Natural Language Processing with Python

Contemporary Philosophical Divides

The contrasting approaches to NLP described in the preceding section relate back to early metaphysical debates about rationalism versus empiricism and realism versus idealism that occurred in the Enlightenment period of Western philosophy. These debates took place against a backdrop of orthodox thinking in which the source of all knowledge was believed to be divine revelation. During this period of the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers argued that human reason or sensory experience has priority over revelation. Descartes and Leibniz, among others, took the rationalist position, asserting that all truth has its origins in human thought, and in the existence of “innate ideas” implanted in our minds from birth. For example, they argued that the principles of Euclidean geometry were developed using human reason, and were not the result of supernatural revelation or sensory experience. In contrast, Locke and others took the empiricist view, that our primary source of knowledge is the experience of our faculties, and that human reason plays a secondary role in reflecting on that experience. Often-cited evidence for this position was Galileo’s discovery—based on careful observation of the motion of the planets—that the solar system is heliocentric and not geocentric. In the context of linguistics, this debate leads to the following question: to what extent does human linguistic experience, versus our innate “language faculty,” provide the basis for ...