Just as Newton's laws hold true in the majority of cases on this planet, but not in the whole of the universe as in Einstein, Sapir and Whorf's contention holds true for most cases, but not in every case. It is merely a description that is primarily mechanical in nature, thus the criticism of Sapir-Whorf as potential determinism, especially in its "strong" formulation.

So, as we definitely think to ourselves with an internal dialogue that manifests in how we communicate, and since our thought, and thus our behavior and hence our culture, is widely modeled after our interactions with language, there is much to be learned from the perspective of Sapir-Whorf.

But, none of this is to discount Chomsky completely by any means as Chomsky's thought is concerned with linguistic origins that are, for lack of a better word, archetypal. Chomsky in this sense is like the meditative Jung to Sapir-Whorf's bulwarking Freud. For in Chomsky we see an analysis that incontrovertibly points to the inherent similarites between all languages. Chomsky's generative grammar, while far from being fully ironed out itself, is thus held as a more all-inclusive theory.

In essence, the two really don't contradict each other as much as one may first think, but instead represent different aspects of conceptualization and "levels" of perceptive consciousness itself. And in each linguistic theory, in Sapir-Whorf and in Chomsky, there is a great deal of indebtedness to Wittgenstein.
So neither are wholly incorrect and meaningless, but neither are entirely true in every single aspect either. Fundamental leanings from nature versus nurture are evident in each persective. And in each there is data to be gleaned as well as a good deal of information to be sloughed off as extraneous.

In Charles Creegan's Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein's influences are enumerated as Leo Tolstoy, Saint Augustine, Fyodor Dostoevsky and, most notably, Søren Kierkegaard, whom Wittgenstein referred to as "a saint". I just read that at wikipedia tonight. No wonder I've remarked before that Wittgenstein is the last extremely important philosopher.

hey, where were the quotations marks, I thought you had written it, majorly impressed.
thanks Glice, if I'm ever at Guest House Paradiso, I'll go check it out.

What I just wrote is mainly just a one-off descriptive exploration that's heavy on somewhat vague analogies, with little meat. The last little bit concerning Wittgenstein's influences contains a reference.

no fucking way that comparison is even remotely applicable; but even if it were applicable, it still wouldn't be true at all.

i'm just saying this for the benefit of naive children who may be bamboozled by the rhethorical audacity of the quoted statement.

It makes some sense in some sense haha. And I admitted moments ago that the analogy was a vague one. Sorry it is so offensive to yourself.

Each thinker represents a revolution in thought or at least an improvement over other thinkers.


Nice hatchet job. You're a wonder.

it's doesn't take genius powers to call bullshit

The main inference is that theories are always being redefined as more information is explored over time. That is, except for relativity theory.
I wanted to squeeze in that Einstein reigns, that's all.
I really don't give a damn about Sapir-Whorf or Chomsky, you know, since they are largely masturbatory.

I've written on other occasions that I'm not a huge Chomsky enthusiast (even though he's not all bad or anything).

I'm all about the Einstein and Wittgenstein though.

Again, sorry it was so very offensive to you.

Please read the following, it's important:

Einstein proved right on gravity
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2639043.stm

 

It all adds up: Albert Einstein would be pleased

 

By Dr David Whitehouse

BBC News Online science editor

 

The speed of gravity has been measured for the first time, revealing that it does indeed travel at the speed of light.


It means that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity has passed yet another test with flying colours.
The measurement was made by Ed Fomalont of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri, in Columbia, both US.
Writing in New Scientist magazine, they say: "We became the first two people to know the speed of gravity, one of the fundamental constants of nature."
Higher dimensions
Isaac Newton believed the influence of gravity was instantaneous. Later, Albert Einstein assumed it travelled at the speed of light and built his 1915 General Theory of Relativity around that assumption.
If gravity travelled at the speed of light it would mean that if the Sun suddenly vanished from the Solar System, the Earth would remain in orbit for about eight minutes - the time taken for light to travel from the star to our planet. Then, in the absence of gravity, Earth would move off in a straight line.
Modern researchers say that knowing the speed of gravity is important in the study of branches of cosmology where the Universe has more spatial dimensions than the usual three.
Some of those theories suggest that gravity could take a short cut through higher dimensions and so appear to travel faster than the speed of light.
Jupiter's help
To measure gravity's velocity, Kopeikin determined that it could be determined with the help of the planet Jupiter, if its mass and velocity were known.
The perfect opportunity arose in September 2002, when Jupiter passed in front of a quasar - a distant, very active galaxy - that emits radio waves.
Fomalont and Kopeikin combined observations from a series of radio telescopes to measure the apparent change in the quasar's position as the gravitational field of Jupiter bent the passing radio waves.

From the observations the researchers determined that that gravity does indeed move at the same speed as light.

The results of the study have been presented to this weeks meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle.

__________________
Thanks for the platform you provided so that I could share what I really wanted to share.


Einstein is rock-solid, baby. Quantum Electrodynamics is really solid, after all, it's based in relativity. Quantum Mechanics is far from being solid, but not complete bullshit. String theory, on the other hand, is gobbledegook.

please let's remark the sleight of hand of the magician

this:


is now somehow equated with the scientific validity of the theory of relativity, via a BBC cut & paste job.

I CALL BULLSHIT.

it gets tiresome.

"The BBC cut and paste job" shows that General Relativity is no longer a theory. I hope people explore the link or otherwise read the article.

In my original sentence I explained how Sapir-Whorf was true in many cases, but really in a mechanical, descriptive sense primarily (as opposed to the determinism it espouses), (& this reminded me of Newton in a way) as contrasted to Einstein's relativity which is now a proven universal fact (see article above). Real science is supposed to be predictive as opposed to just descriptive, you see.

Yeah, some apples got mixed with some oranges a little, that's why I wrote earlier before you even posted that some of my analogies were a bit vague.

So, no "bullshit," just a lack of patience and a fair amount of prejudice against myself evidenced on your part and an admitted little too much straying from literalness on my part. I'm sorry for the confusion, but hey, I had already written a disclaimer which you roundly chose to completely ignore.

my work here is done

I guess you're just getting me back for the times I've been a butt.

Whatever, suit yourself, but that last post reeks of you thinking of yourself as "a legend in your own mind" and I know that you are better than that.

paranoid.

At the risk of not following the herd, I have to say that I think Mr !@#$% is being a little unfair to Mr 2600. The separation between Chomsky and Sapir-Whorff - who are two seperate people whose position is bolstered by their inadvertant cohesion - for me is that Chomsky is aware of, and indebted to, Wittgenstein's latter period; his is a highly politicised awareness of language; the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis is only political in so far as it's prescriptive, and is thus fascististic. For those slightly less aware, 'fascist' is not a negative term in all cases, but I'd be surprised if I had to tell that to two protagonists who've clearly read Nietzsche.

I suppose !#@$ doesn't like the miscegenation of compariring properly scientific with the anthroplogical-linguistic; I think it's entirely legitimate within the realms of simile.

I must now prepare to leave, perhaps I will write at length later? Who knows...

no yee yes no yes no no yes no yes

sort of no-- see, it works like this

it's not just the simile-- some similes work very well. but even as a simile this would not work. when you say "miscegenation", that's an applicable metaphor; could be an applicable simile with a change of words

oversimplifying things: while relativity gives us a picture of a different universe altogether than newtonian physics, newtonian physics are still a good approximation to relativity at low speeds. in other words, even in a relativistic universe, newtonian physics still serves well engineers, mechanics, artillery men, etc., working at speeds nowhere near the speed of light.

sapir-whorf and chomsky are antagnists, diametrical opposites, mutually exclusive; sapir-whorf is not a subset of chomsky, sapir-whorf doesn't "work most of the time" whereas chomsky "works all the time". that's just a load of balls.

so the simile is HRONG.

about the political implications of each theory-- political analysies make for very poor evaluations of scientific theory, donna haraway notwithstanding. still, if one is going to look at that, think of new labor's notion that you can change the world by changing words-- that's a typical application of sapir-whorf nonsense. generally speaking, foucault follows sapir-whorf, and so do all the stalinists and social engineers-- social anthropologists thinking that the human subject is infinitelly malleable by language/culture. 1984's newspeak is a sapir-whorf fantasy as well. but here's a funny thing, our genes know a lot more than our culture-- now that you could say is even more "deterministic" (whatever it is that you want to say with that), but it's also more "democratic", in the sense that everyone is born with more or less the same tools.

but this is a road i don't really wanna go down unless we switch from discussing science (linguistics) to discussing bollocks (humanities). in which case i require alcohol.

and let's please not so casually call nietzsche fascistic-- il duce was a poor sad cartoon, and marinetti was a clown. nietzsche mocked german nationalism and ridiculed obedience to the state, and saw the jews as the salvation of european culture. on the other hand, he wanted some sort of aristocracy, but that had nothing to do with the mental cabbage farts of the nazis, benito, etc.

I'm not really concerned with the erudite discussion at hand, however, Einstein fits yr rule more than he makes the exception.

the Theory of Relativity breaks down when dealing with measurements at or below the planck scale.

just sayin'.

Planck?...that's Quantum Mechanics...see post above

the Theory of relativity does not really "break down" at levels below the Plack scale. That is how it is described but it actually starts preidicting infinities, and infinities in physics are signs pointing to erroneous calculations. relativity posits that at the center of a black hole lies a singularity, an INFINITELY massive and INFINITELY small thing, but quantum mechanics does not.

weird.

quantum mechanics came about because the theory of relativity was found to be not as all-encompassing as it once was believed.

new knowledge, new ideas.

You're confused. Quantum mechanics came along because relativity is perfectly predictive of the very large, but not the very, very small. And why? It's no fault of relativity's...it's just that we cannot see or measure subatomic particles that are so small and travel so fast. Thus, we get Planck's constant and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and so on to make the math work out as best as we know how and this more-or-less functional hodgepodge is known by the name of, yeah, you guessed it, quantum mechanics.

"God doesn't play dice." - Albert Einstein

right, but that didn't really become an issue until much later.

macro / micro - it's all part of the whole, but neither theory describes both very well.

anyways, I'd love to hijack this thread about language and turn it into something I care about, like quantum mechanics, but yeah.

carry on.

Hence the seach for a Theory of Everything, or Grand Unification Theory.

Quote:
Originally Posted by floatingslowly
quantum mechanics came about because the theory of relativity was found to be not as all-encompassing as it once was believed.

new knowledge, new ideas.


I'll respond anew to this post by just declaring that your notion that quantum mecahnics is somehow more encompassing or more correct than relativity is preposterous. Now Bohr did teach Einstein a thing or two though. Have a good night.

ahhh i miss the days on SYG where an otherwise intelligent discussion about linguistics devolves into a trolling battle about philosophy and quantum mechanics

Lolz. Yeah, I wasn't around for that, but it sounds pretty awesome.

Really any discussion of linguistics necessitates a discussion of different philosophies and methods of data gathering — ethnographic/anthropological, neuroscientific — but I never delved very deep into that stuff when I was masquerading as an academic. Because... y'know... linguistics is hard.

I'm actually a little terrified of the scientific study of linguistics. Not language, which is in itself quite a bit more direct, but the cognitive basis of language mechanics, and the reductive study of aptitude for sound creation and mimicry that is variable by culture and region. Yikes.

Blah blah. This is why I left grad school. Ima go write a review of Star Trek now :cool:

yeah linguistics has a lot of intellectual pontificating and red tape. same with genetics. a lot of snobbery. BUT these are two very critical fields of study for people with a historian's professional bias such as myself, combined with archaeology and historiography, linguistics and genetics provide some of most valuable tools to better understand the past and also the past-present connections

but that's superfun! the search for neural correlates to linguistic theory is not just mentally bonerific, but it actually turns some aspects of linguistics into hard science. that's HUGE. HUUUUUUUGE.

e.g.: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/nellab/

Oh trust me, I know. Psych grad school dropout, member? I thought I made it pretty clear that I am too dumb for it.

all I know is English is witchcraft. designed to cast spells. that would explain a lot.

studying early dialect seems abstract to me. time is nonlinear, doesn't need to be examined. it just happened. early man farted, then smiled and laughed, then made art after approximating fart sounds with mouth making friends laugh. sounds = mmmmmm cool!= boasts of ego.

then goes beats on log making beat-in-time leading to possible procrastination with female impressed with boasted ego.

^ though I remember being fascinated by Noam Chomsky's upending of the field of linguistics in the 1990s, which more or less brought on the age of linguistics as a "hard science." Unfortunately, it's usually not studied that way. It tends to fall into Anthropoloy curriculum as a sub-discipline, when it should really be a cognitive neuroscience at this point.

Sometimes I fucking hate anthropology :mad:

oh, the generative grammar thing dates all the way back to the 60s, maybe even earlier-- by the 90s he had moved on to politics-- east timor, manufacturing consent, that sort of thing.

but yes it is a cognitive neuroscience at this point-- which i why i linked you that lab. i met david poeppel when he was in maryland. he was already saying then what his 2015 study showed-- there are neural correlates to a generative grammar. see: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publi...-our-head.html

beyond that, looks like the brain is more or less kantian with his apriori categories. i.e., tabula rasa is utter shit. even though skinner taught pigeons to play ping-pong.

we're more hard-wired than we like to think and that is exactly why marxism failed-- you can't really indoctrinate the "new man" of the revolution into existence. we're hardwired hierarchical beasts and it's the same old shit always with us-- which is why you can read sumerian tablets and totally relate to their pursuits.

same as it ever was
same as it ever was
same as it ever was
same as it ever was

okay, enough free-association from me for today

not at all an expert in any of this, but there's a pretty entertaining article in the latest Harpers Mag all about this, penned by Tom Wolfe, personally I enjoy the musings of WS Burroughs on language, but don't find his analysis any more believable than any other dogmatic claims

"In this month’s cover story, Tom Wolfe attacks the charismatic cult of Noam Chomsky and the long reign of his theory that human beings are born with an innate ability to acquire languages. “It no longer mattered whether one agreed with Noam Chomsky’s scholarly or political opinions or not,” writes Wolfe, “for fame enveloped him like a golden armature.” For thirty years Chomsky had insisted that some empiricist would come along and prove him right. But in 2005, Daniel L. Everett published a paper that didn’t so much refute Chomsky’s conception of a language organ as dismiss it entirely. Wolfe tells the story of the man who proved Chomsky wrong, precipitating the great linguist’s fall from his “plateau on Olympus.” "

There's been a big to-do about Everett and Chomsky for some time now. Well... I don't know... maybe a decade? I don't remember the name of the book Everett published that refuted Chomsky's innate language thesis, but it has had plenty of critics too, as had Everett in general.

Tom Wolfe is such a garish writer. Someone needs to slap him with a glove and tell him he is neither Mark Twain nor Kurt Vonnegut (nor John Irving, for that matter). It really grinds my gears when matters of or relating to empirical science are hacked away at by flowery dandies. Not that I don't enjoy some To. Wolfe now and again, but I prefer my science writing — even editorializing — to come from individuals with some background in objective empiricism. Feels like a hackey attempt to steer pop culture toward one side of the argument or t'other when the literati gets involved. (This kind of applies to Chomsky as well. But at least the guy knows he doesn't have the skills to make an empirical statement about any of this. He's waiting out the research, and hoping a scientist will do this for him.)

Anyway, I think Everett's principal assertion is that language is a result of learning. A brief Wikipedia shows me that he likens language to a tool (which it undoubtedly is) and that the capacity for use is a result of problem solving and cultural learning. Communication being the end to which language is the means.

I'd have to get past a Wikipedia page to be able to speak to how he supposedly dismantles Chomsky's ideas, and I don't lab on doing that any time soon because — again — I'm not smart enough for this shit. But I will say that science is a process of trial and error itself... by definition. I think it's quite unreasonable to assert that everything one theorist claims is incorrect just because, hey, here's another theorist who says it's incorrect! Likely, the truth lies somewhere in between, and won't be known for God knows how long.

Also (more Wiki... take a look at the page... I'm not citing direct sources here) Everett asserts that Chomsky's claims are falsified by studies of the Pirah language and culture. Well, that's totally rad, and everything but it's also kind of a good thing for Chomsky. If his theories are falsifiable, then they fall within the parameters of hard scientific inquiry. If a claim is NOT falsifiable, that means it's essentially scientific rubbish (see Kuhn). Claims like "God exists, he's just too great and unimaginably awesome for us to comprehend" inherently lack falsifiability because nobody can ever hope to gather evidence that this is not the case. Same with "there is no God." No lack of evidence will ever make that a falsifiable claim.

Chomsky's language theories were certainly not 100% correct, and he probably understands that... how could he not? The important thing with scientific theory is to generate a falsifiable hypothesis (I.e. One that could be discarded with enough evidence to the contrary). He appears to have done that. He's certainly kicked off a research fad that has yet to diminish. What's important is coming up with genuinely testable ideas, which Chomsky has clearly done.

But now I'm starting down the barrel of reading up on this shit again because I can't stand how basic and infantile I sound right now, and how limited my ability to write about this subject is. Thanks, guys. God fucking dammit.

ha ha ha-- great

now check out this:

https://www.edge.org/documents/archi...3.html#everett

and click on "the reality club" for a pinkert / everett "mano a mano"

or see if this works https://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge213.html#rc

Whoah... What?

yeah, Wolfe does a good history of the dispute. It's actually very well written. I think that his description of field work vs theoretical thought is very good in the article and is the basis for a lot of corrective work in social science as a whole.

Social science, though. Social science is a broad and somewhat useless term in my opinion. If a single category encompasses everything from economics, political science and psychology (which is gebuinely not a social science, despite the way most undergraduate programs choose to categorize it) to geography, anthropology (also, in many cases, not an SS) and even educational science, it's a label of convenience and nothing more.

Linguistics is obviously very multi-faceted, and requires the inclusion of pursuits and studies from all all over the academic map, from literary and philosophical analysis to white-coat lab studies involving fMIR's and electrodes. But the brunt of contemporary research is being done in a "hard science," reductionist manner, like chemistry, physics, cognitive neuroscience, etc. Isolating and identifying units of measurement (the phenome, for instance), and then conducting longitudinal studies to map sounds and the capacity to create sounds in areas of the brain.

My gripe about prose writers venturing into the arena of science is that it often leads to a slanted representation of an issue. This is because subjectivity is the bread and butter of fiction and humanities writing, and many of these guys simply can't write about issue from an objective perspective. They can't resist peppering their writing with loaded phrases and adjectives galore.

Not saying it can't be done, or had never been done... and I'm not saying Tom Wolfe isn't an extrordinarily talented writer... I'm just saying he's not the guy I'm going to look to for pop editorials on scientific issues.