Is human society predicated on just exploring the "word space" (like the fitness landscape)? Are we a slave to how we speak, incapable of skipping the library rooms right next to us?

Are we right to impose our own words on others? Are the foriegn words all that different that I need to consider them spereatly? Is language a driving force of world development, or would we all be better off speaking 'Mericn (or a universal language)?

To tie this into current concepts: is democracy not inherently "free" (democracy without the rule of law), but a structure to allow words to change over time with minimum fuss?

Some of the arguments I know… but I want to see, with all the new babblers, which ones are worthy to read (yet another troll challenge by myself) in the normal babble threads. I also know that, when I read the Library of Babel, it was a theoretical (read: hoity-toity) concept to me. But after two years of googling… it makes a hell of a lot more sense.

PS: this isn't a challenge to babblers to get whipped by a philosophy major: I am no such thing… if you answer, don't expect a patented, dismissive clockwork remark in response… expect a weighted response…

I don't know why I add this…. Trolls hang out under bridges with sewer pipes, not in the cafés of the streets in Paris

[ 08 April 2003: Message edited by: clockwork ]

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I think translatability is attainable

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please translate.

edited to add: i.e., this statement is too vague for me to agree with it or to question it. what is "translatability"? when is it "attained"? what is communicated in language?

[ 08 April 2003: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

By translatability, I mean the possibility of taking the same propositions and representing them in two forms of human language, which are trivally different in that they use a different phonetic system and have a slightly different ordering of forms and whose difference is actually mostly epiphenomenal. Then I claim that it is possible to map these propositions into these two forms of human language without altering the content of these propositions in any significant way.

I strongly suspect you will not agree with me, MK. I suspect this by the company you keep

[ 09 April 2003: Message edited by: Mandos ]

I always wonder, Mandos, whether you have thought enough about how much we project. It is hard for me still to ask the right questions of you. I guess I'm still in MK's position of puzzlement.

Our minds are structured in a certain way. Our minds are not Nature. We configure Nature as we can (we project), but error is unavoidable, given that we are not Nature.

We are not Nature. We are a wee, skewed bit of Nature. We sense what is out there through very particularly determined bodies. If we were built differently -- and gazillions of other creations are so built -- we would sense Nature differently.

skdadl calls "Nature" something "bigger than us", different than us, something we sense. While Mandos considers Nature to be any existing object.

Consider:
The word 'pain' is readily translated to every human language, as well as to gorilla, horse, possum and sea-lion.
The same holds true for the words 'food', 'cold', 'I', 'here'...
but not 'tree', because trees have no function in the sea-lion's experience.
The word 'meat' excludes horse, gorrilla and possum. The word 'house' is just for the humans. The word 'investment' leaves out a large segment of humans.

By the time you get to politics, technology and belief-systems, you're talking to relatively small group of humans whose experience, knowledge and cultural background is similar to your own.

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We are not Nature. We are a wee, skewed bit of Nature. We sense what is out there through very particularly determined bodies. If we were built differently -- and gazillions of other creations are so built -- we would sense Nature differently.
We see as through a glass darkly, Mandos. Accept!

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We are not Nature, 'tis true, but we are the journal of Nature's exploits written over billions of years. Natural Law has provided some limits on the permissible manifestations which are, nonetheless, infinite.

From hydrogen and helium, gravity fashioned the engines of the universe, the stars. Our ancestors saw them twinkle in the night sky, unaware that every element but the two lightest were forged in their furnaces. The earth upon which we stand, the water we drink, and the air we breathe are all, ultimately, gifts from the stars.

These elements contained within them the possibility of Life and Mind, as the Natural Law whose mark they bear permitted (or demanded) that they form compounds. Compounds assembled into micelles, oligonucleotides and proteinoids in a dance whose steps were present from the beginning or perhaps were improvised as the dancers took shape.

From these components came protocells and at some point, life, as best as it can be defined. We carry within us the magic of the first life as do all livng things present today. All life uses a version of the genetic code, wherein triplet RNA words of nucleotide letters produce epic poems written in protein from an outline provided by DNA.

Simple cells, Lynn Marguilis has taught us, formed communities (solitude runs counter to Natural Law, it would appear) and these more complex cells, still larger communities (called metazoa for those of technical inclination).

Eventually, the metazoa specializied and among their organs was an anterior mass of cells that communicated with each other by transducing chemical signals into electrical pulses that travelled down unimaginably long (for a cell) wires that they used to keep in touch with each other. Just as life was born from insensate matter, so conciousness emerged from these lumps of tissue.

"The whole is greater than the sum of the parts". Just as one cannot predict the attributes of a compound from study of its elements (you don't want to ingest the components of table salt in their uncombined form!), there is no way a priori to deduce the birth of Post-structuralism from a study of neurons and glial cells.

So, while we do indeed see through a glass darkly, our "seeing", imperfect as it is in itself, contains by the chain of contingencies described above, the whole of Nature.

Thus, each of us is like a hologram. We are parts of the whole, but the whole lies within us. We are, at the same time, less than and equal to all of Nature.

P.S. Mandos, accept nothing!

[ 09 April 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]

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Human language is a means of encoding propositions. It is a mapping between a semantic form, represented in some mental structure that is still the matter of debate and investigation, and a linear stream of sound or signs or text generated by some procedure. We are still investigating this mapping.

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I don't believe the terms "mapping" or "encoding propositions" are useful metaphors for language for several reasons.

The term "proposition" is too limiting for one. it carries connotations of logical structure that most languages (I except here some mathematical language and the language of symbolic logic) do not possess.

Human language seems to me to be predominantly associated with indicating internal biological states (I'm hungry, horny, hurt etc.), with directing co-operative actions of others (Lookit that, come here, go away) or with informing others of intention (I'm going over here, I need to see a man about a horse).

Logical discourse is a secondary (some might say degenerate ) use of semantics and syntax. Given, as others have pointed out, the contextual nature of "meaning", it seems to me that generally, human language is particularly unsuitable for encoding logical propositions.

The "mapping" analogy also contains problems, because clearly a set of linguistic strings, defined as a range produced from mappings of mental states (domain), can result from neither an isomorphic nor a homomorphic mapping.

Indeed, if you think about it, particularly in the context of intentionality, ascribing any kind of general properties to such a mapping is impossible, even if we could come up with an unambiguous taxonomy of "mental states".

[ 09 April 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]

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The term "proposition" is too limiting for one. it carries connotations of logical structure that most languages (I except here some mathematical language and the language of symbolic logic) do not possess.

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Human language seems to me to be predominantly associated with indicating internal biological states (I'm hungry, horny, hurt etc.), with directing co-operative actions of others (Lookit that, come here, go away) or with informing others of intention (I'm going over here, I need to see a man about a horse).

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Logical discourse is a secondary (some might say degenerate ) use of semantics and syntax. Given, as others have pointed out, the contextual nature of "meaning", it seems to me that generally, human language is particularly unsuitable for encoding logical propositions.

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The "mapping" analogy also contains problems, because clearly a set of linguistic strings, defined as a range produced from mappings of mental states (domain), can result from neither an isomorphic nor a homomorphic mapping.

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Indeed, if you think about it, particularly in the context of intentionality, ascribing any kind of general properties to such a mapping is impossible, even if we could come up with an unambiguous taxonomy of "mental states".

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I have not seen a convincing argument that a suitably expressive logical formalism (some form of higher order logic) cannot capture most of the dependencies in language. In fact, most of them can be captured with a first-order predicate calculus.

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I'm probably overstepping the bounds of my expertise by a fair bit here (it won't be the first time ), but as it requires compliance with particular inference rules and is therefore subject to the Incompleteness Theorem, a statement about what dependencies in language can be adequately represented by first-order predicate calculus is meaningless, as an infinity of first-order logical representations of syntactically and semantically valid strings in natural language would be impossible to verify in terms of the validity of their correspondence, no?
I forget which specifically, but I know that certain statements (I think to do with sets of properties of sets, for example) are not expressible within lower order logical systems.

I think any formal symbolic logic would fail in trying to represent a sentence such as:
"Sentences like this one are true as long as they remain unread." because the inference rules necessitate operations that cannot be carried out within the any formal system that can be used to represent the string.

Specifically, there is no way to represent the idea of an "unread sentence" within the set of legitimate strings that can be produced by a formal system which can produce the sentence above.
(I'm leaving aside the issue of self-referentiality also included in the sentence, though I see it as a bigger, though not unrelated, obstacle to symbolic representations of natural language).

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The weakness I see in viewing language in terms of biological associations is that the massive, recursive generative power of human language is not required for the expression of these states. How do we explain the remainder of this computational power?

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As suggested by my first post in this thread, the additional "computational power" of language is either a happy accident- I would use the term "emergent property"- or the result of some spooky teleology (I don't believe in teleology). I don't see it as being a defining characteristic of language, and only one of many wonderful powers of language.

How do we explain the existence of puns? (I do not believe any predicate calculus will be able to produce these) or jokes.

(We are coming back to AI vs meat here, so to avoid being sidetracked, I'll say I believe that one can come up with a perfectly good definition of intelligence from which the term "Artificial Intelligence" flows naturally and properly. My definition ,at least at this point in time, requires meat).

Why do I say this? "Brute force" generation of symbolic strings will produce puns and jokes, but that they are such, will never be decideable by the generating algorithm, only by an outside- read "human"- intelligence.

Poetry evokes images in the listener that are frequently unrelated to its semantic content. This its great power and is why it is a mode of expression that cannot be mimicked except by "Brute force"- which I define as the opposite of intelligence- and requires an external intelligence for "verifiability". I should add, that although seemingly paradoxical, great poets
know this and use it, I believe.

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Appealing to the contextual nature of meaning suggests an obvious counterargument: the context is part of the proposition...

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The problem is, biological organisms have a continually-changing context so that any attempt to incorporate a pre-determined context into a natural-language lexicon is doomed to failure at the outset.

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If I am understanding you correctly, this problem is easily solved by positing a Lexicon or a lexical item generator.

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I'm going to ignore questions of intonation, inflection and body language, but two problems still remain. First, syntactically legitimate sentences are permitted that make a mockery of your lexicon: you need some inference rule that can separate "meaningful" from "meaningless" strings. Chomsky's famous "Green Ideas sleep furiously" comes to mind. Then, you need a formalism that can anticipate changes in meaning from syntactic alternatives that re-order your defined lexical elements. This becomes difficult (impossible in my view) when we consider irony, sarcasm or metaphorical language.

The point I was making about intentionality includes not only the modes of discourse listed above, but lying, rhetoric and stream-of-conciousness communication for artistic purposes.

In these cases, accurate symbolic representation of mental states becomes impossible within a logically self-consistent calculus.

P.S. If we want to apply these ideas to creating a reliable translation machine, I think your going to have to break down and use a neural net, Mandos

[ 09 April 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]

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I strongly suspect you will not agree with me, MK. I suspect this by the company you keep

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i wouldn't be too hasty, Mandos. the success or failure of your argument depends on what "you" are. if you are the words on the screen before me, or even if you are their author (auctor) then i can agree with you completely. if you are an auto-authenticist living in the fantasy of the sameness of your subjectivity, it doesn't matter whether or not i agree with you--you will always suspect. indeed, the very fact of my agreement would make me a threat to you, because it would only prove my dangerous proximity. an old black ram, tupping your white ewe. my language, for you, would never be translatable. let the miscegenation commence by recommencing:

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I strongly suspect you will not agree with me, MK. I suspect this by the company you keep

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what is there before language? you've said that "language is shaped by thought, not vice versa." please shape "thought" for me by language. and then, if you like, you can shape "language" for me by thought!

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There is a book a few years old that dealt with the discovery of an ancient skeleton and its implications. Studying the skull the archeologists detrmined that these ancient humans most likely could not speak and did not have verbal language as we know it. Yet, they had some way to rationalize and make sense of the world, express feelings, indeed in many other respects they were completely human. It seems then that we ought to be careful when we discuss language. Is it after all just the transcription and codification of our phonetic codes and symbols?

The evolution of speech seems the result of some need. It seems incredible to me that it would work the other way round. One thinks of the babbling baby and the studies that show that language develops from the mimicing of patterns of adult speech and only later isolating words.

Our convenions of construction and the gradual building up of logical phrases from components is little more than a technology, a marvellous one but an invention never-the-less. The question is then what process "invented" conciousness?

well, first of all, Mandos' definition of language mentions "sounds, signs and text." i basically agree with this (out of context), though i think it would be neater to say that sounds are kinds of signs, and the term "text" needs clarification, but i assume he means graphemes, which i would also call signs. but the mention of the trio already suggests that there are signs other than phonemes and graphemes, and a language other than speech and writing. we've marginalised non-graphematic images, music, tactile objects, etc. as objects of another language.

even if that were not so, i think there are problems here. it's very interesting that you've invoked a skeleton and a baby, two symbols that bookend existence...maybe you know what problematisation i'm getting at, but i'll leave that for now. the more obvious and rather banal thing is that these things are--or were--exterior to your subjectivity, and you've made them part of your subjectivity them by reading of them in certain "studies," writing about them in this forum, or gazing at their images.

The study of the skull and neck bones by forensic archeologists determined that this humanoid lacked certain features - muscle development for speech and a small brain cavity - that were necessary for speech.

The opinion was that this ancient man walking erect and a hunter gatherer but did not speak. The point is then what in the environment demands of the human genome so powerfully that speech is developed? But what is more puzzling is why if we are just elaborate chains of chemical attactions does communication and representation exist at all?

To me there is something else going on that is fairly wonderful but which we only sort of hint at in this crazy world we live in.

That is, suppose that it is all subjectivity generated by our hard wired linguistic mechanism then how do we account for humanity in those who have no means for what we consider language?

[ 13 April 2003: Message edited by: Boinker ]

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That is, suppose that it is all subjectivity generated by our hard wired linguistic mechanism then how do we account for humanity in those who have no means for what we consider language?

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Clearly "language" encompasses more than a particular set of symbols or a particular technology for producing those symbols whether this means auditory or visual representations.
Helen Keller's wonderful life and achievements are tribute to the interchangeability of such "technologies". If the skeletons described in the earlier post were what we could recognize as "human", then most people would require some means of communication (not necessarily verbal)
to be part of their repetoire.
For the purposes of this discussion, we might ask whether all communication is "language" , or for that matter, what is "communication".

When I walk with my dog and he sniffs a lampost or tree where another dog has left a "calling-card", I have no doubt that he is receiving a communication, but most of us would not consider this a "word" or "paragraph" of language.

The relationship of subjectivity to language is a fascinating one, as is the relationship to thought and language. It is tempting to think that language is the realization of our desire to escape our subjecitve isolation to the community of the "objective". (I would submit that the indefinite pronoun "it" represents a lynchpin of communication, wherein two minds have established a sufficiently mutual context that a sort of telepathy exists.)

Of course your "tree" and mine my not be the same, and yet the objective reality does not cause me to see a television when someone uses the word "tree"...

About emotion and language, I find it fascinating that there are people (most often who have suffered some sort of brain injury) who can communicate and understand normally all aspects of their native language except for emotional terms or inflection. This would suggest that the emotional aspects of communication are handled apart from the others.

Some have surmised (I believe Orwell was one) that if we are prevented from being exposed to the "words" for certain ideas or concepts, then we will lose the concepts themselves. This suggests that language can create thought.
How do people without language think. I have seen my dog solve problems. How does he communicate with himself to arrive at his solution. Is he aware that he has found a solution?

When you observe yourself thinking, do you perceive your thought as language, images, sounds or something else? Does applying the "concious mind" to self-concious observation of its own working, does this change its working?

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Professionally, I am absolutely unqualified to mention anything on this topic.

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Bohdan, if babblers could only post on topics they were professionally qualified in, there would be no babble . We are, most of us, "gifted amateurs" .

[ 14 April 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]

Now there are things expressed in language that can be expressed elsewhere. Like sarcasm, irony, lying, etc. I have seen paintings, cartoons, etc, etc that express all these things. Language has characteristics, however, that painting does not. It is those characteristics that must be evaluated--and bringing it back to translatability, the constraints on translatability are only the contraints on restatement in any other medium of expression. There is nothing special about language that limits restatement than any other medium, regardless of context and other nonlinguistic matters.

[ 14 April 2003: Message edited by: Mandos ]

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Some have surmised (I believe Orwell was one) that if we are prevented from being exposed to the "words" for certain ideas or concepts, then we will lose the concepts themselves. This suggests that language can create thought.

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I subscribe to this thesis as well - that language can control the pattern of thought. I have seen it happen in my own life, as well, so I have little doubt that it is possible to regulate the way people, on average, think, simply by altering the language they use.

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By translatability, I mean the possibility of taking the same propositions and representing them in two forms of human language, which are trivally different in that they use a different phonetic system and have a slightly different ordering of forms and whose difference is actually mostly epiphenomenal. Then I claim that it is possible to map these propositions into these two forms of human language without altering the content of these propositions in any significant way.

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If you accept the proposition that language can control the pattern of thought, then this paragraph above would suggest that different linguistic groups tend to naturally think in different ways.

This is partially borne out by the different hand signals we see for the same thing all over the world.

This is also borne out by the difficulties in getting across certain concepts across languages.

The question arises, however, in asking how similar or how different do people think once they begin being able to speak in multiple languages. It is, after all, always possible (in theory) to translate any human language since, well, humans made the language in the first place and so there's some common ground to start with.

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Our minds are structured in a certain way. Our minds are not Nature. We configure Nature as we can (we project), but error is unavoidable, given that we are not Nature.

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I strongly beg to differ, dearest skdadl.

As beings that have evolved and been molded by our ancestry going back to the earliest prokaryotes of 3 billion years ago, we are most certainly a "part of Nature". We have separated ourselves from it by our own volition but we do not live in hermetically sealed cities in which no life-form other than humanity is permitted. We continue to place our houses and apartments in free contact with the open air; we continue to bring plants and animals inside our houses on occasion.

Even our minds are part of Nature, having been the end product of natural selection acting on the genus Homo for millions of years.

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I subscribe to this thesis as well - that language can control the pattern of thought. I have seen it happen in my own life, as well, so I have little doubt that it is possible to regulate the way people, on average, think, simply by altering the language they use.

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Is this the basis for the idea that if we replace certain words that have acquired a perjorative quality with other words, we alter the tendency toward discrimination?

I tend to use as my examples the shift in the last 20 years in the perception of government. "Civil servants" have morphed into "bureaucrats". "Deficit" has morphed from a term of neutral meaning into the awful bugaboo that can be hung like an albatross about an NDP government's neck. "Taxes" have acquired a perjorative tone that disconnects the services the government renders from the taxes one pays, so that people no longer perceive value in what they remit to the government every year.

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...in the US, this is after all a war of images.

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Images produce strong emotional responses without having to activate the verbal/reasoning centres of the brain, thus are more effective than verbal (printed or written ) representations at provoking uncritical responses in audiences.

I mostly agree with the Orwell thesis, but think it can be taken too far. The fact that words such as schadenfruede can be easily understood by those of us whose languages do not have a word for "pleasure in others' misfortune", suggests to me that the "Language-begets-thought" (LBT) hypothesis is limited. That being said, if North American Natives had known what the concept of "ownership" meant to Europeans, they might have forseen the evil they were unleashing on their nations.

Another reason to avoid over-emphasizing the LBT idea is that neologisms are not so uncommon and words have had to appear in the lexicons of languages for a first time throughout history.

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Briefly put, language is a linear arrangement of discrete items the depth of whose recursive embedding is only constrained by memory and the breadth of which is constrained by some process specified by the requirements of linearization and "delinearization."

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But why use linearity as a prerequisite? Surely poetry would challenge this definition. Images and expressions evoke emotional response or multilevel and complex responses that may include ravelling and unravelling aspects...

I think that what is peculiar to me is how we assume that we talk about the world as if we invented speech. Why I wonder did the world the vast physical universe of chemical and endless mechanical chains of evolutionary forces entertain it? Or putting it less lyrically, what advantage does language give in its prototypical form? For example, peacock feathers. Are they not a signal a communication device that subverts the random pattern of natural selection.

I mean the mehanics are simple. The most fit survive, they transmit their genes to their offspring and the species gets more fit. What you have in the peacock's feathers is a ruse. A sickly peacock with bad genes and a dynamite array could theoretically transmit inferior genes.

Similarly with the wide range of displays, love songs,mating calls, warning howls and deceptions and camoflage. They all communicate on some level and alter the brute mechanismin a marvellous way so that we have a wide variety of species and subsecies. So communication definitely alters the world and seems to me to be imbedded in the world itself.

What is language then? Is it something different than the howler monkey's call? I am not talking about a formal definition that we as human beings impose on this phenomenon conveniently calling human speech "language" and everything else something else. I am wondering if there is an actual scientific explanation as to why human speech is somethinhg different than whale talk or ant communication.