Johnson Mark
Macquarie University, Computer Science, Sydney, Australia.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2017 Feb;24(1):171-174. doi: 10.3758/s13423-016-1062-1.
A simple change to a cognitive system at Marr's computational level may entail complex changes at the other levels of description of the system. The implementational level complexity of a change, rather than its computational level complexity, may be more closely related to the plausibility of a discrete evolutionary event causing that change. Thus the formal complexity of a change at the computational level may not be a good guide to the plausibility of an evolutionary event introducing that change. For example, while the Minimalist Program's Merge is a simple formal operation (Berwick & Chomsky, 2016), the computational mechanisms required to implement the language it generates (e.g., to parse the language) may be considerably more complex. This has implications for the theory of grammar: theories of grammar which involve several kinds of syntactic operations may be no less evolutionarily plausible than a theory of grammar that involves only one. A deeper understanding of human language at the algorithmic and implementational levels could strengthen Minimalist Program's account of the evolution of language.
在马尔的计算层面上，认知系统的一个简单变化可能会在该系统的其他描述层面上引发复杂的变化。导致变化的离散进化事件的合理性，可能与变化在实现层面的复杂性而非计算层面的复杂性联系更为紧密。因此，计算层面变化的形式复杂性，可能并不是引入该变化的进化事件合理性的良好指引。例如，虽然最简方案的合并是一个简单的形式操作（伯威克和乔姆斯基，2016），但实现其生成的语言所需的计算机制（例如，解析该语言）可能要复杂得多。这对语法理论有一定影响：涉及多种句法操作的语法理论，在进化上可能并不比只涉及一种句法操作的语法理论更不合理。在算法和实现层面上对人类语言有更深入的理解，可能会加强最简方案对语言进化的解释。
