Please post your questions and 20-minute responses to this week's reading (handouts from Davidson, Chomsky, Lakoff and Johnson, and Deacon) under the comments section here. Per Kevin K's suggestion in class, this might be a good venue to make public some of the anecdotal outside sources that come up in discussion, too.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Language
Please post your questions and 20-minute responses to this week's reading (handouts from Davidson, Chomsky, Lakoff and Johnson, and Deacon) under the comments section here. Per Kevin K's suggestion in class, this might be a good venue to make public some of the anecdotal outside sources that come up in discussion, too.
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Jack Christiansen
ReplyDeleteIs it ‘Nature’ or ‘Nurture’ That Gave Us Language?
In our first reading, Chomsky maintains “..that a concern for language will remain central to the study of human nature” and draws the conclusion that “certain aspects of human thought and mentality are essentially invariant across languages.” He claims that through the study of language it has been proven that all humans are similar. This is further emphasized by the realization that there also exists a ‘universal grammar’ used to create every language. While Chomsky’s argument appears to comfortably link humans with each other and separate them from other species, it does not convince me whether the source of this language is nature or nurture.
Donald Davidson argues in ‘Rational Animals’ that “in order to think one must have the concept of a thought, and so language is required ….”. In his second assigned essay ‘Seeing through Language’, Davidson takes Chomsky’s discussion of ‘linguistic universals’ to the next step, citing that “inner language is not learned, but emerges as part of our genetic heritage, and it is prior to any spoken language.” This is much in line with his discussion of language being an organ in contact with the environment – perhaps allowing him to transition into the ‘language is an evolutionary result’ concept.
I found Davidson and Chomsky consistent in their belief that language is a result of ‘nature’, a trait that we have as human beings that has evolved and is part of our genes, the common root of which explains the idea that there exists a universal grammar. I would suggest that the study of children growing up outside the ‘human nurture’ environment might help give insight on this issue. ‘Feral Children’ would perhaps be a good focus, for they have survived with the aid of ‘dumb animals’ (as Davidson puts it) and should have no grasp of language and perhaps lack the ability for critical thinking. Davidson supports this thought by citing Steven Pinker’s ‘The Language Instict’. I found reviews summarizing Pinker’s work in a way that oddly enough supported both Chomsky and Davidson – that language is a human instinct wired into our brains by human evolution and that culture is necessary to learn the particulars of their language. The word ‘culture’ is important.
Studies of the efforts to teach feral children language skills after they have grown up without humans OR human culture have shown that after about 8 years old the abilities to grasp language quickly decline, with many learning little (if any) language past that point. This may help show that while language may still be wired into their brains by human evolution – as Pinker says, their complete lack of human culture during their most critical development years has resulted in a greatly reduced ability to acquire these skills – however some learning does occur. This tells me that at least in the case of feral children, a combination of Nature & Nurture is necessary to learn and be able to use language skills.
From the website: http://www.feralchildren.com/en/human.php
Feral Children and the Human-Animal Divide
"Part of being a human is being brought up by humans. If you're not brought up by humans, are you completely human?" (Language and Communication Science Professor James Law, London's City University)
Undoubtedly, the lack of normal developmental stimuli has a devastating impact on the development of the human brain. Feral children would not be classified as human using any of the traditional criteria.
However, generally speaking, we now accept as human someone who is clearly genetically human, regardless of their intelligence, abilities or skills.
Homo Ferus
But this position has only been arrived at after centuries of debate, during which Linnaeus, in the first serious attempt at scientific classification of the natural world, classified feral children (homo ferus) as distinct from home sapiens, and appeared to treat chimpanzees or orang-utans as also belonging to the human species (homo troglodytes).
Presumably, Linnaeus supposed that feral children were some strange type of creature that humans rarely encountered:
Classification today
Today, we keep re-defining the criteria we use to differentiate humans from other animals, as we discover bit by bit that animals are a lot cleverer than we thought: they can communicate, and use tools.
One of the latest theories to distinguish humans from other animals is the theory of mind, the ability to understand that others have their own personal thoughts. But it wasn't long before biologists started to find evidence of theories of mind in many other mammals, and now even ravens.
Katie Arledge
ReplyDeleteLakoff and Johnson use evidence from language to support their theory of our metaphorical conceptual systems. In order to accept this evidence I would have to accept thought or conceptual systems as having an existence separate from language. I guess my question, then, is: does thought exist apart from language?
“Metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action” (Johnson and Lakoff, 1). Johnson and Lakoff continuously make a distinction between thought and language. They seem to be arguing that our metaphorical understanding of the world manifests itself in the language we use but exists prior to this in our conceptual systems. I don’t understand how one can think metaphorically without words. I guess I don’t see where the jump would be. Without words, we could maybe see or have a sensory experience of two dissimilar things. Nature is like a woman. I have a sensory experience of nature, I have sensory experience of women. To consider them abstractly, to compare and contrast, to think, I require language. What is a thought if not expressed in words? I apologize for the rhetorical question but I do not know what form a thought would come in if not in language. Our conceptual system cannot be extracted from its roots in language. Our thoughts and ideas are so language-reliant that although perhaps they have an existence separate from this, we cannot discern it. Nonetheless, I am very skeptical of such a proposal. In “Rational Animals”, Davidson writes that his thesis is “that a creature cannot have a thought unless it has language” (322). I agree with him. In terms of what Lakoff and Johnson argue for in the excerpt, the distinction between thought and language is a critical one. The metaphors we use do impact the way we interact with the world but not because they exist in some conceptual framework we carry with us that is not language-based. I am not expressing my contention with their argument very well here but I think that they are correct in asserting that metaphors have significant meaning to our lives, but the cause of their significance is not the cause they suggest.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteDisregard the first posting- this will read easier... stupid copy/paste.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to address some of the discussion we had last week, especially regarding 'culture'.
The study of Anthropology is a recently defined discipline and full of self-censure. It has redefined itself with a code of ethics in response how it been affected by prejudices and ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism is the principle that a culture should be understood on the terms of the subjects own culture. History is rife with judging cultures and peoples 'superior' to one another. Most of us in class are familiar with this- most wars, enslavement, and some bodies of science were built on these types of beliefs.
Overall, I would like to point the similarity of ethnocentrism and anthrocentrism. There is a great possibility that when addressing the ideas of consciousness and emotions in animals, we have a bias that we are working against much like a psychologist had when addressing a womans ability to reason in the early 20th century. Or how about African slaves and Drapetomania? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
Often, science reflects its present cultural biases.
It was given as a point that we refer to a grouping of bacteria as a 'culture', but I won't be addressing that directly, as I think that this is but an indication of the limitations of language and the ease that misunderstanding can arise. This calls into question the universality of language, like what Chomsky espouses of the universality of language versus the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/whorf.html
of a systemic relationship between a language a person speaks and how it affects their understanding and relation to the world around them. A story that comes to mind is from an Anthropology professor of mine- she learned Romanian and went there for school for a year. Her roommate said that while Romanian was the best language to speak of emotions, even French was better than English, due to its limitations. They challenged each other to write as many emotions in their native tongue. My professor came up with about fifty or so, where her roommate had written pages and pages. Romanian are a brooding people in her estimation and have contemplated passionate things more than English speakers.
All of that is anecdotal but the fact that there is a raging debate in linguistic theories with the rise of cognitive psychology and anthropological linguistics give me the sense that the page is far from turned on the idea that animals can and have language and culture. It remains to be seen if we have yet the tools to bring it to light.
Another article on humpback song show that there are hierarchical structures in their song, the only other animal observed to exhibit this besides humans.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8886--whale-song-reveals-sophisticated-language-skills.html
The last line of the article- "...We're still very far from knowing the meaning of whale songs" .
I am really bad a posting- sorry for the triple post but I forgot to include this paragraph. Could you delete the first post Kevin? thanks...
ReplyDeleteIt was given in class as a statement of fact that we know certain things in science. In context to whales, this is simply not the case.
Whales spend much of their time unobserved- in fact, we barely know where some of them go (Northern Right Whale) when migrating.
Research has emerged that notes dialects in whale communication, which has been dubbed a language I might add, that challenges the idea of humans having a monopoly on culture and language. This is a fine short article http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=218392150&language=english on some of the reseach conducted by Hal Whitehead, researcher at Dalhousie University in Canada http://whitelab.biology.dal.ca/
John Malaby
ReplyDeleteAn excerpt from David Berlinski's "The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions", found in Harper's Magazine, Aug. 2008 edition.
"Since the great scientific revolution of the West was set in motion in the seventeenth century, we have ben vouchsafed four powerful and profound scientific theories -- Newtonian mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell's theory of the electromagentic field, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics...
... These splendid artifacts of the human imagination have made the world more mysterious than it ever was. We now know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped. We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is here. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from a "warm little pond." The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial doctrine about the manner in which the brain functions. Beyond the trivial we have no other doctrines. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul. We do not know what impels us to right conduct or where the form of the good is found. On these and many other points as well, the great scientific theories have lapsed. The more sophisticated the theories, the more inadequate they are...
...A man asking why his days are short is not disposed to turn to algebraic quantum field theory for the answer. The answers that prominent scientific figures [I]have[i] offered are remarkable in their shallowness. The hypothesis that we are nothing more than cosmic accidents has been widely accepted by the scientific community. Figures as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Jacques Monod, Steven Weinberg, and Richard Dawkins have said it is so. Is is an article of their faith, one advanced often with the confidence of men convincedd that nature has equipped them to face realities the rest of us cannot bear to contemplate. There is not the slightest reason to think this is so.
While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love and meaning, the religious traditions of mankind have a good deal to say, and what they do say forms a coherent body of thought. The yearnings of the human soul are not in vain. There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience. There is recompenese for suffering. A principle beyond selfishness is at work in their cosmos. All will be well. I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false."
I am posting the above comment in response to the apparently large portion of the class that has subscribed whole-heartedly, without proper scrutiny, to the Darwininian evolutionary theory. I am not contesting the presence of evolution, merely pointing out the fact that it is not, as of this moment, a fool-proof postulation. Darwin's studies have no doubt proved something, but insofar as the contrast between adaptation and full-blown evolution, Darwin has provided very little.
Printed below are a number of questions that seem pertinent to this discussion. Firstly, observations of the difference between human and animal consciousness needs to be discussed, further on, the role that evolutionary processes are responsible for the human psyche's state. Both the first and the last support one another, to a degree, so this may be a bit confusing.
Are animals conscious? Are they sentient?
The answer to this is no doubt dependent on your interpretation of consciousness. The answer to this is also hindered due to our lack of scientific technology that can properly study a "conscience". Stereotypically, westerners will say that animals do have a conscience, though it is not on par with human consciousness. Buddhist traditions teach us that animals are sentient, to be differentiated, along with humans, from plant species.
Is the consciousness of an animal similar to that of a human?
Since consciousness is not necessarily something that can be measured with current technology, we cannot confirm a difference between human and animal levels of consciousness. But, it is commonly agreed that a human consciousness is different from that of an animal.
If animals are not on par with humans in terms of consciousness, can they evolve to such a state?
The answer to this seems greatly dependent on the individual's faith in Darwinism. To begin, Darwin did not prove that evolution was the sole creator of humans, or any animal for that matter. What Darwinism has shown, without a doubt, is a certain level of adaptation that humans, animals, and plants possess.
Unfortunately, Darwinism combined with modern technology cannot prove that all species are derived from one original organism. Darwinism cannot prove the existence of a soul, or a conscience for that matter. Since physical science cannot confirm the part of the brain responsible for the "hidden observer", it cannot prove that evolution is the cause. Darwinism, in a nutshell, can simply prove that life can adapt, at least in small increments, to its environment.
This is very unfortunate, since the existence of a soul could potentially be used to determine the level of sentience in life forms. It appears that science can work very efficiently when in reference to purely corporeal subjects: The body, the brain, the earth, etc. But science can say nothing in reference to their less tangible counterparts: The spirit, the soul, the conscience, the heavens.
This is where it becomes readily apparent that believing in Darwinism whole-heartedly is, just as religion, an act of faith. Presuming that Darwinism is the primary, and possibly lone mechanic behind our quizzical, metaphysical state requires just as large of a step in faith as religion does. Although, religion seems to be stepping in a different direction than science: The former snuggles up with intuition, while the latter to logic.
So, it is here I propose that Darwinists should, in all honesty, affirm their confusion on the matter of life just as pious church-goers were forced before them.
Richard Dawkins, arguably the most famous and qualified evolutionist, likened evolution to a monkey banging on a type-writer. It is said, given enough time, the monkey will eventually bang out a line from one of Shakespeare's plays. This is not proof of the validity of Darwinism as it fails to confront the supporting framework: What compels the monkey to type letters for a period of time sufficient to create the Shakespearian quote? What put the monkey there in the first place? What caused the monkey to become motivated at all? All of these questions seem very abstract, but such is the topic at hand if you eliminate justification via evolution. Similarly, what gave humans the ability of self-reflection, why was it given to us? This sums up my feelings on evolution: It is an easy scapegoat for a not-so-easy subject.
Faith and intuition are the only things that the human is armed with to answer such questions. As I see it, the biggest issue of all seems to cause the Darwinian theory to fall face first in the mud: Darwinism is supported only according to physical laws, but, as the law of conservation of energy has taught us, if you go back in time far enough, the universe could not be created by nothingness.
February 4, 2009
ReplyDeleteJohn S. Sonin
Eng. 418—Blog 3
Quite the uncomfortable read this week. Symbolism, putting perceptions into communicable terms, is both the irritant and the laxative of human conditions. And if we continue to categorize our perceptions by the Judeao-Christian paradigm (either/or, this or that, you/me, trust/suspect), conflict-based relations will continue to rule our ideology right to the end—our personal and that of humanity’s.
I’ve been impressing on others the need to address directly our paradox, yet after reading Deacon, Davidson, Lakoff & Johnson, and Chomsky, I feel overwhelmed that it’s such a tacitly imbedded condition, unearthing it may not be possible without unleashing, by any means other than through the gradual education of maturity, a “hope(less) monster.”
Deacon may have uncovered its origins revealing the seeds of language born of a sexual parlay, this solidifying of objects (mapping them for reference) perpetually in motion, with its bicameral evolution, explains the effect but where’s the cause? Everything “moves,” but where is the prime mover?
Colin K.
ReplyDeleteOkay, before getting into my usual ramblings I would like to say three quick things regarding this post. First, I am not in a good mood and I expect that this post will reflect this fact. Second, I stand in awe of Jack, who says what I want to say except much more eloquently and not to mention first—thank you. And lastly I don’t have much time for this post so it should be short.
When I was reading our handout I found myself thinking about Plato’s Cave. For those of you who do not know I will briefly explain the general idea. (Also you should note that this idea was presented as a fictional dialogue between Socrates and Plato’s brother) Imagine a bunch of people in a cave that allows nothing from the outside in, and they were all chained and held immobile, forced to look at the wall since birth. Now have the people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of the cave entrance, and they will begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing the real world. Plato then says to let one of the people go and you would find that he probably would not leave and that if you forced him to leave he would find themselves blinded by the sun and unable to realize that the shadow they had come to understand as a tree was not actually the big green and brown thing right in front of him. Plato thought that over time he may be able to acclimate eventually but he also thought that he would end up coming right back to the cave and that the other people who stayed in the cave would kill the him if given the opportunity because the new knowledge he brought would contradict their entire world.
Anyway, the reason I think about the cave when doing this reading was the thought of what would happen if we adapted Plato’s cave so that instead of seeing shadow puppets they saw the real world but were completely and utterly alone. If they had no basis of language, no one to teach them, how would they be any different from a cat, or a monkey? This is why I liked Jack’s post regarding feral humans. Couldn’t this human perceive danger? Distinguish a tree? Understand that when they are hungry it is time to eat? They may not use words as we do, but wouldn’t they have an idea, a perception, a concept of what they are feeling or looking at? Would they not still be able to solve problems, even without the ability to think the word “tree” like we do? Without the aid of mom and dad and Sesame Street we do not get language, but why—without language—can’t we think?
Taylor Manuel
ReplyDeleteWhat is thought without language?
Today I stayed at home and relaxed. I did not interact with anyone. I did not talk on the phone, or text message anyone. I read, and watched TV, I made breakfast and lunch. Yet still language and interaction surrounded me. Reading, I turned symbols on paper into words and analyzed their meaning. Watching TV, I listened to dialogue and observed actions that allowed me to determine "what was happening." Making breakfast I did not need to look in the fridge and find the carton labeled "Eggs." Or the container labeled "Milk." Yet I knew from previous experience the eggs are usually in a rectangle carton with certain dimensions. When making a sandwich I did not have to read the label on the jar of Peanut Butter to know that I had found what I was looking for. All day, I have not said a word, yet have used my understanding and education of language to operate.
Now imagine taking all of that away, everything I previously knew about words, speech and other signals of thought or feeling and was left with just instinct.
Davidson says, "that a creature cannot have a thought unless it has language."
If I attempted the activities I performed, they would be meaningless. I would still have hunger, but would I know how to make anything? Would I know to cook eggs in a pan?
Do my thoughts themselves not use language?Is not thought a conversation with thyself? If I did not know what to say to myself, or how to formulate answers to the questions inside of my head, how would I function? I would still have instinct. I would still have a response to stimuli. And we wonder why animals are so much better at certain things then we are? If we were not able to think, we wouldn't be able to survive, in a fully furnished apartment for much longer then a few days. Animals have these keen senses, of smell, vision, and hearing to provide their instincts with early warning and detection.
-The following blank space is my answer to what is thought without language?-
Some primary q uestions. NatureVs. Nurture? Do animals have language? And what defines language?
ReplyDeleteNoam Chomsky would say that our language is nature based, and not something self-imposed by society and culture alone. So then we have to ask, if it comes from nature, then why don’t more animals have a language capacity similar to our own. There are no definite answers, but in the Symbolic Language, it is noted that our unique language could possibly be a result of unique circumstances that were best utilized by a symbolic language. This language required an ability to distinguish between different potential realities and time frames. An example being how to establish a truce with somebody you have had war with in the past. The Truce requires a language that relies on abstract ideas. But then, does the language require concepts, or does language create concepts? Does it exist before it is spoken? From this, we have the idea that a being requires a language to have complex thoughts.
My own personal thought on language is that an arsenal of vocabulary enables a person to think about something. If you try to explain something to someone, when you didn’t really know what was going on, you are almost incapable of expressing the thought. You can’t even explain it to yourself! Of course, you then have to determine what makes a language. To keep it short, I would go with Chomsky’s definition of language as a generative system that has an infinite number of ideas. If you have a working terminology, you can create more and more complex ideas all the time.
Jon Hays
Again and again, the readings and our class discussions have been coming back to the issues of animal consciousness and thought. But it seems like we've continued returning to these topics without even trying to come up with a rough estimate of what thought is. Davidson attempts to make the point that only “communicators” can have it. So does thought have to be communicated to be thought? Or (perhaps a better way to put it): are the “propositional attitudes” as Davidson would say only rational when expressed?
ReplyDeleteWhy aren't Davidson's “propositional attitudes” thought? What changes in them as they are expressed? Is the mere act of organizing your beliefs so you can communicate them to others sufficient to make them thought? I'm not normally given to contemplating how I think, but the few times I have considered it I've always felt that the 'thoughts' on the surface of my mind, the thoughts I could express in words, felt like they've been put through a sieve. Like before I have a thought I can say something has to be left behind. What is that? Where is it coming from? Maybe that is the 'instincts' that are so often said to be lacking in humans. Or maybe its just the irrelevant aspects of that thought—Davidson's oldest oak tree in sight—being cast aside as the more useless parts are distilled into the finished 'thought'?
I feel like I've really just gotten myself deeper in questions in this one, and really only more uncertain. Does anyone else have an opinion about this, or feel similarly?
To what extent does communication determine what we think of the intelligence of others?
ReplyDeleteThis is a question that I had personal reasons for thinking about this week. I’m part of the legislative internship program, and as part of the program there is a seminar that requires us to do a few research projects. There are a few people per topic, each of whom works independently and emails the paper to the class a few days before our seminar so that, in theory, when the seminar meets everyone has read the papers that will be presented that day. I was one of three students to present last week. I wrote a sprawling paper about power in the legislature, about half of which was comprised of setting out operational definitions of terms like power and authority and influence, and the other half of which was essentially an application of the definitions that I set out. I received informal comments from 7 out of the 10 other students in the seminar, just in passing conversations, that they thought my paper was very well-done and clearly the best of the three. Then, the next day I was invited to join a trivia team full of the interns. I declined because I have class during the competitions, and everyone was very sad because ‘I’m so smart’. It seemed pretty widely assumed that because I wrote a good paper, I would be fantastic at trivia and the team was very much at a loss for my not being able to attend. Then, not so long after, I had dinner with a few interns. We had a stack of Trivial Pursuit Jr. cards and asked the questions to pass the time. I sucked. I got few answers right and made some rather embarrassing guesses. Now certainly the point could be made that the type of intelligence needed for doing an analytical paper on power and authority is different from that needed for remembering names and dates, but there still remains the fact that the two are somehow associated to the extent that I was assumed to be good at something that I am actually very terrible at – just because both of the skills are associated with intelligence.
When I was thinking about this, I was driven to consider why they thought my paper was good in the first place. Really, I didn’t do anything too fantastic. I didn’t even have a premise. All that I did was say ‘this guy said term A is defined as X, I instead propose it should be defined as Y because of Z.’ I then just used these terms to explain a situation. What sort of intelligence is displayed in this sort of writing? I think that more than anything it’s a command over the language. I spent 5 freaking pages on a semantic debate. Surely there is some deep thought need to present a person’s view and refute it, but I have trouble believing that I did as much abstract thinking as some of the other presenters. All I did was use big words to analyze other words; essentially my paper was about when to use what word. Is that intelligence?
This leads me to a question that I can’t really answer. Am just I better at translating thoughts from their ‘silent medium’ to words than others? Is that why I come across as smart? Are the big words I use indicative of a higher intelligence? I don’t know the answer to any of these things, but luckily, that’s not the question that this post is trying to answer. The question is, “how strong is our association between communication and intelligence?” I think it’s tremendous. It’s hard to say that my paper contained more intelligent ideas than the other papers, but fairly easy to make the case that it was more eloquently written and paid more attention to the use of specific words – this is emphasized by the fact that 70% of the class told me without prompting that my paper was ‘the best’.
Davidson makes the case that “brain damage can cause loss of the ability to use language without destroying general intelligence.” (p. 19). Do we actually perceive this? This may sound terrible, but I can’t ever remember thinking someone that couldn’t communicate effectively was very intelligent. I even talk down to people who don’t naturally speak English and somehow assume that because they can’t understand big words, they can’t understand big ideas (to nod at Hemingway). I don’t mean to, and even feel bad about it after, but when I’m honest with myself, I know that I hold some latent belief that people who cannot communicate with me are not as smart as me. My guess, as illustrated in my case this week, is that lots of us do the same thing… To focus to the class subject directly, isn’t it possible that this extends to animals?
Aimon Indoung
ReplyDeleteKevins Maier and Krein
Critical Perspectives on the Animal
Blogspot Post: 2/2/09
In the Chomsky selection “Linguistic Contributions to the Study of Mind,” Chomsky explores some previous studies on the evolution of human language from that of animal language or communication in order to explain the necessary preliminaries for the study “behavioral science.” I am sure I am not the only one who found reading Chomsky a little difficult probably from lack of experience, but based on what I understood, the question that grew from this article was: How does human language set itself apart from animal language?
Chomsky discusses people who have tried to “bridge the gap” between the language of humans and the language of animals in order to explain the evolution of the development of language, but finds their connections lacking in actual connection. To Chomsky, he finds it more pertinent to define human language itsel f through the study of “universal grammer.” Chomsky finds that the discussion of human language from animal language is irrelevant because we cannot at this point even define what human language is or have barely begun to do so. Can we define animal communication/ language? Why is this important to people?
David Leggitt
ReplyDeleteIn response to Collin K.’s post, I agree I think that the ability to use complex language is not what defines us as humans or not animals. I think it is the way humans interact with the environment, through a buffer of tools, which is really just our ability to conceptualize solutions for problems. Maybe if all these philosophers were not sitting a desk, but were instead hunting and gathering with their own hands, they would have a much more accurate perception of the world. They may know the earth and its systems in scientific ways, but knowing that something must die so you can live is much different from killing it yourself. My point is, you cannot know the workings of the human mind unless you view in the environment it evolved in. The human brain did not evolve to deal with computer viruses or to be able to change the thermostat level, it evolved to deal with very raw and powerful natural phenomena like hunger and cold north winds, and unless it dealing with those issues I don’t think it is the same human mind of one thousand years ago.
To try and study the human mind in the modern world is like studying a primitive man in a cage. It does not work. Granted the primitive man is going to be a bit more shell shocked than we are, but we are still shell shocked in a way. The way we live these days is a far cry from how we lived for the last seven million years. Let’s do the math, if man has been around for between 400,000 and 250,000 years, and the “modern lifestyle” (where we are not in direct contact with the environment) has been around for what, say 500 or 600 years (that’s an estimation), that means that we have lived this way for .24% of our existence at the maximum. How can we not be shell shocked as a species?
I guess what I’m getting at is that our mind is much different now than it was before McDonalds and the like. And one cannot know what our mind was like by studying what it is like.
You know, this whole language vs. communication thing got me thinking: the only reason we differentiate between language and communication as a whole is because we've come up with two different terms in our language. We are, in effect, applying an artificial concept to nature and calling it reality, so what REALLY is the difference between communication as a whole and language?
ReplyDeleteLanguage is generally considered artificial or human in nature, I think. The languages that belong to various groups of people are not something we're born with, and they use symbols which would otherwise be meaningless to communicate ideas and concepts. This is what pro-language people tend to argue.
Communication is really just a catch all, however, and doesn't necessarily imply a learned system or a system that uses symbols. Communication isn't language, but language is a form of communication unique to humans, some would argue.
But not me. Humans communicate in non language-oriented ways, as do many animals. Body language, the tone of one's voice, the context of the situation, and even wordless vocalizations. Why do we separate these forms of communication from language when both are complex systems of information transference? Is it because there's no written form of body language? Gee, then I guess all those groups of Native Americans who had spoken but not written language weren't human. Or is it because body language is innate? I guess all of us awkward guys who went through high school with no friggin' clue about what girls meant when they said, "you're sweet, but I'm busy Friday" missed out on that gene.
I think the REAL reason we differentiate between the two forms of communication is because we aren't the only ones who utilize nonverbal cues. Technically we aren't the only ones who have a spoken language, either, but it's easier to grudgingly admit that a few whales and dolphins are somewhat intelligent than it is to accept the idea that humans aren't so different from other animals after all.
Brian Nichols
ReplyDeleteThe connection between the readings was a bit hard to understand even after the class discussion I was not really sure what we were trying to get at. From what Kevin said in class I guess Chomsky argues that humans are the only animals that have a language system with grammar. Also humans are the only animal that uses its language to express ideas.
Donald Davidson seems to expand on the idea that humans are the only animals that use language to communicate thoughts by arguing that there is a difference between thoughts and beliefs. For example, he shows how a dog could belief that a cat is in a tree but argues that believing a cat is in the tree is different from having thoughts about the tree and the cat. Davidson argues that the dog does not have concepts of what a tree or cat is. The dog’s belief that the cat is in the tree is instinct driven not concept driven. At the end of his paper, Davidson proposes that humans are rational and animals are not because human’s have language which allows them to communicate to each other and develop concepts. Humans, therefore, compare concepts to create objective truth. Humans create a reality through language and communication amongst each other. Animals do not. Davidson’s conclusion is that rationality is a social trait, only communicates have it and since animals do not communicate amongst themselves they are not rational.
The George Lakoff and Mark Johnson essay, proposes that humans live by metaphors. But I am not sure if they argue that language comes out of metaphoric concepts which Davidson in his essay “Seeing through Language,” seems address.
Donald Davidson’s essay “Seeing through Language,” then seems to argue that language acts more as a sense organ than a product of human invention. This argument seems to make sense if language, as Lakoff and Johnson proposes, comes out of metaphorical concepts in the human mind. In conclusion, Davidson seems to believe that objective truth comes from shared experiences. Davidson argues for what he calls the primitive triangle, constituted by two or more creatures reacting in concert to the features of the world and each other’s reactions, thus providing a framework in which thought and language can evolve (27). He believes that, according to this account neither thought nor language can come first, first each requires the other. Therefore, human ability to speak, perceive and think develop together, gradually. We perceive the world through language, that is, through having language (27).
My question than is metaphoric concepts genetic?