Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Mandarin word literally means "relationships" and the concept is well established in English. When you describe somebody as "connected", that's what you're saying. It's an incredibly poor example of an "untranslatable" phrase.
The first and only time I've ever felt like I really know Chinese was when I came across the phrase '洋汽扑鼻' in "Fortress Besieged" by Qian Zhongshu. It literally means 'the breath of the sea assaults the nostrils". It's a joke on how fashionable and in demand everything Western was in China in the 1920s. For me it's just laugh-out-loud-for-10-minutes funny. I've tried to explain it to literal dozens of my friends and…
Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
131–140 of 404 posts
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#132The entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good summary of the Language of Thought Hypothesis. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/ Jerry Fodor, who advocated an internal mental language, was seen as an old crank when I studied Linguistics in late 90s; I just looked him up and, god, he died recently in 2017. Here’s a New Yorker article from that time: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/post…
This is related but not really the same thing. The Language of Thought may or may not be closely related to human language. (Some animals may also have concepts and compositional mental representations.)
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#133I am one of those who uses language to think. I would have an internal monologue and I would also say things out loud just to see how they sound. It's not always a fully fledged idea, or even a coherent thought for that matter. I have no idea why i do this. But that is me. In a sense, my thoughts are forming when I speak. Hence, i am somewhat better at written communication than being asked for things on the spot.
I have encountered people who when they speak, are communicating their thoughts, not formulating them unlike the way I do. I have to be careful with them because they assume I am also communicating my thought vs formulating it and that makes it sound more rigid than it is in my mind. I have seen many nerds like me who understand what thinking out loud is and are more forgiving about missteps or "wrong sounding thoughts". They are also more understanding because in our experience, that is how people tend to think.
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actual human natural language is meaningfully recursive, because any grade school student understands the recursive properties of certain toy sentence examples in that they could "go on forever" as a set of arbitrarily larger complex sentences. The commonality of mathematical grammars (as mathematical objects in their own right) and natural language is that both have computational properties such as recursive structu…
You're confusing the object language (human natural language) and the meta-language (formal grammars - ala Chomsky). Formal grammar theory relies on recursive formulae to define what is a a language (formally set of sentences), natural language itself does not use/require recursion as understood in the same way. Some natural languages support grammatical features like sub-clauses but that's only "recursive" in the se…
Very little for that subset you wish to communicate, maybe.
In some literary traditions, not only are clauses nested within clauses at the sentence level, but whole narratives are nested within others.
(hmm, are there any in-the-wild examples of recursive tmesis? if so, that'd be just fan-far-fucking-out-tastic)
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#135It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#136It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…
These days I mostly use words but there are many concepts that don't have a short number of words corresponding to them, which makes recalling them much harder for me.
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#137Here is my explanation why language seems to be, while not necessary, so useful for abstract thought: Thinking thoughts with abstract concepts takes up a lot of working memory. We can't hold many of those in mind at once. But if they are expressed in words they take very little memory. So we can have long winding and abstract thoughts because language compresses the parts of the thought complex we are not currently f…
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#138It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…
I was surprised to learn the other day from HN that not only some people, but some commenters here, consider the notion of "not opening one's mouth to start a sentence before knowing how it's going to end" an impracticable ideal.
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seem…
How does one even get high inner voice score there? I dialogue in my head all the time and answered “sa” to most of the inner voice questions, but fell on the far left side on that graph. Feels like other questions subtract from it silently. Instead I got high score in object rotation which I can do easily but it isn’t my main mode of thinking. I usually think abstractions and/or speak myself into convincing they are…
As far as the Likert scale nonsense, I am right there with you, all these psychological instruments are pretty poorly framed from my perspective, and while there's some discourse deep in academia about the rigor of various experimental methodologies even in the most broken of social sciences, in practice they don't seem to care much because it's publish or perish baby!
It really doesn't seem like most sciences are quite this broken, though some are clearly trying. Obviously there are people in psychology trying to do good rigorous science, it seems like institutional pressures are not working to support them, and certainly won't amplify rigor over making bold claims that get a lot of press
Like, all this to say that it's definitely worth taking these things with a massive grain of salt, but if you do that, it can still be pretty interesting.
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#140Our thoughts and ideas come from an unknown source. We might call it intuition, but scientifically speaking, it remains a black box.
Lethologica - a temporary inability to remember a particular word or name - is one evidence of this. You can have a fully formed thought in your mind, but be unable to express it with words.