which achieved descriptive adequacy
and those which went further and achieved explanatory adequacy.  A
descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the
(infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language, whereas a
grammar which achieves explanatory adequacy gives an insight into the
universal properties of language which result from the innate linguistic
structures in the human mind.  Therefore, if a grammar has explanatory
adequacy, it must be able to explain the various grammatical nuances of
the languages of the world as relatively minor variations in the
universal pattern of human language.  Chomsky argued that, even though
linguists were still a long way from constructing descriptively adequate
grammars, progress in terms of descriptive adequacy would only come if
linguists held explanatory adequacy as their goal.  In other words, real
insight into the structure of individual languges could only be gained
through the comparative study of a wide range of languages. 

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational-generative_grammar

+++

So I guess the subsumption diagram is like this?

descriptive adequacy
      ^
      |
      |
explanatory adequacy

And simulation adequacy is orthogonal. In other words, a descriptive
or explanatory theory could either have a simulation or not.

Sound OK?

It would be cool to include this just to showcase our relentless,
pedantic attitude.  Have you read any books by Chomsky?  I haven't.

-- 
A new cognitive theory of emotion, http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/aleader