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I dunno what "FAO" means, but FAO anyone interested in linguistics + behavioral psychology (pg. 4)
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
Well you've just shown that you are rather ignorant when it comes to architecture. lol |
So a building HAS already told you to grab a cup of coffee for Mrs. Williams? And how hard a childhood its architect had?
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
I don't want to derail the thread too much getting into this, but suffice to say you are wrong. |
Well, don't underestimate me, I do have some knowledge about visual arts (not architecture, but I used to work with graphic design, having taken courses and whatnot), but I don't consider "colour", "balance", "rhythm" to be at all analogous to vowels and consonants. Why?
There's something about "darkness" for example that means something based on our experience. If you build a darker room in a building, it may convey a meaning which is far from being conventional. There's absolutely nothing about the word "dark" (either its graphic representation or the sequence of an voiced alveolar stop, an open anterior unrounded vowel, and a voiceless velar stop) that resembles darkness.
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
Can't blame you if you don't speak the language, though. |
I do, but I take "language" to be something much more specific. Even because, otherwise, it doesn't mean anything at all. |
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| nefardec |
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
Well unfortunately Joe Spartan didn't leave behind any writings, but the theory is easily tested in the modern world. Explain the divergence of opinions regarding the nature of space-time in the English-speaking world with regards to your theory of "the rules of language govern[ing] one's perception of time and space". You can begin with the differences that you and I apparently share.
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Sorry, I meant 'govern' in a loose sense not a strict sense. Kind of like a thomas jefferson versus an alexander hamilton.
This is what I was getting at with the 'general framework' observation. Certainly people are free to use the framework to come up with unique things. But they have latent underlying similarities and limitations that are hard to grasp because its hard to think of them when you have to use the language that is responsible for the limitations in the first place.
Suppose several people from the same hometown pick a pool of 50 different words. Then they are told to combine them into sensible paragraphs. Each of the people could combine them differently into paragraphs to come up with totally different meanings. Yet the content of the words might suggest what was important to the group as a subset or sampling of a culture, and the latent structures and modes in which they both combine the words, not to mention the roles of the words themselves would be loaded with certain ontological concepts of dualism: subject-object relationships, concepts of here versus there, now-then, etc.
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
As an example, one can point to the universality of ontological categories that different people employ to categorise different objects in the world around them. People are put into a different ontological class from animals, which are put into a different ontological class from tools, which are put into a different ontological class from landscapes and so on. Such a universality of cognition is difficult to account for if our conceptions of the world around us are shaped a posteriori by language, especially given that we now know that all such objects are constructed of exactly the same (baryonic) matter: would it be labouring the point to note that it was, again, the literate West which first noted this holistic view of nature and not the pre-literate East?
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I don't know why you're so obsessed with this west versus east deal. I think you are making unwarranted assumptions about my interests in an attempt to discredit me.
Ok, this goes very deep. Let me put it this way. What we call 'spoken language' is an abstraction of that universal language, that limitless mesh of meaning which is the very substance of thought, which is experience-time-space. An easy way to think of this is with computers as a metaphor. Programming languages are abstractions of a deeper language that allows humans with sensory organs and fingers to interact at a macro-scale, without needing to manipulate the finest granularity of information. This finest level of information is thought itself, which is inseparable from time/space/experience. Because we are aware, conscious beings, and we have the faculty of perception, we are burdened with the unavoidable task of separating the universe into the fundamental dualism of I and the world. This fundamental dualism represents the origin of language and thought, the concept of I and the world, subject-object, perceiver-perceived, here-there, now-then. From this initial (apparent) dualism, we create a many-forked tangle of relationships and meanings between appearances and fragments of appearances. This is the fundamental structure of thought, which is the basis for language, which is the nature of time, which is the nature of space.
So the ontological relationships you mentioned have existed for quite some time, and have been part of human language for just as much time, because we all come from the basically the same origins.
Please note that I am not talking about differences in mere world-view as much as I am talking about a fundamental ontology. That is, I am saying that language shapes our fundamental notions of subject-object,here-there,now-then, etc. Differences in world-view or values are inconsequential and uninteresting to me. So as others have pointed out in this thread, it may seem like I am really making a big fuss about something that is really self-evident, but it is a self-evident truth is endlessly fascinating and wonderous to me.
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
As examples of universal metaphysical beliefs, it is possible to identify many that seem to be commonplace in all the worlds religions. These seem to center around the existence of unseen, counter-intuitive (in some way) agents, who have privilaged access to important social information and who can be placated or entreatied using proscribed rituals. Religion needn't have taken such a universal form, and perhaps that's best demonstrated by a list of qualities that universally never appear in religious beliefs (even though they seem to be as warranted empirically as "normal" religious claims):
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I would suggest that the reason for that is like the phrase 'art imitates life'. God (the word, the concept) has always been a projection of man. Even shamanic, pre-historical religion can be described the way you suggest, and I think this is because we are tied to our personal conceptions of space-time-experience. The idea that heaven is a 'place' (above) and 'time' (future, after death) for example, imitate the conscious experience of life. The concept of 'nirvana' is often misconstrued in the same way as a 'place' or 'time' that can be 'reached'. We say 'reach nirvana', or 'attain enlightenment'.
Except the true mystics do not say these things - they recognize all language as mere metaphor, as an abstract layer which provides us as conscious beings with a functional, macro-scale interface for interacting with the infinitesimally fine substance of reality. If you ever read the words of true mystics, they will not talk about 'reaching nirvana' or 'getting into heaven'. You will hear words like absolute, beinglessness, timelessness, void, silence, pleroma.
So what I am trying to say is that 'religion' as a belief/ritual system (not mysticism) is completely tied to the same linguistic structure of the 'world' (taken to mean experience-space-time-construct) as everything else. So it's no wonder that, as sentient beings, we would come up with the idea of a spirit world versus a material world. The grass is always greener as long as there is another side.
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
No, what you said was that "the rules of language govern one's perception of time and space" which I said was patently not true. But even in this case you're wrong, because it's possible to have thought without language. For instance, someone suffering from "anomia" can still think of a horse or a car or any other number of objects with perfect fidelity even though they are incapable of associating such objects with a word. To use a less extreme example, one's imagination or memory scarcely seems to be dependant on language does it? Surely, then, thought is possible without language?
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Yeah, I think I've said abotu 4 times in this thread already that language is much greater than the spoken word. Language is thought itself. Language is the total (tangled) structure of meaning, the ever-unfolding manifestation of one basic ontology. Therefore the limits of this manifestation are the limits of thought, and the so the conception of experience-space-time (ie the world/universe) is limited to this manifestation, but ultimately reducible to the same basic ontology.
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
I would even venture that the opposite is plausibly true: that is, that language is possible without thought in any meaningful sense of the word. The "Chinese Room" thought experiment is a good example of this.
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Yeah, I said that.
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
But now you're just playing word games: if every human output is a form of language, or if we can define language as loosely as "a relationship of meanings that allows some creature to understand [and] make decisions in time and space" then one can probably say that "language and thought are inseperable". But then it also means that we would have to say that animals are capable of language because their system of behaviour is also predicated on "a relationship of meanings that allows [them] to understand [and] make decisions in time and space": aren't we now defining the term too broadly for it to have any meaning though? |
Ever heard of the waggle dance?
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
My point was that written language is merely an extension of spoken language: the former wouldn't (and probably couldn't) exist without the latter, hence my objection to your drawing such a clean distinction between the two. You said that "the major difference between alphabetized language and spoken language is that the voice communicates in a more holistic and all-at-once way as pure sound, whereas alphabetized language is strictly parsed as a sequential code" and I'm saying that simply isn't true. Written language is merely a reification of spoken language, always has been and always will be. |
I agree that it is a reification, but it is a reification of consequence.
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
Sorry, your cust... ah, you knew what I meant.
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Oh. That's a record by Sunpeople, a play on the chicago house mantra 'Jack your Body'. Try again...
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
So why didn't you say that in the first place instead of "the rules of language govern one's perception of time and space "? |
If I knew where I was going to arrive when I started a discussion, why would I even bother? |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
Language is the total (tangled) structure of meaning, the ever-unfolding manifestation of one basic ontology. |
No, it isn't. Language is a means of communication. If you claim language and thought are the same (which you did before this quote), you're overlooking the fact that you can have private thoughts, but you can't have a private language. |
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| nefardec |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
No, it isn't. Language is a means of communication. If you claim language and thought are the same (which you did before this quote), you're overlooking the fact that you can have private thoughts, but you can't have a private language. |
I think you aren't allowing yourself the scope to understand what I am saying beyond your definition of language.
You are also assuming that private thoughts are 'yours' somehow, which is also of the sort of narrow scope that I am not even (interested in) discussing.
I understand your (practical) point of view, because you are a linguist interested in world languages. I am interested in the stuff the universe is made of. World languages as verbal communication are macro-scale abstractions of what I am discussing. They are curious to me, but I am more concerned with the nature of things than their superficial appearance. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
renegade has a fascinating ability to make unfamiliar or complex concepts easy to understand for us dopey laymen. certainly his arguments in this thread read much better than the wordy, ambiguous bollocks being trotted out by others.
i've said it before james, you should be writing (something, anything!) as a profession. its a unique skill being able to dumb down your prose for your audience, without really dumbing it down at all.
oh, and update your blog you lazy bastard :) |
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| woscar |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
renegade has a fascinating ability to make unfamiliar or complex concepts easy to understand for us dopey laymen. certainly his arguments in this thread read much better than the wordy, ambiguous bollocks being trotted out by others.
i've said it before james, you should be writing (something, anything!) as a profession. its a unique skill being able to dumb down your prose for your audience, without really dumbing it down at all.
oh, and update your blog you lazy bastard :) |
+1 :) |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
I understand your (practical) point of view, because you are a linguist interested in world languages. I am interested in the stuff the universe is made of. World languages as verbal communication are macro-scale abstractions of what I am discussing. They are curious to me, but I am more concerned with the nature of things than their superficial appearance. |
I'm interested in the world as well, but I'm very wary of any "semantic holism" that postulates everything is meaningful as if meaning is a property of the things themselves.
No, it isn't. We ascribe meaning to the experiences and objects around us, either based on our previous experiences or on our biological constitution. There's no essence in the nature of things (like the Kantian thing in itself), they're what we make of them. If you claim there's something deeper about the nature of this computer I'm using because it is made up of atoms, that's simply because we've analysed what matter is like and came to the conclusion that if we say it's made of tiny particles that behave in a certain way, we can explain its behaviour under certain circumstances.
Like I said, language is a codified convention of symbols we use to communicate (which need not have any relation with the things they stand for). Thoughts are inner cognitive processes. Why does this distinction matter? Let me go back to what you told Renegade:
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
Please note that I am not talking about differences in mere world-view as much as I am talking about a fundamental ontology. That is, I am saying that language shapes our fundamental notions of subject-object,here-there,now-then, etc. |
No, it doesn't. This is largely imposed on us by our biological make-up. We experience time and space regardless of language. If anything, language helps us make sense of the world in a pattern, but it doesn't shape the world. You're advocating a strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it's been proven again and again to be misguided.
Whorf thought the Hopi language dealt with time in a completely different manner because they didn't have "tense" and their view of time was for that matter cyclical. He was seriously mistaken and, if it were the case, the Chinese would have a hard time telling the time as their language lacks the semantic category of tense altogether.
The impact language has on us is very subtle. Having extra words for colours, for example, helps us spot these colours more quickly as we're used to making this distinction. But that doesn't mean that if we didn't have a word for "black" we wouldn't be able to see this colour.
The reason why I'm not philosophising here like Renegade is because I know the literature that deals with this stuff quite well, and language is not as magical as we take it to be. We live in a hyperlinguistic culture thanks to stoic philosophy and its misguided conceptions about languages that have been passed down to us. Language is sneaky, and it makes us talk about nothing when we have the impression to be uttering the most profound of all truths.
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
oh, and update your blog you lazy bastard :) |
+1. |
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| nefardec |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
renegade has a fascinating ability to make unfamiliar or complex concepts easy to understand for us dopey laymen. certainly his arguments in this thread read much better than the wordy, ambiguous bollocks being trotted out by others.
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Yeah, his posts are indeed insightful |
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| nefardec |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
I'm interested in the world as well, but I'm very wary of any "semantic holism" that postulates everything is meaningful as if meaning is a property of the things themselves. |
Why? Personal grudge? I know, it's academia...
Except you have it wrong - it's not that meaning is a property of the things. What kind of monism would that be? It's that meaning and the thing are inseparable, like two sides of a coin.
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
No, it isn't. We ascribe meaning to the experiences and objects around us, either based on our previous experiences or on our biological constitution. There's no essence in the nature of things (like the Kantian thing in itself), they're what we make of them.
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Yes, agreed, we do that because it is our biological nature to do so. I also said that in my post to renegade (something like 'we are burdened with the unavoidable task of perceiving').
The problem is, there is a difference between 'what we make of them', for example what we make of an experience, and what experiences themselves are. The difference, as I said, is the difference in level of abstraction. 'What we make of them' is a macro-scale abstraction comprised of cognitive language, and the experiences themselves are comprised language itself, in its purest, finest form.
Again, the computer analogy:
The finest language, which actually drives the process, is fine agglomeration of 1s and 0s. We have then abstracted this with a programmatic layer that allows us to manipulate the 1s and 0s on a macro-scale that makes sense to our biological nature. In fact there was no other way for us to go about the whole thing because of that biological nature. Then on top of programming layers we abstracted applications, with their own abstracted languages, etc.
Yet while PHP, C++, PASCAL, and FORTRAN are all languages of one type, the fact remains that the basic stream of 1s and 0s is a language, and of the finest kind.
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Like I said, language is a codified convention of symbols we use to communicate (which need not have any relation with the things they stand for). Thoughts are inner cognitive processes. |
I think you're selling language short. You're just used to thinking about it in a very specific way because of what you do. I'm used to thinking about it in a very general way because of what I do.
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
No, it doesn't. This is largely imposed on us by our biological make-up. We experience time and space regardless of language. If anything, language helps us make sense of the world in a pattern, but it doesn't shape the world. |
Again:
Language abstracted into cognitive languages, macro-scale forms 'help us make sense of the world'.
Language in its finest expression is the shape of the world - is what the world is made of.[i]
| quote: | [i]Originally posted by Lira
You're advocating a strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it's been proven again and again to be misguided.
Whorf thought the Hopi language dealt with time in a completely different manner because they didn't have "tense" and their view of time was for that matter cyclical. He was seriously mistaken and, if it were the case, the Chinese would have a hard time telling the time as their language lacks the semantic category of tense altogether.
The impact language has on us is very subtle. Having extra words for colours, for example, helps us spot these colours more quickly as we're used to making this distinction. But that doesn't mean that if we didn't have a word for "black" we wouldn't be able to see this colour. |
That's really NOT, what I am saying, at all. I don't understand how you can still think that I am saying this after all of the posts I have written.
Did I ever say something like 'English speaking people experience time faster than Mandarin speaking people'?
I have been speaking about language in a very different sense than what you are probably used to, which accounts for the miscommunication. Maybe instead of 'language' I will say use a metaphorical matrix-like phrase like 'the source' or 'the code'. That might be more confusing. But if it helps, think of my use of the word 'language' in a general sense as the 'code' that exists behind the matrix in that movie, and language in the sense of 'english', 'spanish', as things like buildings, phone booths, streets, in the matrix.
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
The reason why I'm not philosophising here like Renegade is because I know the literature that deals with this stuff quite well, and language is not as magical as we take it to be. We live in a hyperlinguistic culture thanks to stoic philosophy and its misguided conceptions about languages that have been passed down to us. Language is sneaky, and it makes us talk about nothing when we have the impression to be uttering the most profound of all truths.
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Again, I appreciate your knowledge and interest in world languages and culture, but what I am talking about is much different. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
So what you're really saying is: "Thought is inseparable from perception".
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| nefardec |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
So what you're really saying is: "Thought is inseparable from perception".
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Well that's one truism that comes of what I am saying. But factor in the additional piece of what I am saying - that the perception, the perceiving, the perceiver, and the perceived are all aspects of the same thing. |
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