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

Post by proveanegative » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 2:35 PM UTC

aomurphy wrote: post #6

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.

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…

Why is Everett prohibited from going back?

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Sun, Dec 21, 2014, 12:43 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #20

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else Dealing with other people is probably the biggest part of most people's cognitive burden, though. And it's likely that the ability to make complex inferences when on one's own (solving a mathematical problem, writing a novel, or whatever) derives from the experience of communicating complex ideas through language. I have a pretty close re…

> Dealing with other people is probably the biggest part of most people's cognitive burden, though.

That's a scary thought. I haven't tried to measure my own cognition, but I doubt that modeling other human's behavior amounts to even 10% of my waking, thoughtful time.

When I read this part of your comment, it struck me that this might be very different for a typical person. What if they're spending 99% of their time doing this? How could they have any intelligent thought at all?

Perhaps they use this to substitute for intelligent thought... it would explain how pervasive groupthink is in all areas of life.

I will have to study this.

> nd it's likely that the ability to make complex inferences when on one's own (solving a mathematical problem, writing a novel, or whatever) derives from the experience of communicating complex ideas through language.

This isn't true for me. I will not dismiss that it's true for others. But it also implies that they would have very limited minds... not only can they not contemplate ideas for which there is no useful language yet, they'd also be limited by whether they can imagine explaining it to others well enough that those people could understand it too.

They'd be virtually as stupid as they imagine everyone else to be.

Thank you. You've given me much to think about, and few do that.

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

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