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Stenka25 Posted 11 years ago
Vocabulary
A question regarding a pronoun
a question regarding a pronoun
The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.
http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm
Learnability theory — the mathematical analysis of how learning can work in principle — tells us there are always an infinite number of generalizations that a learner can draw from a finite set of inputs. The sentences heard by a child, for example, can be grounds for repeating them back verbatim, producing any combination of words with the same proportion of nouns to verbs, or analyzing the underlying grammar and producing sentences that conform to it. The sight of someone washing dishes can, with equal logical justification, prompt a learner to try to get dishes clean or to let warm water run over his fingers. A successful learner, then, must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
I'd like to know what the underlined pronoun, 'others' seems to mean.
In a way it seems to refer to 'other conclusions', but in another it also seems to be able to mean 'other inputs'.
(I tentatively think the former is better without any convincing ground, though.)
Regards.
The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.
http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm
Learnability theory — the mathematical analysis of how learning can work in principle — tells us there are always an infinite number of generalizations that a learner can draw from a finite set of inputs. The sentences heard by a child, for example, can be grounds for repeating them back verbatim, producing any combination of words with the same proportion of nouns to verbs, or analyzing the underlying grammar and producing sentences that conform to it. The sight of someone washing dishes can, with equal logical justification, prompt a learner to try to get dishes clean or to let warm water run over his fingers. A successful learner, then, must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
I'd like to know what the underlined pronoun, 'others' seems to mean.
In a way it seems to refer to 'other conclusions', but in another it also seems to be able to mean 'other inputs'.
(I tentatively think the former is better without any convincing ground, though.)
Regards.
Top answer
Yes, draw some conclusion and not draw other conclusions.
- Yes, draw some conclusion and not draw other conclusions.
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