This has been buzzing around my head for a fortnight.
Comparative philology is a very arcane area of study. There's so much
controversy around what came to be called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
even though S+W never seemed to hypothesise quite so formally.
Pinker has argued quite convincingly for a universal underlying
linguistic foundation, which cuts right across S+W. I have not read
as much Pinker as I probably should have. But I foound this rather
nice Pinkerish statement:
"Because chimps and monkeys show similar expectations about objects,
languages are probably built on concepts that evolved before humans
did," Spelke suggests.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html
And many of these debates seem to revolve around Chomsky, whose
career has swung so sharply between academia and popmedia I have
never managed to get a fix on anything he might or might not have
thought.
Formalism is interesting in its own right, I'd say, whether or not
you can explain the human mind as a formalist system, and whether
that system, if it exists, is already there and complete, or whether
it is built while we acquire uses for it.
But it is an interesting idea to play with. Am I thinking about
algorithmic processes or are they thinking about me?
Paul
On 24 Jan 2007, at 01:31, alex wrote:
> Relevant here I think:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir%E2%80%93Whorf_hypothesis
>
> Includes this quote:
>
> Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in
> the
> world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very
> much at
> the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of
> expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that
> one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and
> that
> language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of
> communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real
> world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language
> habits
> of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be
> considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in
> which
> different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same
> world
> with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise
> experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our
> community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir, 1958
> [1929], p. 69)
>
>
Received on Sat Feb 10 2007 - 09:31:47 GMT