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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Interesting NY Times article, arguing that since Asian languages have each character correspond to a syllable of sound, and in Chinese, at least, a basic unit of meaning (called a morpheme), they lack the abstract character of Western languages which inhibits the development of analytical thought. This is a very recent development of a very old chestnut, which went by the name of the Sapir Lee Whorf hypothesis, and which held that the mental categories by which people perceive the world are determined by their language."Alfred H. Bloom... argued that the lack of a subjunctive tense in Chinese made it extremely difficult for native speakers to explore "counterfactual" conceits... When Mr. Bloom tested Chinese and American students on a series of counterfactuals, he found that the Chinese students were typically unable to distinguish between events that really happened and false hypotheticals. The implication, Mr. Bloom argued, is that Chinese is more concrete than English, and, as a consequence, Chinese speakers have more trouble with abstract thought than Americans. "
There are certainly some interesting empirical differences between the speaking of Chinese and English; the use of intonation to distinguish otherwise identical words requires use of both brain hemispheres, whereas English speakers only use the left side of the brain. However, the problem with the Sapir Lee Whorf hypothesis is that it does rather tend to beg the question of how long the chicken and the egg intend to discuss their respective origins (that is, it is rarely clear to what extent language molds perception and to what extent perception may mold language. Determining the nature of any interactive loop in this respect is a fraught proceeding at best). In this context, it is hardly novel to observe that notion of rationality (as opposed to heurictic thought) is a Western concept. For example, some psychological research a few years back came to these conclusions;"Easterners, the researchers find, appear to think more "holistically," paying greater attention to context and relationship, relying more on experience-based knowledge than abstract logic and showing more tolerance for contradiction. Westerners are more "analytic" in their thinking, tending to detach objects from their context, to avoid contradictions and to rely more heavily on formal logic. "
As such, while I am rather reluctant to side with Pinker, I think it's fairly clear that language need not be identified as a sole causal factor. Of course, the discovery of language formation by the deaf children in Nicaragua (they had formed a complex grammatical sign language without any external assistance or stimulus) should have ended these debates; given that the discovery made it abundantly clear that a genetic basis for language formation exists, it should be reasonably clear how we choose between chicken and egg.
posted by Richard 10:04 pm
