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Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

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Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#131

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…

Probably worth noting that while 洋 does literally mean "sea", it also means "foreign".

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#132
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The 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.)

I didn't read the SEP article, but is the language of thought hypothesis perhaps already verified by our ability to do some sort of logic on neural network embeddings? E.g. queen-royal=woman.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#133
In my limited (to one person) experience, it may not be as clear cut.

I 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]

#134
post #93
post #75

Earlier 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…

> English as a communication tool looses very little expressive power when users do not use sub-clauses.

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]

#135

It 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…

That test was indeed interesting. But, one thing it didn't mention was audiation. Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording. This is very useful when performing as I can pretty much play along to this internal track. Some people appear not to be able to do this at all.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#136

It 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…

Anecdote: I once tried to suppress my internal monologue. I found thinking elaborate thoughts and checking them for soundness was a lot harder. Might just be not being used to it.

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]

#137

Here 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…

I find the opposite. The more complex a thought, the harder it is to reason about using language in my head. Speaking as someone who has a constant inner monologue.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#138

It 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…

> just how much of a wierdo

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]

#139
post #130
post #109

Earlier 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…

Weird, based on the wording of the questions and the categories they presented I kind of just assumed that each question only pertained to one of them. If they're doing something more complex I didn't notice it. But maybe they have some baked in assumptions that some of these modalities are like, mildly anticorrelated? That's the thing that kinda irked me about psychology when I was studying it more seriously. The epistemic integrity of psychological research reads to me as basically castles built on sand, where people get excited about results that seem super weakly supported based on reading the paper, which is often itself laden with a ton of assumptions that don't seem justified, but people who cite them just take the conclusions the authors drew as established, build their own studies with those assumptions baked in, ad nauseum. I was not shocked at all when the replication crisis hit this field as hard as it did, and since the issue is often in the way the hypotheses are operationalized in the first place, there are inherently going to be tons of flawed studies that are hard to even detect through the heuristic of replicability.

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]

#140
Language helps us shape our thoughts, in a way a ruler helps us draw straight lines, but thoughts do not begin with language.

Our 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.

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