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Language may shape human thought

18:05 / 19.08.04

This from the NewScientist.com article:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996303

Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.

Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study.

*******

Guess it's time to dig out my foreign language texts again!

14:28 / 20.08.04

this is a great study and very strong evidence for at least a certain degree of linguistic determinism, but as the article points out, the theory isn't exactly new. lots and lots of people in fields dealing with these issues believe that cognition is coterminous with language.

14:39 / 20.08.04

almost forgot, there was also a recent report of an experiment with preverbal infants, to try to determine whether or not preverbal infants had a conceptual life before the acquisition of language. the results seem to suggest that there's a rich conceptual life first, which is then limited by the constraints of language. there's a story on it here.

14:41 / 20.08.04

If you're not taught to speak by a certain age, doesn't that mean you never really learn how, like the wolf children, or the Welder ghost from 5 Days a Stranger?

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17:19 / 20.08.04

You might also dig out some linguistic anthropology texts which outline the discussion surrounding the linguistic determinism hypothesis. Zdenek Salzmann's Language, Culture, and Society has an interesting discussion, but it's only a short chapter so I recommend checking it out at a library if that's your only interest in the subject. Steven Pinker critiques the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in an extremely entertaining way, but is not to be taken for granted; his biodeterminism model overrides his limited understanding of anthropological linguistics, and he favors the "I can prove this point by thinking about it a lot" methodology.

statisticalpurposes

22:51 / 27.08.04

I'm pretty wary of the linguistic determinism stuff. In this case, isn't it more likely that there's some kind of critical period for acquiring the math skills that we have? To say the lack of a word "determines" the way one thinks seems really beside the point. Wouldn't it go in the opposite direction, that the way one thinks determines which words one will have?

09:36 / 28.08.04

Fritjof Capra, and a few others, have made the point that concepts outside our paradigm that exist in other cultures, like "sung" (Chinese for "relaxation in action", perhaps the internal equivalent of economy of motion), are concepts we have no words for. Observe how F. M. Alexander and Mosche Feldenkrais had to invent whole new terminologies to describe their psychophysical integration disciplines, like "acture","use","end-gaining","the means-whereby","parasitic contraction","tensegrity","kinesthetic debauchery"... hell, you can't even easily describe what it is they do in English. I suspect it would be simpler in Chinese, where concepts like sung and chi and gungfu are built into the language. The East never suffered the Cartesian schism between mind and body that scarred our paradigm, the Baconian separation of observer and subject that is only now being redressed as quantum physics prove the mystics right.

02:47 / 22.09.04

So...

your species needs high cognitive skills in order to be able to process linguistic information

but then after that

your cognitive skills depend on the complexity of the linguistic information that you're processing?

Funny that.

03:12 / 23.09.04

It might be difficult to communicate a concept or mentally manipulate a concept without a word for it, BUT the word cannot come before the concept. You coin a word for a concept you already have.

The Piraha don't have words for numbers greater than two because they never developed, for whatever reason, the concept.

22:34 / 23.09.04

Or may be they simply lack the other eight fingers.

10:19 / 26.09.04

What are some more good links on the subject? I am taking a sociolinguistics class and wanted to write my paper on the subject of linguistic determinism and how it affects society. The book for the class only has one section of one chapter on it and only really meantions Whorf.

04:39 / 27.09.04

concepts we have no words for a lexical holes (i recall douggie adams and someone took words hanging about listlessly on place name signs and used them to fill some of these - 'the meanin of liff')

but surely there could be no word conjured up that expresses a concept prior to the concept being brought to mind...??

the piraha simply never bothered to name the concept of 'many, just as english never named the concept (with a single term) germans call 'gemutlich' (or whatever that term they have is for 'kind of nice fuzzy ok feeling' - and as we borrow ready-made words from languages that thought of them first and we were too lazy to come up with the english term for..!!

i'm quite sure that piraha could learn 'many'... they just never bothered to.

04:20 / 30.09.04

Do you think that knowing a language limits our ability to conceptualize? It would seem that language only limits our ability to communicate, but not to think, but then what of the Piraha? I think a good argument for language's inability to limit our concepts is language itself.

However, if language is able to constrict imagination and knowledge, it would have profound effects on society. Society would be able to evolve merely through a change in language.

19:40 / 04.10.04

but surely there could be no word conjured up that expresses a concept prior to the concept being brought to mind...?

of course there can, there can't not. language is where concepts come from.

basically, you've got the whole thing backwards. your brain constantly takes in massive amounts of sense data and logs memories and internal biochemical reactions to stimuli. taken as a whole, it's an incoherent mess, a conceptual blur.

it's not that concepts arise in the head and you name them somehow. concepts arise from limiting that blur, shaping it by carving lines in it.

your unsorted sense data and memories and thoughts are like soft Play-Doh. language is the toy that you pump the Play-Doh into so it comes out all star-shaped. concepts are the star-shaped bits of clay at the end.

However, if language is able to constrict imagination and knowledge, it would have profound effects on society. Society would be able to evolve merely through a change in language.

umm, yeah. that is how society evolves. hence the last two or three decades of leftist activism and politics being so focused on language and terminology, and the well-observed phenomenon that people win elections by being the first to successfully frame the issues at stake as a narrative people can understand.

12:52 / 05.10.04

umm, yeah. that is how society evolves. hence the last two or three decades of leftist activism and politics being so focused on language and terminology

But this has hardly been an uncontestable success, though I suppose one could argue that the right has been at least as successful in this activity, at least so far as to frame certain debates. I'm still pretty sceptical about the role of language here, since it is so intertwined in social activity that it seems too easy to claim a bigger role for it than is warranted. It is easy to see that the framing of certain debates, and the familiarity of certain arguments makes rhetoric and large scale persuasion (politics, I guess) easier. Language is then shaping thought in a fairly weak sense, no?

To put it another way, if I design a website to put forward a religious message and I get converts, to what extent has a computer influenced the minds of people? Only a trivial one, as far as I can see.

05:42 / 06.10.04

i really should learn to make hyperlinks in this forum, but i haven't yet... anyway, go to this page ( http://www.centreforthemind.com/publications/publications.cfm ) and open the 'concept formation...' article. the brain is very good at making concepts - we do it all the time - and the mass, or blur, of sense data is very rarely available to our 'executive brain', our awareness - our 'consciousness'... (autistic people do not have well functioning concept formation, usually through damage to the frontal cortex, and so do not see 'concepts' but see the world as it is. that's the theory, anyway.)

so i contend, diz, that there can only be a language correlate to a concept the brain (mind) has already formed. the inverse is simply not possible. food for thought, anyhoo?

fish confusion errata

20:27 / 25.04.07

Some linguistics have taken issue with every facet of Everett's argument: "Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment" by Nevins et al. Everett has responded with "Cultural Constraints on Grammar in PIRAHÃ: A Reply to Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues". You can read both on http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/

In mainstream linguistics, culture does not shape grammar, at least not to this extent, so Everett's claims are pretty controversial.

fish confusion errata

21:30 / 25.04.07

Also, Everett's claims about Pirahã seem to be the exact opposite of Whorf. His claim is

"IMMEDIACY OF EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLE (IEP) IN PIRAHÃ: Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced (i.e. seen, overheard, deduced, etc. – as per the range of Pirahã evidentials, as in Everett (1986, 289)) by the speaker or as witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker)."

The Whorfian hypothesis: "the nature of a particular language influences the habitual thought of its speakers."

They're really not related.

00:36 / 30.04.07

and really, isn't all this capacity to deliberate on neural templates all a bit of a way of arguing for the sort of stuff that will constitute [some or all of] what kant was on about in his 'critique of pure reason', that there is really stuff 'out there' and that is going to dictate, pretty well, what we might some to say about it?

the nexus of our minds and reality is founded on there 'being' a reality, so it makes intuitive sense that any capacity we have for communication is going to be utilised to describe what we see as well as what we think, everything conforming to some necessary underlying logic. if 'language' is just the medium of neural processing and interaction with the environment, then it will have to have some antecedent premises/rules, which we are all hardwired to 'discover'...

fish confusion errata

00:51 / 30.04.07

I'm afraid I don't know much about Kant, but I know that the controversy here is over whether fundamental principles of grammar are influenced by culture. Chomsky claims they're not, that grammar is an independent thing that is fundamentally the same across all languages. One of Chomksy's predictions is that all languages have recursive embedding. Everett is claiming that Pirahã culture influences the fundamentals of Pirahã grammar, and one of the outcomes is that Pirahã grammar has no embedded clauses.

One of the problems here is that Everett is one of the few linguists in the world who has studied the language. Until the language is better studied, the evidence is inconclusive.

02:55 / 30.04.07

I wonder if these folks in the study (the Piraha) might have been limited by not recognizing the importance of distinguishing between two different large numbers. Might it not have been so much an inability to distinguish as a mentality that this would be close enough for any sensible person, so why is this guy who is asking me questions making such a big deal about something so unimportant. I vaguely remember a scene from Pygmalion in which the young woman who was trying to learn to break her cockney accent said something like, "I can't tell the difference except that the way you're saying it is all fancy." And the Professor responded with something like, "For God's sake woman, if you can tell a difference, why don't you …"