# On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

DevFeed: [On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/on-chomsky-and-the-two-cultures-of-statistical-learning-40547.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://norvig.com/chomsky.html>)

Published: 2011-05-27T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Peter Norvig](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/peter-norvig.md>)

Topics: [Statistics](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/statistics.md>), [Language models](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/language-models.md>), [Machine learning](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/machine-learning.md>), [syntax](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/syntax.md>)

Tags: [essay](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/essay.md>), [history-of-science](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/history-of-science.md>), [language-models](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/language-models.md>), [probabilistic](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/probabilistic.md>), [science](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/science.md>), [statistics](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/statistics.md>)

## AI overview

This essay responds to Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky on the role and success of statistical and probabilistic models in language. It argues that interpreting success as approximating unanalyzed data is not novel, and uses examples from language modeling, communication, gravitation, and statistical mechanics to distinguish trained, probabilistic, continuous, and quantitative models.

## Source excerpt

At the MIT 150 symposium, Chomsky said that the notion of success used by statistical language models (namely, that they successfully predict the world and allow programs to accomplish tasks) was "very novel ... I don't know of anything like it in the history of science." This essay argues that it is not novel at all, but perfectly commonplace.