Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
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Re: Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
#2I keep seeing these types of articles.
Then I keep seeing comments and links debunking them (example: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/...) and saying that the claims about the Piraha tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting.
At this point I don't believe anything I read about the Piraha.
Re: Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
#3I love this story.
This talk (by Everett) is a lot of fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo
Re: Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
#4I keep seeing these types of articles. Then I keep seeing comments and links debunking them (example: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/... ) and saying that the claims about the Piraha tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting. At this point I don't believe anything I read about the Piraha.
Thank you for such an insightful comment! I will absolutely check this out!
Re: Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
#5The absence of recursion would not actually "refute Chomsky" (whatever the hell that means; it's not like Chomsky only has one angle). "Universal grammar" just means "whatever linguists think all human languages have in common", it would just mean that clausal recursion is not one of these things.
Re: Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
#6I keep seeing these types of articles. Then I keep seeing comments and links debunking them (example: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/... ) and saying that the claims about the Piraha tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting. At this point I don't believe anything I read about the Piraha.
Not knowing what to believe is probably the best thing right now. Everett (the linguist who made the claims) is quite insistent that this is the case, many other linguists are not. It's definitely a big controversy right now, particularly Everett's claim that Piraha does not allow recursion (many linguistic theories, notably Chomsky's, seem to make recursion a pretty fundamental feature of human language). A lot of the arguments are pretty technical, and they're all ham strung by the fact that the Piraha are so remote there isn't a whole lot of research on them besides Everett's, and even he has trouble going back now.
This blog post has a nice set of links about the controversy, and Everett and one of his major critics both appear in the comments to argue, so definitely read those if you are interested:
Re: Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
#7> Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist?
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Wittgenstein
Re: Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
#8I keep seeing these types of articles. Then I keep seeing comments and links debunking them (example: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/... ) and saying that the claims about the Piraha tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting. At this point I don't believe anything I read about the Piraha.
It seems fairly simple.
Extraordinary claims are often made and publicized widely today just because they get attention, grab eye-balls and so-forth.
Most of these ordinary claims are at least unproven if not wholly fallacious for similar reasons.
This is why "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Once a claim has made that rounds and gotten some pretty thorough debunking, it's reasonable to say that it's water under the bridge and move to the next claim.
Re: Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
#9The absence of recursion would not actually "refute Chomsky" (whatever the hell that means; it's not like Chomsky only has one angle). "Universal grammar" just means "whatever linguists think all human languages have in common", it would just mean that clausal recursion is not one of these things.
That's sort of the problem with UG, though - it's either so strong a claim as to be almost mystical claims about "the mind-brain" or some such nonsense - and therefore nigh-irrefutable - or so weak as to be basically a truism - "whatever languages all have in common, that's UG!"
Re: Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)
#10I keep seeing these types of articles. Then I keep seeing comments and links debunking them (example: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/... ) and saying that the claims about the Piraha tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting. At this point I don't believe anything I read about the Piraha.
Not knowing what to believe is probably the best thing right now. Everett (the linguist who made the claims) is quite insistent that this is the case, many other linguists are not. It's definitely a big controversy right now, particularly Everett's claim that Piraha does not allow recursion (many linguistic theories, notably Chomsky's, seem to make recursion a pretty fundamental feature of human language). A lot of t…
When you have one data source and only a handful of data points and that data is not reproducible, you're not doing science. Everett might have some interesting hypotheses, but what he's doing isn't what you could call peer-reviewable. Linguists who have aspirations towards hard science will, for that reason alone (not to mention the theoretically tenuous/unpopular nature of his claims) dismiss him pretty quickly.