Fair enough—it’s probably good to have it in writing. But this seems to me like the sort of explanation that is “the only possible way it could conceivably work.” How could we bootstrap language learning if not for our existing, probably-inherent faculty for correlating classifiers over the the environment? Once you say “I want to teach something the meaning of a word, but the only means I have to transmit information to them is present them with situations and have them make inferences”… there almost isn’t anything to add to this. The question already seems to contain the only possible answer.
Maybe you need to have read Through the Looking Glass?
Fair enough—it’s probably good to have it in writing. But this seems to me like the sort of explanation that is “the only possible way it could conceivably work.” How could we bootstrap language learning if not for our existing, probably-inherent faculty for correlating classifiers over the the environment? Once you say “I want to teach something the meaning of a word, but the only means I have to transmit information to them is present them with situations and have them make inferences”… there almost isn’t anything to add to this. The question already seems to contain the only possible answer.
Maybe you need to have read Through the Looking Glass?