Language and its influence on thought

[Pyrotex]

...Here's a problem - let me know what you think:

I don't believe in a languaging center in the brain. That is, I cant believe that language is produced from a single module of the mind, because I can't reconcile it with the way I understand biological evolution. I'm inclined towards thinking of language as a chimera of cognitive tricks, all evolved separately by their different benefits, commondeered, or co-opted, for a beneficial effect: language. Compare with the way language has co-opted the tongue, larnyx and nasal.

Okay.

 

I like your last paragraph. I like it a lot. The reason I like it is that I cannot think of any way of refuting it; and it fits precisely with the way Gould, et al, describe the processes of evolution in the development of phenotypic behavior. And I like the way you write. :) So, I am seriously considering the possibility of agreeing with your last paragraph -- as soon as I work out the immediate consequences.

 

As for the rest... :evil: :shrug: :evil: I dunno.

 

I will state for the record that what your source referred to as "semantic structure" is not the same as what Korzybski and I mean. [analogy] Your source is referring to the "wetware"; the associations of brain tissue "nodes", their interconnectedness (interfaces) with each other and with the ears and the muscles of speech. I am referring to the "semantic value" (or meaning, an emergent phenomenon) of those associations and interfaces. [/analogy]

[sman]

I like your last paragraph....

 

Well, I'm just talking out of the top of my hat, really. My time is limited - I can build a case with details only if you have patience for me.

 

For now, I just want you to notice that the "chimera" model is not compatible with cognition arising from language, but is with language from cognition, which I believe is the contemporary scientific position.

[Pyrotex]

Well, I'm just talking out of the top of my hat, really. My time is limited - I can build a case with details only if you have patience for me....with language from cognition, which I believe is the contemporary scientific position.

That's one bad hat, Harry. :shrug:

 

Okay, if you got the time, build your case. So far, I like it.

 

As for language from cognition, I hold firm to the opposite. Without an emergent structure capable of associating "symbols" with the objects of reality (and with other "symbols"), cognition doesn't have a leg to stand on, so to speak. It is just marginally possible to imagine how a system of "symbols" could arise, and in doing so, create and support a fledgling cognition. But the idea of cognition bootstrapping itself with no underlying "atomic" components just does not (IMHO) work.

 

Nontheless, lay on McDuff!

[JMJones0424]

Please forgive me, I have been away for a long time and I have a lot of reading to do to get caught up with this thread. But before I do, I would like to make a few points.

 

Different languages use different structure to express the same thought. For example in English we say the "red apple" and in French we say "la pomme rouge" or the apple red. Both humans see the same thing in the mind or do they?

 

The English puts the word red first, so this is the first image induced. If we talked very slowly, with the mind working faster, one might extrapolate red into red apple, red dress, red flag, etc., until finally the word apple appears. In French, if we talked slowly, we would get the word apple first. The mind, working faster, would then wonder is this apple red, yellow, green, has a worm, etc., until the word rouge/red appears.

 

I have two responses to this.

 

First of all, the example you give is poor, as it is an example of what I think are just trivial differences in grammar. What difference does it make if the adjective or the noun comes first, as they are associated by proximity, and their order does nothing to change the underlying concept they describe.

 

Second, just because we say red apple, we do not necessarily see the "redness" first, and then see the "appleness". I think (though I may be wrong, but in my experience as a trained observer, I have no reason to doubt this) that humans physically see things in this order- movement, shape, and lastly color. As far as I can tell, most mammals (at least the ones I have hunted) do the same. By your reasoning, we should all say, "stationary (usually omitted), apple, red." Yet that clearly isn't the case.

 

A better example could again be given by comparing Korean with English. In English, and as far as I know in most other "western" languages, blue and green are considered to be two distinctly different colors. In Korean, they are both given the same name. Now this does not mean that all Koreans are somehow color blind and can not differentiate the difference between blue and green, but rather they see the difference as being unimportant, and if one were to use just a basic set of labels to describe primary colors, they would view blue and green as being two different shades of the same color.

 

While this doesn't readily seem important, another example can be had through music. The western scale is composed of 7 primary notes that are not consistently spaced throughout the frequency spectrum, yet when we hear a scale being played, it sounds like a natural progression through the frequency range. Other cultures have other scales, and their music sounds discordant to us, just as our music sounds discordant to them. We are hearing the same thing, and yet we get widely different responses, because we have been conditioned to view one scale as pleasing and therefor the other scale sounds unnatural.

 

Another example is that of the "atom", a word which can be traced back to a Greek concept that everything is composed of fundamental particles that can not be further divided. Through the years, that concept has stuck, and has been the bane of many high school students trying to understand physics and chemistry, for as we all know, atoms are neither indivisible nor are they made up of purely particles. Think of where molecular biology and quantum physics would be if we had not been hamstrung by the concept of everything being made up of tiny billiard balls.

 

Now, did language CAUSE this misconception? No, obviously not. But I think a clear case can be made that this incorrect "labeling" of the concept perpetuated an incorrect worldview, and made (and still makes) it more difficult to truly understand reality.

[Qfwfq]

For instance, if I where to say that "I am going to the store" in Korean, it would be assumed that I was not coming back, where in English, it is obvious. in Korean, I would have to say that "I am going and returning from the store".

I hope it means that there is a single verb which indicates "go-then-return" rather than having to use two verbs every time! :)

 

I have a hypothesis that language is necessarily abstract, and its learning of expression of abstract thoughts influences not only the expression of those thoughts, but how those thoughts themselves are created and expressed.

Well, I've been bilingual since the age of about 8 and I could say a few things. Unfortunately my opinion about the matter is hard to... put into words.:hihi:

 

When I was young and more often regarded as a foreigner, folks would occasionally ask me whether I think in English or Italian. I would always say: "Neither." What I meant is that thought isn't necesarily words, it is concepts. Now, language certainly provides a tool for identifying concepts by attaching a symbol to them. This occurs not only with words however. Mathematical symbols are not phonetic and neither are Chinese ideograms, they can be read without connecting them to any sound, not even "in the head". A symbolic language is a great aid to our ability of thinking and so of course it helps to shape our thoughts; without it we would still have direct sensory samples of the most concrete things but no symbol for 'honesty' or 'crime' unless we somewhat arbitrarily associate these ideas with some figment of our imagination.

 

I have often pondered on the relation of thought and language and one thing is sure in my opinion, we could never really think by simply manipulating words. The process starts much more "down in there" but we have a degree of need to translate it into words, somewhat like "so we know what we've thought" but it is somewhat automatic, largely out of habit IMHO and this doesn't quite necessarily occur in the case of some folks including myself.

 

Chinese people have told me they can read written Chinese without even mentally pronouncing the ideograms and understand them exactly, as much as one might laugh at a wordless humorous picture by just getting the ideas it suggests. The same folks also told me that each ideogram is composed of marks that each stand for an idea. However, in reading aloud only the complete ideagram is associated with a syllable, The ideaograms are exactly the same throughout China but the spoken syllables change from place to place.

[JMJones0424]

I hope it means that there is a single verb which indicates "go-then-return" rather than having to use two verbs every time! :hihi:

 

In Korean "I am going to the store", the verb is a conjugation of a combination of both of the verbs "to go" and "to come". Korean conjugation is done for tense and intention, not for subject/verb agreement.

 

The ideaograms are exactly the same throughout China but the spoken syllables change from place to place

I understand this to be correct, and furthermore, it applies to most other eastern Asian languages in the vicinity of China. In fact, it is hard to read a Japanese newspaper without knowing a basic number of Chinese symbols. Chinese could be considered linguistically equivalent to Latin in the regions that China has had historical influence. Koreans did not even have a written language until about the 15th century, scholars had to learn Chinese in order to read and write. As part of the agenda of isolation in DPRK, nearly seventy percent of the nouns and verbs in use prior to the splitting of the country had to be renamed in order to purge sino influence on Korean. For a sino noun, one must use a sino counter, and pure Korean requires a Korean counter. Mixing the two sometimes ends up in embarrassing moments. But this is just a digression from my original observation.

 

The time I am able to devote to reading in the disciplines of linguistics is limited, as I have higher priority interests, but the little I have read of Chomsky and contemporaries sometimes doesn't quite sit well with what I have experienced. I tend to agree with Pyrotex's post above. While the need for symbols to label abstract thoughts internally may be debatable, I think it is obvious that symbols are needed to communicate those thoughts to others. And perhaps once you have become "fluent" in those symbols, you no longer need to associate the symbol with that which it describes when thinking, but when first learning the concept, it was necessary (wasn't it?). Something akin to the process you go through when learning a second language, when translation finally gives way to expression directly in the second language.

 

Then again, children readily learn two languages just as easily as they learn one. But I think enough research has been done to at least strongly suggest that this is a function of the biological condition of the child's brain as opposed to the adult brain.

 

I don't know, I really have nothing more than anecdotal tales to offer to this thread, but I greatly appreciate the discussion taking place :)

[JMJones0424]

It appears that in at least one of my examples, I may be placing too much emphasis on the process of labeling concepts. I gave the example of how Koreans use the same primary color name for both green and blue. According to this abstract from Cognition vol 112 issue 3 (Sep 2009)

 

Categorical perception (CP) is said to occur when a continuum of equally spaced physical changes is perceived as unequally spaced as a function of category membership (Harnad, S. (Ed.) (1987). Psychophysical and cognitive aspects of categorical perception: A critical overview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A common suggestion is that CP for color arises because perception is qualitatively distorted when we learn to categorize a dimension. Contrary to this view, we here report that English speakers show no evidence of lowered discrimination thresholds at the boundaries between blue and green categories even though CP is found at these boundaries in a supra-threshold task. Furthermore, there is no evidence of different discrimination thresholds between individuals from two language groups (English and Korean) who use different color terminology in the blue–green region and have different supra-threshold boundaries. Our participants’ just noticeable difference (JND) thresholds suggest that they retain a smooth continuum of perceptual space that is not warped by stretching at category boundaries or by within-category compression. At least for the domain of color, categorical perception appears to be a categorical, but not a perceptual phenomenon.

[Pyrotex]

Funny thing about color CP. My wife and I disagree on blueness/greenness for certain shades of "blue/green" like teal. She insists they are "blue" even when the "greenness" is obvious to me. The shades have to get much greener before she agrees they are green. :eek_big:

 

This is a good debate. Me like. :shrug: Again, my POV comes from Alfred Korzybsky, a Polish-American philosopher who was quite instrumental in the 1920's and 30's. His original attempt to pinpoint the linkage between language and thought was ahead of its time, but now (in its original form) looks rather dated and primitive. He had, of course, no knowledge of brain structure and function as we do.

 

But his basic premise still works. Animals (mammals) must do their "thinking" with entire memory "snapshots" of images, sounds, experiences. This makes their cogitation somewhat limited and slow. They "remember" only what they have sensed. They "understand" only the operantly conditioned events they have experienced. They may learn by mimicry or they may be imbued with "reflexive templates" (instincts) that associate an event (sensory input) with a standard reaction. Their "thoughts" are big and unwieldy.

 

Our "thoughts" are small, fast and super-flexible. Our brains condense a "memory" down into what Korzybski calls a "story", and then "tags" the story with several conceptual symbols that we might call "indexes". We search our memories by index. A water buffalo searches by direct comparison match. A "story", in fact, is condensed because it itself is a sequence of "tags". We may remember the images and sounds of our trip to Paris, but primarily we remember the "story" of our trip. The tags inside that story then associate to bits and pieces of the sensory stream.

 

Animals make sounds. My cats meow. Their meows are all different. The differences do not reflect semantic content. All meows basically mean, "hey!". :hihi: Humans no doubt made sounds just as apes make sounds. There may have been some minimal semantic content: one grunt for rage, another for hunger, etc, with sounds drectly associated with physical/emotional sensations.

 

Today, our sounds contain incredible amounts of semantic content, with words associated with concepts and abstract relationships. Which came first? The word or the abstract relationship? Korzybski would say the abstract relationship came first and then we assigned a grunt to it. Otherwise, we must conclude that the grunt came first, and our ancient ancestors then waited around with this unassigned grunt for generations until the abstract relationship got thought of. :hihi: I don't think so. Even more likely is that the "word" and the "concept" emerged together out of the babble and chaos of pack behavior.

 

But then comes the next phase of human development. Instead of just word/concept pairs, the mental symbols for both words and concepts became "free". They could become arbitrarily strung together like beads on a string, free from direct attachment to either spoken sounds or sensory memories. They became "semantic structures". Highly condensed into brain cell signals: symbols, and symbols for sequences of symbols -- this mental ability to engage in dialogue with itself, without having to reference either the spoken sounds, or the sensory memories, becomes "languaging".

 

Only you have a different word for it. You call it "thinking". Korzybski's brilliant breakthrough was to identify "thinking" with "languaging"; it is the symbolic manipulation of semantic structures. And the manipulation is done with OTHER semantic structures whose symbols code NOT for nouns and verbs, but code for relationship, association, categorization, principals & rules, qualification, adjudication, moral assignment, intention, purpose, meaning, temporalization and communication.

 

Korzybski says that by the time we are 7 or 8 years old, we have a fully functioning semantic structure built from symbols that do indeed relate to spoken words some times, but not necessarily. This fledgling semantic structure is not composed of brain tissue, cells or neurons. It is composed of highly abstract signals and cellular programming that corresponds one-to-one with objects that we would call "symbols". The capabilities and functioning of the semantic structure is given to the growing child by the environment of talking, gesturing, facial expressions, experiences of joy and pain and physical associations that surround the child.

 

The semantic structure that Korzybski calls "languaging" is in fact an emulation, a MODEL of the child's physical universe. It behaves just like the world behaves. The "people" inside the model behave just like the physical avatars in the real world.

 

And everything the child is, knows, becomes, or can become -- is provided -- and constrained -- by languaging -- and the accuracy of those semantic structures in modeling the external world.

 

The beauty of this system is that as the child grows, new experiences (if survived!) can add new symbols, new elements, new associations, new meanings to the semantic structures. And with these, the human can learn, not just new "things", but learn to think in new ways.

 

Languaging gives us thinking.

[sman]

Funny thing about color CP. My wife and I disagree on blueness/greenness for certain shades of "blue/green" like teal. She insists they are "blue" even when the "greenness" is obvious to me. The shades have to get much greener before she agrees they are green. :)

 

Try this: call your teal Teal A and her teal Teal B and if there’s further argument, apply a little Teal C; works on my wife every time.

 

:):):)

 

Our view of language is subject to the same distortion as our view of life: there is only one sample to observe. We could satisfactorily define language as that thing the humans specialize in the way we might define wood-pecking or dam-building as the things that wood-peckers/beavers specialize in. If we observed a population of wood-peckers making a living by hunting worms like robins, we would hesitate to call them wood-peckers.

 

There are no pre-cursors to language in the other animals; there is not a continuous grade from the grunts & gestures of chimps to the niceties of English prose. You either have it or you don’t. All humans have it, and all other animals don’t. This can make it difficult to differentiate language from some of the other things that (we like to think) are uniquely human, like our cognition.

 

The enterprise is further confounded, I think, by the fact that we talk to ourselves, incessantly, compulsively, out loud & in our heads. It’s like when we have an idea or a thought we reflexively attempt to “sell it” to ourselves exactly as we would present it to others. Language is a very powerful tool for this kind of persuasion. In fact, I don’t mind asserting here that language was designed (by selection) in part to excel at this. It is not necessary that the machinery of language, that packs our thoughts into a medium that can be transmitted by speech, be peeked into our awareness. Our language encapsulates our thoughts involuntarily.

 

Anyway, we must be careful here. We are very close to the subject matter making us very vulnerable to error.

 

I’m out of time. Thank you.

[Pyrotex]

Try this: call your teal Teal A and her teal Teal B and if there’s further argument, apply a little Teal C; works on my wife every time. :):):) ...

That is just so wrong. :rant: :umno:

[Qfwfq]

While the need for symbols to label abstract thoughts internally may be debatable, I think it is obvious that symbols are needed to communicate those thoughts to others. And perhaps once you have become "fluent" in those symbols, you no longer need to associate the symbol with that which it describes when thinking, but when first learning the concept, it was necessary (wasn't it?).

I quite agree but it's a complicated matter. In my previous post I called the words symbols, but others here are saying symbols to mean the images-sensations-ideas that I had called figments. So maybe we should say instead that the words, ideograms or mathy marks are tags for the symbols or concepts. These tags are much handier for manipulation as well as for communication; this is why we have such a great need to talk to ourselves, as Sman says, to sell ourselves what we are thinking, I think our need to do this has two grounds. One, the words, acting as tags, make our thoughts less vague, more manageable, it fixes the thought better in the mind, it's analogous to "getting it down on paper" so to speak. Two, the need to communicate with society is so important that we are born with the linguistic mechanism being automatic. I suspect though that two is part of the reason for one; thinking it out in words satisfies the same need as telling it to others and so maybe this is why it serves the purpose of fixation.

 

Something akin to the process you go through when learning a second language, when translation finally gives way to expression directly in the second language.

Back in those young days friends were always trying to catch me at translating and they would pounce when my Italian was still occasionally influenced by English linguistic traits, even though I wasn't really translating as I spoke.

 

Then again, children readily learn two languages just as easily as they learn one. But I think enough research has been done to at least strongly suggest that this is a function of the biological condition of the child's brain as opposed to the adult brain.

Certainly, because it is in the first years that the need is greatest, to learn the at least one language of the community. They also say that bilinguism in childhood helps the language learning ability to remain longer, so it's typically easier for adults that aren't monolingual.

 

Another thing. We aren't the only species to have language, not even the only one to have spoken language; naturalists have been recognizing languages and dialects in ape communities. What's unique of our speech is called complex language meaning that it's more than just one sound for tree and one for banana, it is also syntax and grammar.

[BrianG]

xxx

[Pyrotex]

I quite agree but it's a complicated matter. ...Another thing. We aren't the only species to have language, not even the only one to have spoken language; naturalists have been recognizing languages and dialects in ape communities. What's unique of our speech is called complex language meaning that it's more than just one sound for tree and one for banana, it is also syntax and grammar.

I would like to tackle this one. Saying that the difference between ape "language" and our language is just a matter of complexity is to completely miss the mark. The critical difference is that ape "language" is NOT syntactical.

 

Apes have no verbs, no nouns, no adjectives. Their grunts, screeches and moans do not take on nuanced values when put in combination with other sounds. Their "language" is entirely reactive to certain external events (such as a leopard, or another tribe of apes) or to certain internal events (such as hunger, anger, or pain). And that's it. Quite frankly, this is not a "language", no matter how many grunts and screeches you catalog.

 

Human beings are the only species on our planet to have a syntactical language, or even anything even CLOSE to a syntactical language. And since (as far as humans are concerned) language necessarily implies syntax, you can shorten the first sentence to say we are the only species to "have a language".

 

Now, if you were to note that chimps have one screech for "leopard" that is far away, but give two screeches if there are two leopards far away, then I might be wrong. Or if they give the two screeches for "pain" and "leopard" when the leopard is at some middle distance to the tribe, and the three screeches for "pain", "pain" and "leopard" when the leopard is very close to the tribe, then I might be wrong. The chimps would apparently be using syntax to communicate nuanced meanings in those cases.

 

But they don't.

 

Any attempt on the part of any contributor to this thread to put the chirps, twitterings, grunts, yells, clicks or any other sounds of any other species on this planet in the same category as human (syntactic) language, will be folded, spindled and otherwise dealt with as harshly as the Hypography Rules allow.

 

:hihi: :hihi: :hihi:

[Qfwfq]

I would like to tackle this one. Saying that the difference between ape "language" and our language is just a matter of complexity is to completely miss the mark. The critical difference is that ape "language" is NOT syntactical.

Did you read what you quoted, down to the last few words?

 

Any attempt on the part of any contributor to this thread to put the chirps, twitterings, grunts, yells, clicks or any other sounds of any other species on this planet in the same category as human (syntactic) language

I did not do this. The terminology of complex language is quite widely used to indicate what I said.

 

There is a lot of controversy, partly due to the usual problem of people not using the word with the same meaning. Many things, not only sound, can be called language but some people reject applying the term to them. It is a complicated matter and I'm not an expert, I just remember things from documentaries or articles.

[Pyrotex]

Did you read what you quoted, down to the last few words?

 

I did not do this. The terminology of complex language is quite widely used to indicate what I said.

 

There is a lot of controversy, partly due to the usual problem of people not using the word with the same meaning. Many things, not only sound, can be called language but some people reject applying the term to them. It is a complicated matter and I'm not an expert, I just remember things from documentaries or articles.

Hello Q,

yes, I did read down to the last few words. Which is what prompted my response.

 

When it comes to animal sounds (chimps and porpoises), ancient hierglyphs, and the moans and grunts of human children raised without linguistic contact with other humans, the "experts" often read more into those sounds and glyphs than is warranted. They really, really WANT there to be something like a human communicatory language. But then they have serious problems with proving it.

 

Even Koko, the talking gorilla who was taught American Sign Language, and appears to still use it, presents serious problems with the theory that even apes are able to use "language" just like humans do. If this were not so, we would be teaching apes to talk in every zoo in the world. And in the wild. And giving them full "civil rights" as sentient beings. Killing a chimp for medical research would be declared "murder". But we don't see these things happening.

 

However, the documentaries you spoke of (I think I've seen them, too.) are quite fascinating and persuasive. It's just that they don't present all the facts.

[Qfwfq]

I did read down to the last few words. Which is what prompted my response.

I find this surprising, because I had made the very distinction which you then made great, huge efforts to point out and explain to me....

 

:phones:

[paigetheoracle]

I think that language, like law, results from experience. I believe that it facilitates thought, but not on the level of food-gathering. I was thinking and remembering before I learned language. The relationships of objects and beings and the changes in those relationships cause cognitive questions and thought. Movies would lose much of their ability to make us think if we could only think by means of language, but don't tell linguists that.

 

I wish I had known that about the Korean language when I had a lot of Korean friends. I've lost contact with them. But, if my premise that language follows experience is correct, I wonder what there is in the Korean experience that would lead to the necessity of adding what seems to us like a joke. If I told someone, "I'm going to the store and also I'm coming back," I'd get a laugh.

 

Also, how many words do we have for snow? Slush? Snowpack? Powder?

 

Any other suggestions?

 

--lemit

 

No but I get your 'drift'.