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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.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Having been interested for a while in the ideas of Sapir and Lee Whorf, the recent research on the Piraha language, which has occasionally been characterised as providing evidence for those theories, was something I was immediately interested in. Looking into it in more detail, I don't think it actually does support Sapir to any marked intent, but as this article argues, it does challenge many current assumptions about language and consciousness:"So in the case of Piraha, the language I've worked with the longest of the 24 languages I've worked with in the Amazon, for about 30 years, Pirahã doesn't have expressions like "John's brother's house". You can say "John's house", you can say "John's brother", but if you want to say "John's brother's house", you have to say "John has a brother. This brother has a house". They have to say it in separate sentences.
One answer that's been given when I claim that Piraha lacks recursion, is that recursion is a tool that's made available by the brain, but it doesn't have to be used. But then that's very difficult to reconcile with the idea that it's an essential property of human language—if it doesn't have to appear in a given language then, in principle, it doesn't have to appear in any language. If it doesn't have to appear in one part of a language, it doesn't have to appear in any part of a language... If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they tell their stories.
So the evidence is still being collected, the claims that I have made about Pirahã lacking recursion and the fact that Piraha is an evidence that there probably isn't a need for universal grammar. Contrary to Chomsky's proposal that universal grammar is the best way to think about where language comes from, another possibility is just that humans have different brains that are different globally from those of other species, that they have a greater general intelligence that can be exploited for all sorts of purposes in human thinking and human problem-solving... The ongoing investigation of these claims and alternatives to universal grammar, an architectonic effect of culture on grammar as whole, and the implications of this for the way that we've thought about language for the last 50 years are serious. If I am correct then the research so ably summarized in Steve Pinker's book The Language Instinct might not be the best way to think about things."
What particularly interests me about these arguments is the role they play in the overall history of ideas. In contrast to the ideas of Marx, Freud, Skinner and Foucault, which all assumed to varying degrees that environmental forces are markedly more important than what would now be termed genetic considerations, modern conceptions of rationality have increasingly spurned the idea of the blank slate and moved towards a conception that bears a marked resemblance to that of Thomas Hobbes, if we substitute the term ‘genes’ for ‘passions.’ As Edward O Wilson observed every human brain is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as 'an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid. I have to admit that evolutionary psychology of this kind is not something I have ever had a great deal of regard for; it tends to involve post-hoc extrapolations that are typically every bit as unfalsifiable as Freud's theories. In either case, the term 'just-so story' seems amply deserved. It tends to disregard culture as a natural and material phenomenon and one that can be described as responding to a form of natural selection. If that is being displaced in favour of a more nuanced, tempered view, the I'll certainly be happy.
posted by Richard 4:41 pm
