Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)

Post by zorked » Fri, Dec 19, 2014, 10:59 PM UTC

WaxProlix wrote: post #10

aomurphy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by moioci » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 12:12 AM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #12

ExpiredLink wrote: post #7

> Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist? "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Wittgenstein

Some (most? all?) people have the capacity to think highly complex thoughts without using language. It's a common misconception that human thought "has a language", and I see many people ask the bilingual "what language do you think in". They never seem to understand that you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else, rehearsing a conversation or whatever. They're prone to a cognitiv…

Post by WaxProlix » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 12:36 AM UTC

meepmorp wrote: post #18

WaxProlix wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

Am I correct in assuming you've not actually read any of Chomsky's syntatic work?

Post by WaxProlix » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 1:56 AM UTC

zorked wrote: post #21

WaxProlix wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While it is far more likely that Everett is wrong, science has to start somewhere, and Pirahã people exist on this planet and other people could go check the story. You can absolutely prove him wrong. Coming up with crazy ideas based on some strange observations is a part of science too.

Post by vorg » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 4:18 AM UTC

ubernostrum wrote: post #2

I 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.