11–20 of 51 posts
Language isn't an invention, it's co-evolved with Homo Sapiens. I highly recommend The Symbolic Species for the current state of the art in language origin theories. http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Lang...
The former is a more consistent notion than the latter. More consistent with the evidence, etc. cited. Thinking 'in' language implies passivity and representation, thinking into language implies evolutionarily novel linguistic production, autonomy of mind, etc.
Please review The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience.
Language isn't an invention, it's co-evolved with Homo Sapiens. I highly recommend The Symbolic Species for the current state of the art in language origin theories. http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Lang...
Are you kidding? The book is 15 years old. I did enjoy it very much in 1997, though.
The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not…
The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not…
With regard to grammatical gender, w/re German, I was told that it was futile to try to derive grammatical gender from the attributes of objects --that it was pretty random, for the most part. Mark Twain once remarked "In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has"
The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not…
The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not…
If you casually asked a native Chinese speaker "are leaves and the sky the same color?" would they answer differently than if you asked a native English speaker? If so (i.e. if Chinese speakers tend to say Yes while English speakers tend to say No), then I would argue that there's something more going on than simple hue labels, since the labels themselves aren't being asked for or provided.
Good article :), here's my dissent... I, like most europeans (or for that matter most of the non anglo-saxon world), speak multiple languages on a daily basis. I think its true that a language forces you to concentrate on certain things i.e. object gender, its relative distance, or shape when counting objects, but it doesn't make you "think" differently in any fundamental way. We all still perceive three chairs, or d…
But doesn't your programming language change how you think about problems? Does a Lisp expert think the same way as a Java expert? Our spoken language is not something that was designed but is an artefact of thousands of years of social interaction. Of course most of the time it doesn't matter, but sometimes it does.
EDIT: I would also suggest that Lisp and Java are more different than any two human languages in history. And even then, they are both Turing complete.