From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Mon Jun 23 2003 - 15:15:50 MDT
[Kharin]
<quote from Ke Ping>
"For instance, both Chinese and Anglo-American culture regard time as a continuum, but when referring to the past and the future in terms of "back" and "ahead," they adopt different starting points. A traditional Chinese stands facing the past, perceiving what just happened as ahead of him and what is yet to come as behind him. A native English speaker, however, assumes the opposite viewpoint."
<end quote>
Not entirely surprising given the importance of ancestors in Chinese culture. There was something similar cited by Lee Whorf in Language, Thought and Reality;
I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past and into a future.
[rhinoceros]
First, my apologies to everyone for the long rant which is going to follow. It is just one of my latest toy-obsessions.
So, does anyone have any thoughts on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and the relationship between the spoken languages, Fodor's hypothesis of an innate "language of thought" or "Mentalese", and thought itself in any of its forms?
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/
In short: There is a strong "linguistic determinism" hypothesis:
"People's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language (which means that the language of though is simply the spoken language)"
and a weaker "linguistic relativity" hypothesis:
"Differences among languages cause differences in their thought of their speakers (which means that the language of thought is not simply the spoken language, but it is affected by it)"
George Orwell seemed to adopt a version of the strong hypothesis in his "1984":
<begin quote>
"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words....A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of "politically equal," or that free had once meant "intellectually free," than, for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable."
<end quote>
Of course, the phrase "at least so far as thought is dependent on words" is crucial.
Let's see how Sapir and Whorf themselves put it:
".. the real world is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group. We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached." (Sapir, 1956)
"We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees." (Whorf, 1956)
Even Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus" is often cited in this context:
"The limits of my language indicate the limits of my world" (Wittgenstein, 1966)
Now, this view was not left undisputed. Pinker, in his "Language Instict" (1994), did not seem to be very happy with these ("outrageously mistaken") ideas; he seemed to find them contrary to the "language of thought" hypothesis (Chapter 3: Mentalese). I've talked about it again in this post:
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=28562
Pinker, in his delightful writing style, even pointed out that "Whorf was an inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company" (rather than a linguist), made a joke with Whorf's native language, German, by quoting Mark Twain and, of course, proceeded to debunk some of Whorf's arguments.
<quote from Pinker's "The Language Instict">
"People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve the spectrum into color words at digfferent places, the fundamentally different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are not "in" the world but are imposed by one's culture (and hence can be challenged, perhaps accounting for the parennial appeal of the hypothesis to undergraduate sensibilities).
But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications. (The "fact" that we use only five percent of our brains, that lemmings commit mass suicide, that the "Boy Scout Manual" annually outsells all other books, and that we can be coerced into buying by subliminal messages are other examples.) Think about it. We have all had experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a "what we meant to say" that is different from what we said. Sometimes it is not easy to find *any* words that properly convey a thought."
<end quote>
Pinker actually goes on to debunk the argument of the "40 Eskimo words for snow" and the argument of the "Hopi concept of time". Actually, Pinker says that Worf didn't have personal experience with the Hopi and used a wrong translation of the researcher's work, and then he presents some cases where Hopi talked about time. However, this has been followed by a lot of passionate arguments and counter-arguments all these years. For example, here is a small flame war:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-768.html
http://linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-780.html#1
More "Whorfian" articles:
What Whorf really said
http://www.nickyee.com/ponder/whorf.html
I Don't Think So: Pinker on the Thinker
http://www.d.umn.edu/~dcole/pinker.htm
Neuro-Cognitive Structure in the Interplay of Language and Thought
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lamb/lt.htm
I found the last one very interesting. It begins with the very same quotation of Whorf's, followed by this:
<begin quote>
I must confess that to me this statement is so self-evidently true -- in all but one respect -- that I find it hard to understand how anyone could disagree. Yet disagree they do, some people. For example, Steven Pinker finds it almost outrageously mistaken and even calls it "this radical position" (1994).
<end quote>
Some final comments of mine.
Fodor's hypothesis for the existence of a "language of thought" or Mentalese is based on the logical requirements that thoughts should have a representation in the brain on which some processing is being done. Everything seems ok up to this point. However, could such a language cover every kind of thought?
A word can correspond to a simple concept (concrete or abstract), or to a complex technological or artistic artifact (concrete or abstract). Also, a word can correspond to a concept close to perception, or to a concept which is the result of elaborate processing with external means (a calculating machine or a series of scribbling on a piece of paper in the language of mathematics -- see Einstein: "My pencil is smarter than me").
Here is a question: Does our language of thought really process all these kinds of words which represent different kinds of concepts in the same way, and reduces them into its "low-level" representations? Or does it directly conjure new created tokens and works directly with them in some cases?
A second question: Does our language of thought have to be inborn and universal? To some extent, I don't see why not, as far as we are talking about concepts closely related to the mechanisms of human perception, which we could consider as universal. We could even include logic in the mechanisms related to human perception if we accept a kind of Kantian phenomenology of logic. But beyond that point, words seems to have their own newly created tokens. When, for example, I use the word "logic", I do not necesserily recall the laws of logic.
That's all. Open for comments. As a bonus, here are some words to play with. To be translated into Mentalese: "qabalah", "dada", "infinity".
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