Our language, our world
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Anyone who speaks more than one language in the home has jumped back and forth between languages in a sentence when trying to convey something "properly". When you live with a spouse/partner, over time you learn to consider your choice of words even in a single language in order to make it happen -- individual words can have idiosyncratic implications. Over time (decades) you have to do this less and less as you form a "household language" with your partner.
BTW the origin of the hermaneutic effort comes from aneffort to reconcile inconsistencies in the christian texts: if they are truly the word of a god then any inconsistency must be due to human confusion or imperfection of human language; this was an attempt to find the underlying meaning (or as the article says, platonic meaning). This led to quite a bit of development in linguistic philosophy in the 20th century (some of it quite insightful and some of it plainly absurd). Because text cannot make the same adaptations one can mid-conversation, it's both harder and (to me) more interesting to look into the text itself.
A long-term relationship grows its own shared vocabulary and idioms that sound idiotic outside of that context.
This has more to do with alignment of signifiers and emphasis (determined by the concerns particular to that relationship). Language is, of course, not just the collection of signifiers, but the signs in toto, which means signifier, concept/proposition, and signified.
> the origin of the hermaneutic effort comes from aneffort to reconcile inconsistencies in the christian texts
I would just emphasize that what constitutes a cohesive corpus of text (like the Bible) is determined by prior Tradition. That is, it wasn't the case that the Bible came first in absolute terms (it didn't fall from the sky), but that the Bible was assembled (by the Catholic Church) through the lens of Tradition from texts written over the course of thousands of years. This Tradition provides not only the hermeneutic means that allowed said text to be compiled in the first place, but also the means to interpret the text in the future with greater depth as more is learned and the Tradition is refined and developed. That's how we know that Genesis, having been written in a different language, time period, style, and cultural climate than the the Gospel of John, must be read differently from the Gospel of John. (Incidentally, this is the reason behind the absurdity of sola scriptura. By doing away with the unbroken Tradition that links us to the past and gives us the means by which to interpret Scripture, we are left to whatever parochial devices we happen to have. This explains, in part, the great variability and divergence of interpretation among Protestants, made evident by the presence of over 40 thousand Protestant sects in the US alone.)
What is the nature of the human experience? Humans are animals, so it’s all just biology, right? But biology is just a bunch of chemicals, chemistry is just the proclivities of atoms, physics is just one possible instantiation of a set of mathematical systems, mathematics is just a game of logic, logic is just a type of thought crystallized in language, language is just the social emission of human culture, and humans are just biology.
it's not circular. Physics is the root.
philosophy and math might have a claim that there's some extra-physical thing, but in my very very humble opinion, put up or shut up.
All the evidence we have is, math and philosophy can only be understood by electric meat. Electric rocks are making some progress. It's not at all clear if those are a side effect of electric meat, or if there's some other magic dust. But, uh, I ain't seen no magic dust. it might exist, and I might not be able to perceive it, cause I'm electric meat. :shrug:
Anyway, the point is, you can root a tree in physics. And, uh, there's no counter example that says rooting the tree in physics is wrong. Physics produces biology, biology produces math. We have clear examples of this (you can totally throw in more layers, like chemistry or whatever).
Math or philosophy may indeed be the root and all things flow from some deeper underlying organization. But we have very little evidence of that. I don't have the faith of a mustard seed, so I can't move mountains. I don't think anybody has been able to do that for a while, and I find the reports suspect. They may be true! But you'd sorta think that kinda thing would happen more often.
In any case, (as a computer scientist) I think you can pretty safely pick physics as the root. You could be wrong. But, like, you're going to be Newton wrong. Newton was absolutely dead wrong, arrow in the heart of the theory, when Einstein rolled in and upended everything. But it's close, and super helpful. I don't really consider time dilation when driving up a hill. (Maybe I should) Newton's model has been close enough so far.
In any case. I'm not really qualified. But I ain't seen no magic dust.
I don't see the chain, but I might be overlooking something super obvious (or not so obvious)
Arithmetic isn't super helpful for calculus, but it's real tough (for me) to construct calculus without a notion of +.
So, I don't have any evidence of math, the very narrow branch of math in the sense of algebra, and proofs without electric meat. I'm open to a very broad definition. I think, we agree that two different things are equal, and if we change both sides the same way, they're still equal. that kind of gives us algebra.
Does anything else do that? Does anything else preserve equality that's not just simple physics?
Again, I'm wildly unqualified to make this argument, but maybe I learn something amazing.
How do you "close the knot"? I've got some computer science background and I can mostly deal with fix points. In what way would neuroscience be free from the underlying systems? I'm pretty sure I can represent computation with gears or electrons or marbles, or whatever, but those are rooted in physics. I'm super curious how you might represent neuroscience, language and culture without that foundation.
- Philosophical Investigations, 6.
Cool downvote, bro!
Do y'all even get why I was peeved by the downvote? I was referencing the very book the commentator was talking about and it was clearly misinterpreted by an ignoramus.
And yes, I've read the FAQ, thank you very much. I earn my karma, I'll spend it how I like!
Looks like everyone moved to Woosh City over the weekend.
Even between German and English which are quite similar you see it in the honorifics, Du/Sie which doesn't just lack a modern English equivalent, you see that difference in behavior. When I speak German in a German workplace you have to actually often think if you're going to "dutz" someone. In English I'm more casual because it doesn't even enter your mind. Not to mention if you go East Asian cultures where it gets even more complicated as age and family relations have their own terminology.
I went decades with 'objects' being the one and only way. It was all I had been taught or had done.
Then when I started learning functional programming. It really did take a long time to switch the brain around. Not to learn the language, but to re-learn thinking. It changed how I viewed problems.
According to that view, then yes, obviously, language affects how we interpret observation. Interpretation fills in gaps and relates prior beliefs with the observation. Two people with different priors can interpret the same observation in two different ways. (Which is not to suggest relativism. We can indeed speak of having better or worse priors, just as we can speak of lesser or greater expertise.)
Language also allows us to express finer distinctions. It is not that distinctions are not perceived otherwise. That would be absurd. How could you ever develop the vocabulary to make finer distinctions if you wouldn't perceive them in the first place? Rather, it makes it possible to speak about them with greater precision, and speech can reinforce discernment through a kind of process of affirmation. When speech reaffirms a belief, it is more durable. It stands a better chance of withstanding the potentially hostile churn of psychological and social forces. Hence, why naming something, accurately, and with the appropriate precision, is such a powerful act.
I think we MAY find something supportive of our desire to understand our connection between humans as we follow the path that the e evidence leads us to upon further investigation of a theory, "form follows function even when the function is chaos", seen in a recently released science news, but a possible way to predict emergent chaos, geometry-wise. https://physicsworld.com/a/could-the-geometry-of-chaos-be-fu... . Possibly a simulation type of theory is relevant here.
Anyway, language is made of words, words are made of letters, and letters are [made of shapes] - with meaning attached to all these different layers, and concepts are made of understanding (where under is friendly but different substance than abstraction).
Or you can say abstraction can have opposites, either statistical and lazy (above standing; the outer), or reverse-engineered/causative working layer and fundamental (under standing; the inner). The lazy way only transfers cases but not causes like you can do through fundamentals.
Root words are (more) de facto in the direction of statistics but don't emerge from "source".
If you truly had a way to understand letter meaning what would you do with it with AI or HI? It's a really powerful skillset that should get some play in our society of the minds.
My startup has linguistic self-knowledge because it under/inner stands from letters onto words and therefore it's Generative in a fairly straightforward function anyone with a mind can get into.
What if you can know that a foot is F as low, lifting and lowering, OO as alternating (also see roof), and step by step from pOint A to point B, and T as the delta/difference/distance along the path. ?
Why do you think wAlk is made of an arrow and coW and Walk both have a footprint, one below foot and one below mouth/head. ?
We're talking about serious AI value here.
Cat = C as random, A as routes, T as to a target. Cow = C as random, O as spots, in a C as field/pasture, W as where the cow eats/grazes the grass.
I'll share a semi-complicated Letter Value:
• Wor simpler:
• AIt's an emerging "state of the art" where art is the emergence of language through however long it's taken humanity to build, and a science because it's a repeatable theory. In fact, a platonic form is basically a repeatable theory. (non-natural OR emergent Pattern)
Enoq, my startup, has potential for AI to find patterns, new and old, in a language, English, that works really well for relaying ideas between people.
It's just me right now.
Actually, as a native Romanian speaker, it shocked me when I moved to the UK and started noticing how many phrases have a literal translation along with the same meaning in both languages. For example, "straight from the horse's mouth". I can only assume it's a modern acquisition in at least one of the two, but it's still surprising to see such an unexpected bridge between the languages.
Of course there are plenty that don't translate, but even the few that do are interesting to see.
There are many anthropological theories that suggest that music as a form of communication came before the spoken word, be it the beating of logs or vocalized melodies to communicate during a hunt, call for assistance, mark the start of a raid, etc.
That generalization is completely false. There are situations where that is the case, and situations where there is an exact correspondence between words that have the same meaning or set of meanings.
Even when there isn't a correspondence, context usually resolves it. The word pairs have overlapping meanings and there is a situation in which that overlap applies, and so they are an exact translation.
But there are certainly other words or phrases in one language which require more circumlocution in another language. Most obvious are animal or plant names where the animal or plant does not exist in the home lands of both languages--there is no single word for 'narwhal' in Tzeltal, and there is no word in English (outside of the scientific name) for many plants familiar to the Tzeltales.
Less obviously, there are words in one language for concepts that you can certainly wrap your mind around in another language, but for which there's no one-word or even standard phrasal translation in another. I heard a commercial in Spanish for some company on the radio, which ended with the single word sentence "Cumplimos!" It was obvious to me as a second language learner of Spanish what this meant (something like "we finish what we promise you we'll do"), but I could not come up with a simple translation (the literal translation "We complete" does not hack it).
There are a lot of words for concrete things, like the example you gave. But also specific words for abstractions.
I suspect, for instance, that Korean has a word for communism which has that one specific meaning.
I think the article is not so much getting at the unfamiliar plant names or cultural things like names of foods.
But for instance verbs. In English you can take a nap, take a wife, take a stand, take a leak, take someone somewhere, take the money and run, ... In another language, you need different verbs for these. But some of those verbs in that language also have multiple meanings. If we pin down the specific usage frame, like "take a nap", there is a specific translation that fits. This doesn't involve geographic or cultural items; everyone everywhere takes naps.
Verbs are often like this because they involve metaphor a lot.
Nouns also involve metaphor, often when some less common objects are named after common ones. E.g. mouth is a body part. Skirt and sleeve are parts of clothing. A river can have a mouth in English; maybe it would be funny in another language. Technical objects can have skirts (protective guards) or sleeves (sliding casings). Maybe in the foreign language you cannot use those clothing words for those objects without sounding funny.
"We follow through" could work for cumplimos. I suspect that it may be a word that is used often in ads? So in the translation you have to lose exactness and map hackneyed to hackneyed, same sort of thing to the same sort of thing. E.g. "we go the distance" or whatever.
It's an alluring idea, but it's been debunked.
From my understanding S-W is focused more on the languages as conceptual symbol systems and not on the real world lived experience. In other words, sure, languages may be somewhat equally capable of expression, but if you live in the desert your culture and language is going to be lacking when talking about rainforests.
This seems to be in line with the Wikipedia article:
Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity: that a language's structures influence and shape a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
This is not the same thing as the hypothesis. You're saying that language is going to be correlated with world knowledge, but that both are a result of the environment that those people are living in. Environment -> Language, and Environment -> Perception. This shared causal relationship induces correlation between Language and Perception, but does not conclude any specific causal relation between those two.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesises Language -> Perception. This is a meaningful additional causal relationship, which is very hard (but perhaps not strictly impossible if you don't care about ethics) to find evidence for.
The cited weaker version still suggests the same causal Language -> Perception relationship, but allows the influence to be weaker in some way.
What does that mean, huh?
Language shapes the world, and yet even with these characters I can paint a picture that escapes them.
Not only does nature over reach language, even art does. What are great works of art except those most sublime objects which always provoke more interpretation, more words, because they are like black holes of meaning, or maybe more than that. They are more than what we can understand in language alone. And if humans have the capacity to create, through their own genius, or even with the assistance of an AI, something that escapes the rationality of regular language use: if even one person can do that, then language can never be the end all be all. But neither can the "normal" world, the world that "makes sense," because it is precisely "making sense" that proves the primacy of the Word. It is when we fail to make sense, when we disturb and confuse, when sense-making spirals out of control, that we escape language--it is only when the whole world threatens to collapse that we approach the Real.