Language and Concept-Formation

I heard a very interesting story once from a teacher of mine. The class was History of Science, which meant that we also delved significantly into epistemology. The story, which he referenced as being drawn from a science journal, concerned a group of anthropologists who stumbled on an isolated tribe on an island in the southern part of the Pacific Ocean. They attempted to communicate with the tribe and learn their language in order to study them, but found that the language was quite different from those that they had encountered before, and it proved extremely difficult to learn. The behavior of the tribe was quite odd in that they seemed to have no conception of time as we would understand it. The language ended up being the key to understanding this. You see, the tribe's language was not based on identity (that is, the same objects and actions referenced from different points in time thorough the use of conjugations, declinations, etc.) but instead on morphology. That is, things that appeared visually similar had similar names. The names for "ripe fruit" and "fruit gone rotten" were totally different, since one was still on the tree whereas the other was splattered on the ground. But the terms for "human" and for "monkey" were similar, though distantly related, owing to the many body traits shared by humans and monkeys. The language therefore worked against the identification and integration of concepts, since it operated on a totally perceptual level.

Now is it just me, or is there some crazy Orwellian stuff going on here? And then of course there are the rather sinister implications for political correctess...

To what extent, then, does the language with which we are raised impact our ability to understand reality? And could such a thing be overcome, or is it possible that a language may have an entirely separate and insurmountable epistemology associated with it?

Post 1

Sunday, June 25, 2006 - 8:45pm

Daniel,

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But the terms for "human" and for "monkey" were similar, though distantly related, owing to the many body traits shared by humans and monkeys. The language therefore worked against the identification and integration of concepts, since it operated on a totally perceptual level.

Now is it just me, or is there some crazy Orwellian stuff going on here? And then of course there are the rather sinister implications for political correctess...

To what extent, then, does the language with which we are raised impact our ability to understand reality? And could such a thing be overcome, or is it possible that a language may have an entirely separate and insurmountable epistemology associated with it?
==============

You're attempting to awaken Wittgenstein's Monster, here. Only thing is, you already answered your query when you said: "since it operated on a totally perceptual level."

That is the answer -- the one keeping Wittgenstein's Monster in perpetual slumber now (and forever).

Ed
[many, many professional philosophical errors stem from taking the mind as purely a passive organ of perception -- or the POOP theory, for short (but the mind is not POOP)]

Post 2

Sunday, June 25, 2006 - 10:07pm

Why Ed - a lot of folk consider the mind as full of shit... ;-)

Post 3

Sunday, June 25, 2006 - 11:03pm

Ed - I'm pretty sure, upon looking back, that my wording was awkward (read: bad) and that my real point wasn't properly conveyed, so let me try and elaborate. From what I can tell, language becomes intertwined with a person's thought patterns by the time that person reaches adulthood. A great deal of thinking is done in words rather than in pure ideas. It takes a mind of exceptional rigor and discipline to think extensively in ideas divorced from words; I've tried it before and failed miserably. I'm not suggesting that consciousness is entirely defined by language, but rather that having a particular concept completely absent from a language makes it quite difficult for those who speak only that language to integrate it into their view of the world. One can witness fundamental parts of the normal thinking process in the Pacific Island tribe described earlier, particularly the process of creating abstracts to organize concepts. Their abstracts, however, are exclusively morphological, whereas we (and certainly most of Europe) use a far wider range of criteria in forming abstracts.

If you want to find an example of ideas not translating well into vastly different languages, have a look at an extremely literal translation of Aristotle, particularly the Revised Oxford Translation of the Organon. Often one has to read passages over a few times to make sense of the verb structures, and occasionally it is impossible to get anything out of a given sentence.

The overall point I'm trying to make is that it's quite possible that language DOES play a significant role in formation of concepts, although it is by no means essential. After all, if it were, then we as a species would never have developed any higher-order thinking abilities at all.

Post 4

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 5:08am

Ed wrote:

You're attempting to awaken Wittgenstein's Monster, here. Only thing is, you already answered your query when you said: "since it operated on a totally perceptual level."

I did a Google search on "Wittgenstein's Monster" and had little success. I did find this satire humorous, though:

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~iav202/powers/wittgenstein.html

Could you elaborate?

Post 5

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 8:47am

Crazy stuff, but one way I've learned to handle the issue of language is what can the language do? If it just is based on morphologies then it's useless because you can't classify anything effectively by it. Can you imagine classifying the marsupials? "Oh that fuzzy, monkey looking, egg laying, stupid thing over there..." And the lack of a time cofficient to reference what was and what is really makes the language in question also the more useless since then the placement of something and it's reference (past tense) would be impossible.

Essentially, languages don't define thought, but they do help us define our knowledge, or more specifically how we sort through it and classify things. If we don't have the basic tools to classify by such as time, space, and so on, then the means to develop more concepts based on them (one can argue these measures are based on concepts in themselves, which they are, I'm just keeping this post really simple...). From realization that there is a passage of time, one can get past, present, and future. Then that allows a person to categorize that Aunt Eunice died two weeks ago. Or that next week is the big football match. Etc. To ignore this significant means to classify, which all languages really do (again, sorting), really means you can't do jack squat. This is why most anthropology students hate me, because I prefer to look at utility over 'understanding (SO-CALLED).'

Then again, I'm a CS major, what the hell do I know? ;)

-- Bridget

Post 6

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 9:49am

Luke,

Here is something I found with a Yahoo search:

http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/people/A0861983.html

To understand any sentence one must grasp the reference of its constituents, both to each other and to the real. Meaning in thought and language requires a direct reference to the real. The Tractatus, however, made a distinction between what language could say and what it might show. The structures of language and thought could indicate, but not represent, their very correspondence to reality; unsayable things thus exist, and sentences whose structures of meaning amount strictly to nonsense can result in philosophical insight. Thus the Tractatus did not, like the logical positivists, reject the metaphysical; rather, it denied the possibility of stating the metaphysical: �Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.�

L W

Post 7

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 5:19pm

[struggling] Hold on, everyone -- I've got him (Wittgenstein's Monster). [throws bloody carcass on table to take note of others' reactions] ...

Frayn on Wittgenstein:
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(According to some sympathisers, the reason why drivers on the motorways failed to slow down in thick fog recently, as so crashed into each other in multiple collisions of up to thirty vehicles, was simply because the authorities had failed to provide illuminated signs explaining that the fog was fog.

This is a situation on which Wittgenstein made or or two helpful remarks in a previously unpublished section of 'Philosophical Investigations'.)

'I do not know there is fog on the road unless it is accompanied by an illuminated sign saying "fog".'

When we hear this, we feel dizzy.

[break]

Of course, one is familiar with the experience of seeing something ambiguous. 'Now it is the Taj Mahal -- now it is fog.' And one can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see it is labelled 'fog'.

The motorist replies: 'What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying "fog" because of the fog.' -- One can imagine uses for the rule. For example, to lure people to their deaths ...

If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.
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Ed

Post 8

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 5:32pm

And heeeeere's Gellner ...

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The new Wittgensteinian vision was to start not from the self, the subject, but from language: doubt presupposes not so much a doubting, thinking self -- it presupposes a language in terms of which the doubt could make sense ...

What an improvement on Descartes! Instead of 'I think, therefore I am', we get 'We speak, therefore the whole world is, and moreover it is as it has always seemed.' A rich harvest.
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Words and Things, p 154

Ed

Post 9

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 5:38pm

And Ayer with the knock-out punch ...

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A point to which Wittgenstein recurs is that the ascription of meaning to a sign is something that needs to be justified: the justification consists in there being some independent test for determining that the sign is being used correctly; independent, that is, of the subject's recognition, or supposed recognition, of the object which he intends to signify. ...

... But unless there is something that one is allowed to recognize, no test can ever be completed: there will be no justification for the use of any sign at all.
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The Concept of a Person, p 41

Ed

Post 10

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 5:57pm

And this guy was taken seriously????????

Post 11

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 7:17pm

Sweet zombie Jesus, I knew Wittgenstein was screwed-up, but only by reputation. This is just...ugh. Miles and miles nuttier than what I was suggesting (see my previous post).

Post 12

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 8:06pm

To what extent, then, does the language with which we are raised impact our ability to understand reality? And could such a thing be overcome, or is it possible that a language may have an entirely separate and insurmountable epistemology associated with it?

Good questions; I'm trying to answer these (if I can, during my lifetime) scientifically. I actually have a large book-- more of a review than a book, really-- called The Big Book of Concepts and it's all about concept formation research; it's part of the cognitive science repertoire. However, I did read of this tribe and I think anthropologists are still studying and trying to understand this group...

Post 13

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 8:55pm

I think what concepts that are 'built-in (insomuch either implicit or explict in the ITOE sense)' to a language set can give us a good indication as to how mentally far an native speaker can go with it as to expand, sort, and abstract any given set of knowledge.

The biggest issue I have in the modern philosophies is that most [excluding Objectivism, obviously] do not accept that propositions say anything about reality, thus anything
written /spoken as a proposition cannot say anything about reality. This is what irks me because by their reasoning then even their reasoning cannot be asserted. It's like setting up a partition between thought and Nature, then saying the partition exists because X says so. Yet, if one follows their reasoning is all hearsay since any claim to a partition as such would be an affirmation that one could know something about Nature, insomuch what is excluded from it.

Now take that and notice what is proposed by the 'Wittie heads' and notice they make a metaphysical proposition without any reason to affirm it. They claim it is impossible to make such propositions yet they made one. So, in short, their claims are flatly false since they in their claim one cannot make metaphysical propositions just made one, in this case, it is a metaphysical proposition excluding all others.

QED, bi0tches. ;)

-- Bridget

Post 14

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 9:15pm

Daniel,

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A great deal of thinking is done in words rather than in pure ideas.
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Daniel, it seems you've already "talked past" me. Words are the perceptual designators of "pure" ideas (they're how we catalogue ideas for immediate retrieval upon reading, writing, or speaking).

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It takes a mind of exceptional rigor and discipline to think extensively in ideas divorced from words; I've tried it before and failed miserably.
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And that was predictable, given the function of words -- the function I just outlined above.

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I'm not suggesting that consciousness is entirely defined by language, but rather that having a particular concept completely absent from a language makes it quite difficult for those who speak only that language to integrate it into their view of the world.
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It's not that consciousness is defined by language. As I said above, concepts are denoted by language. And, again, it is totally predictable that, given the function of words, that it would be quite difficult to integrate a concept without a word for it. Words, fulfilling their function, allow us to free up our minds for more words (more concepts).

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One can witness fundamental parts of the normal thinking process in the Pacific Island tribe described earlier, particularly the process of creating abstracts to organize concepts. Their abstracts, however, are exclusively morphological, whereas we (and certainly most of Europe) use a far wider range of criteria in forming abstracts.
=============

They're sticking to the perceptual level of awareness. Their 'abstractions' are likely only brute associations (like they were when chimps and humans fell under the same heading). They seem not altogether different than what Rand describes when she describes the Anti-Conceptual Mentality.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 6/26, 9:16pm)

Post 15

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 10:18pm

Okay Ed, I definitely see where you're coming from now, and I WAS sort of talking past you; I apologize for that. I'll do my best to be a better conversationalist in the future :)

Now I've got to thank you, because you phrased my ideas much better than I did myself. This particular tribe, because they use only percepts to form their conceptions, is unable to use those conceptions to form higher-level abstractions. Thus, their use of cognitive potential IS inhibited because of the sheer number of particulars that they need to keep track of. This would actually be an instance of a language that is demonstrably inferior to English in its ability to express concepts. We DO have morphological abstracts, like "humanoid" or "spherical" or "pyramidal," and this doesn't even include describing something as being "shaped like ." But since English has no built-in limitations on what qualities can be used to abstract, we can also abstract based on other qualities. Theoretically, the number of possible ways for an English-speaking mind to abstract is large beyond counting.

Post 16

Monday, June 26, 2006 - 10:55pm