The function of language

[tjohnson]

GS,

OK, I see that you're using "subject-predicate form" with a different meaning than I'd understood. I still think you fall into the form you object to -- and can't help but do so, not because of any being "brainwashed" by language but because of far deeper, and universal, linguistic principles. You've every now and then referred to the Worf-Sapir theory of language and culture. This theory has come in for strenuous criticism. You might, for instance, see works by Steven Pinker, also recommend by Bob K.

Something I think I should say to you, however, is that I'm not desirous of being in an adversarial relationship with you. You've said that you've found Korzybski's work a good living-your-life basis for (as I recall the figure) 32 years. I have no desire to try to "upset the applecart," or similar expression, of a view of existence with which you're happy. I haven't seen reason to think that I'd glean much of usefulness to my own life and intellectual concerns from Korzybski's writings, though I do find certain of his ideas, which I've heard from others as well, "interesting" in a metaphorical not a literal way.

I'm afraid that the biggest hurdle you'd face with attempts to convince me of the merit of his theories is that I've been steeped in evolutionary thought since I was of gradeschool age -- I started studying evolution when I was in 5th or 6th grade, fascinated by what I found about the evolution of the horse pictorially portrayed, and described, in one of my horse books. The exact sequence has subsequently been questioned; the general idea of evolution, however, I fell in love with then and remain in love with. A lot of my objections to Rand come from thinking she's not properly evolutionary, for all her claims to situate the human in a "biological" context. (I think her context is Aristotelian biology, not Darwinian.) Although you seem to think of describing the human as "an animal" a limiting view, even a pejorative view, I have no such emotional reaction. Do you think the human is a plant? A protozoan? You see, all the identification means to me is the correct biological classification. It carries no negative emotional weight, instead explanatory truth.

So...I think what it comes down to is that we'll remain in disagreement, whatever either of us might say countering the other's views. I don't mind being friendly with someone with whom I disagree.

Ellen

___

Sure Ellen, I love being friendly But I'm curious about what evolution theory has to do with this?

[Ellen Stuttle]

I'm curious about what evolution theory has to do with this?

GS, I honestly don't know how to process that question. What has evolution to do with whether humans are animals? Is that what you're asking?

Btw, I misspelled Whorf in my post from which you quoted (edited now).

Bob and I have both mentioned Steven Pinker's critiques of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Here are intoductory remarks to his discussion in The Language Instinct, including a comment about General Semantics:

The Language Instinct

Copyright © 1994 by Steven Pinker

Perennial Classics paperback edition

pp. 46-48

General Semantics lays the blame for human folly on insidious "semantic damage" to thought perpetrated by the structure of language. [....] The verb to be is a particular source of illogic [according to General Semantics], because it identifies individuals with abstractions, as in Mary is a woman, and licenses evasions of responsibility, like Ronald Reagan's famous nonconfession Mistakes were made. One faction seeks to eradicate the verb altogether.

And supposedly there is a scientific basis for these assumptions: the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determination, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers. People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve the spectrum into color words at different places, the fundmentally different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. [All of these "factoids" are myths, as he details in subsequent pages.] The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are not "in" the world but are imposed by one's culture [deleted semi-argument-from-intimidation quip about the appeal of the theory to "undergraduate sensibilities"].

But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications. [....] Think about it. We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a "what we meant to say" that is different from what we said. Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words. And if thoughts depended on words, how could a new word ever be coined? How could a child learn a word to begin with? How could translation from one language to another be possible?

The discussions that assume that language determines thought carry on only by a collective suspension of disbelief. [....]

As we shall see in this chapter, there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers' ways of thinking.

[Although it's tempting to keep typing; I always find Pinker fun to read, even in places -- and there are those -- where I have doubts about or disagreements with what he's saying. His analysis and critique of the Sapir-Whorf thesis which follows isn't one of those places. I think he does a nice job of, well, ahem, shredding the thesis.]

Ellen

___

[tjohnson]

I'm curious about what evolution theory has to do with this?

GS, I honestly don't know how to process that question. What has evolution to do with whether humans are animals? Is that what you're asking?

Btw, I misspelled Whorf in my post from which you quoted (edited now).

Bob and I have both mentioned Steven Pinker's critiques of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Here are intoductory remarks to his discussion in The Language Instinct, including a comment about General Semantics:

General Semantics lays the blame for human folly on insidious "semantic damage" to thought perpetrated by the structure of language. [....] The verb to be is a particular source of illogic [according to General Semantics], because it identifies individuals with abstractions, as in Mary is a woman, and licenses evasions of responsibility, like Ronald Reagan's famous nonconfession Mistakes were made. One faction seeks to eradicate the verb altogether.

And supposedly there is a scientific basis for these assumptions: the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determination, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers. People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve the spectrum into color words at different places, the fundmentally different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. [All of these "factoids" are myths, as he details in subsequent pages.] The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are not "in" the world but are imposed by one's culture [deleted semi-argument-from-intimidation quip about the appeal of the theory to "undergraduate sensibilities"].

Do you not see any difference between saying we ARE animals and we LABEL ourselves as animals?

Pinker implies above that Korzybski claims a scientific basis for his assumptions in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? I think S&S was published long before that, so if anything, they were perhaps influenced by Korzybski. It doesn't sound like Pinker understands much of what Korzybski wrote based on this short comment. Anyway, I'm much more interested in discussing these issues with YOU than referring to what someone else thinks.

Edited November 5, 2007 by general semanticist

[BaalChatzaf]

Do you not see any difference between saying we ARE animals and we LABEL ourselves as animals?

Pinker implies above that Korzybski claims a scientific basis for his assumptions in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? I think S&S was published long before that, so if anything, they were perhaps influenced by Korzybski. It doesn't sound like Pinker understands much of what Korzybski wrote based on this short comment. Anyway, I'm much more interested in discussing these issues with YOU than referring to what someone else thinks.

The numbers don't lie. We have 95 percent of our genes in common with chimps and bonobos and over 70 percent of our genes in common with dogs and cats. How much more proof do you require that we are as much animal as chimps, bonobos, dogs and cats? Perhaps we should just state the percentage of genes we have in common with this species and that species.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[tjohnson]

Pinker's determinism mischaracterization, which is quite effective for building a familiar strawman opponent, is followed immediately by undisguised scorn for anyone who finds something of intellectual value in the celebration of cognitive diversity instead of smartly jumping on the universalist bandwagon, characterizing it as merely a pre-professional concern ("perhaps accounting for the perennial appeal of the hypothesis to undergraduates"). And then the inevitable voice of authority thunders out from the ivory halls:

But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity.

Again there is no citational backup, nor is any possible, to show that Whorf ever stated that thought was the same thing as language (if he thought they were the same thing, how was he supposed to have then said that one determines the other?), but there it is -- Whorf's all wrong, and he's committed a conventional absurdity. On the next page Pinker tells us that "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make," and then authoritatively and derisively intones,

[T]here is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers' ways of thinking. But I want to do more than review the unintentionally comical history of attempts to prove that they do.

Wrong? Absurdity? Less sense? Unintentionally comic? Does this promote objective scientific reading of Whorf? You see how fun it is to take shots at a strawman opponent and call it 'Whorf'? He then takes the next few pages to help us understand WHY linguistic determinism, often called 'the strong version,' is wrong, yet again without demonstrating that either Sapir or Whorf advocated it -- and what's the point of talking about it if nobody advocated it? What is the purpose of all this muddying of the waters, this setting up of a strawman opponent easy to tear to shreds?

See http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm

[tjohnson]

The numbers don't lie. We have 95 percent of our genes in common with chimps and bonobos and over 70 percent of our genes in common with dogs and cats. How much more proof do you require that we are as much animal as chimps, bonobos, dogs and cats? Perhaps we should just state the percentage of genes we have in common with this species and that species.

Ba'al Chatzaf

We can't we call ourselves humans and leave it at that? Do humans HAVE to be a subset of animals? Isn't it possible that we can define humans as a disjoint set? Korzybski did, plants=>energy-binders, animals=>space-binders and humans=>time-binders. These are functional, disjoint definitions.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

We can't we call ourselves humans and leave it at that? Do humans HAVE to be a subset of animals?

GS,

I don't understand this. The way it sounds, this is tantamount to asking, "Does knowledge have to be hierarchical?"

Of course it does.

Maybe you mean something else?

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

1) Whoever wrote the material you cite in post #30 is being mendacious in slashing and misrepresenting both the sequence and the specifics of the argument.

2) Re:

Pinker implies above that Korzybski claims a scientific basis for his assumptions in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? I think S&S was published long before that, so if anything, they were perhaps influenced by Korzybski.

No, he isn't saying Korzybski claimed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as a basis. Sorry, I skipped stuff in order to compress. He was talking about General Semantics more generally, as continued by Stuart Chase and S. I. Hayakawa.

3) Re:

Do you not see any difference between saying we ARE animals and we LABEL ourselves as animals?

Yes, the first is true and the second carries an implication which is false, that we're merely calling ourselves animals though we aren't.

4) Re:

We can't we call ourselves humans and leave it at that? Do humans HAVE to be a subset of animals? Isn't it possible that we can define humans as a disjoint set? Korzybski did, plants=>energy-binders, animals=>space-binders and humans=>time-binders. These are functional, disjoint definitions.

GS, you can define a term however you want. But the facts are that humans are animals which evolved from earlier animal ancestors. Thus, yes, humans "have" to be, factually-speaking, animals because that's what they are.

Ellen

___

Edited November 6, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[tjohnson]

GS, you can define a term however you want. But the facts are that humans are animals which evolved from earlier animal ancestors. Thus, yes, humans "have" to be, factually-speaking, animals because that's what they are.

What about an electron, is it a particle or a wave?

[Ellen Stuttle]

What about an electron, is it a particle or a wave?

That query looks to me like game playing, since both Dragonfly and Bob K. have answered you several times already on particle/wave duality.

Here are links to a couple posts in which Dragonfly explained:

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...ost&p=37222

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...ost&p=37228

The problem there was assumptions which had been formed on the basis of macroscopic behavior, assumptions which didn't hold on the microscopic scale. You've raised the example as indicating a problem in "2-valued logic" -- by which I'm understanding you to mean true/false statements. But it isn't a problem in that regard.

Ellen

___

[BaalChatzaf]

GS, you can define a term however you want. But the facts are that humans are animals which evolved from earlier animal ancestors. Thus, yes, humans "have" to be, factually-speaking, animals because that's what they are.

What about an electron, is it a particle or a wave?

What about them? These mathematical concepts used in duality have produced the most successful scientific theory to date. And this theory (quantum field theory) was produced by people who use the dreaded and loathsome two valued propositional structure and who even use various declensions of the verb "to be". Oh the horror, horror!

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Ellen Stuttle]

I'm hitting some paydirt here. I've been burning late oil even later than usual.

Larry and I went for dinner tonight at an Indian restaurant we like which is about 20 minutes' drive away. On the drive there we were talking about at incident at one of his "Critical Thinking about Global Warming" presentations. This one was at a local library for a lay audience. The librarian who had sponsored the talk -- rather reluctantly, since she believes AGW is true -- commented afterward to the effect that each side (whether there's anything to it factually or whether there isn't) has its perspectives and biases, etc. Her thrust was that we all wear filters and it's a matter of opinion, e.g., whether temperature leads CO2 in the ice core records or vice versa. Larry was wondering about this being a defensive reaction to a challenge to her views. I was saying, well, maybe partly that but it's much deeper; it's a result of things which have been taught for a long while about how science is just a EuroCentric (white male EuroCentric) "filter," etc., etc.

I waxed far more lengthily and eloquently than I can describe now. I'm much too tired now. One of those speeches it's a shame wasn't recorded for later use.

I'd taken along with me Pinker's The Language Instinct and while we were eating I was reading to him some sections from that about Whorf. I was saying that it was the sort of thing which Whorf proposed which was a root of current-day beliefs that "it's all just different perspectives, and all perspectives are relative; one person's bias is just that person's set of glasses; there's no assessing truth," etc.

Some hours after we got home, I began to explore the material on the website GS linked in post # 30:

http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm

I started, as I sometimes do, by reading all the footnotes so as not to be interrupted by checking those in process of reading the article itself; then I looked at the main page which gives an outline of his (Dan Moonhawk Alford's) whole book and some other material; then began the section specifically on Whorf.

What do I find? The following:

What are these academics so afraid of that they can't face and contemplate and answer student's questions about Whorf's actual text? Why the smoke and mirrors? I suspect that they fear, and rightly so, that the entire Western worldview -- logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories -- the entire 'civilization' enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake; or at least the superior attitude that often accompanies it. It may be a fear that what we're culturally heir to is 'just another worldview and its langscapes' rather than exemplifying, as we tend to want to believe, eternal and universal human logic, which we're simply 'better at' than people who speak other languages outside of the Indo-European language family. As John Lucy says, relativity "challenges assumptions which lie at the heart of much modern social and behavior research -- namely its claim to be discovering general laws and to be truly scientific."(3)

Yes, well, there it is: science is "just another worldview and its langscapes."

I feel cold fear for what will become of our world, realizing the extent to which the populace at large is coming to believe that.

Ellen

PS: Some of what "Moonhawk," as the author calls himself, says about Chomsky's unfairness I expect is true. Chomsky does use unfair argumentative techniques. Plus, I think Chomsky's own theories deserving of severe criticism. But Moonhawk's basic thesis -- from indications I've gleaned thus far (I'm still reading) -- is enough to send ice water through my veins.

___

Edited November 6, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[tjohnson]

What about an electron, is it a particle or a wave?

That query looks to me like game playing, since both Dragonfly and Bob K. have answered you several times already on particle/wave duality.

Here are links to a couple posts in which Dragonfly explained:

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...ost&p=37222

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...ost&p=37228

The problem there was assumptions which had been formed on the basis of macroscopic behavior, assumptions which didn't hold on the microscopic scale. You've raised the example as indicating a problem in "2-valued logic" -- by which I'm understanding you to mean true/false statements. But it isn't a problem in that regard.

Ellen

___

I assure you it is not game-playing. You have no problem saying "man is an animal" is a fact - something independent of context in some theory which I claim is strictly a misrepresentation. Wave-particle duality and QM in general is one of the reasons Korzybski began formulating his language of 'orders of abstractions' because we are confronted with phenomena where the 'is of identity' clearly does not work. Of course he generalized this to denying the 'is of identity' in all non-mathematics but this example really made it obvious. Where in 2-valued logic can you say that sometimes the electron is a wave and sometimes it's a particle? The 'is of identity' doesn't allow for this.

[tjohnson]

......was produced by people who use the dreaded and loathsome two valued propositional structure and who even use various declensions of the verb "to be". Oh the horror, horror!

Ba'al Chatzaf

Real intelligent Baal. You know, if this were a moderated forum these kind of comments would not be posted.

[BaalChatzaf]

I assure you it is not game-playing. You have no problem saying "man is an animal" is a fact - something independent of context in some theory which I claim is strictly a misrepresentation. Wave-particle duality and QM in general is one of the reasons Korzybski began formulating his language of 'orders of abstractions' because we are confronted with phenomena where the 'is of identity' clearly does not work. Of course he generalized this to denying the 'is of identity' in all non-mathematics but this example really made it obvious. Where in 2-valued logic can you say that sometimes the electron is a wave and sometimes it's a particle? The 'is of identity' doesn't allow for this.

Some measuring procedures detect an electron as a particle (very localized). Some measuring procedures detect an electron as a wave. The double slit experiment implies an electron prior to the collapse of its quantum function for location is a wave. *

Here "is" means detected as.

Ba'al Chatzaf

* See De Broigle and Bohm on this matter.

[tjohnson]

GS,

I don't understand this. The way it sounds, this is tantamount to asking, "Does knowledge have to be hierarchical?"

Of course it does.

Maybe you mean something else?

Michael

I claim (after Korzybski) that the only possible content of 'knowledge' is structure - to know is to know structure. I suppose hierarchy is a kind of structure but it is not the only kind and it is not a necessary condition of knowledge, I don't think.

[tjohnson]

Here "is" means detected as.

Eureka! Don't you see the huge difference in the use of 'is'? Now "man is an animal" becomes "man is detected as an animal". So why can't man be "detected" as a human? We can focus on man's animal nature or we can focus on his human nature - it's our choice.

[merjet]

Eureka! Don't you see the huge difference in the use of 'is'? Now "man is an animal" becomes "man is detected as an animal". So why can't man be "detected" as a human? We can focus on man's animal nature or we can focus on his human nature - it's our choice.

"Man is an animal" is a shorter way of saying "man is a kind of animal". It places humans in a more abstract category, one containing more than humans. For one who has often posted here about levels of abstraction, I hope you can understand that. If human aren't animals in this way, then what are they? Plants? Minerals? Artifacts? Humans are animals in such categorization because they have so much in common with other kinds of animals -- living, they breathe, eat, are motile, reproduce, have brains and sensory organs, etc. Obviously humans differ from other species in the category, but not by enough to exclude them from the category.

[tjohnson]

"Man is an animal" is a shorter way of saying "man is a kind of animal". It places humans in a more abstract category, one containing more than humans. For one who has often posted here about levels of abstraction, I hope you can understand that. If human aren't animals in this way, then what are they? Plants? Minerals? Artifacts? Humans are animals in such categorization because they have so much in common with other kinds of animals -- living, they breathe, eat, are motile, reproduce, have brains and sensory organs, etc. Obviously humans differ from other species in the category, but not by enough to exclude them from the category.

We classify man as an animal in biology or evolution theory but that does not mean man has to be classified as an animal in epistemological theory, does it? Animals cannot know things as humans can so within the context of GS, for example, man is not classified as an animal.

[Brant Gaede]

"Man is an animal" is a shorter way of saying "man is a kind of animal". It places humans in a more abstract category, one containing more than humans. For one who has often posted here about levels of abstraction, I hope you can understand that. If human aren't animals in this way, then what are they? Plants? Minerals? Artifacts? Humans are animals in such categorization because they have so much in common with other kinds of animals -- living, they breathe, eat, are motile, reproduce, have brains and sensory organs, etc. Obviously humans differ from other species in the category, but not by enough to exclude them from the category.

We classify man as an animal in biology or evolution theory but that does not mean man has to be classified as an animal in epistemological theory, does it? Animals cannot know things as humans can so within the context of GS, for example, man is not classified as an animal.

This is like saying a car is not a vehicle because it has a motor while a carriage requires horses and is therefore a vehicle. Or a car is a car, a man is a man. Quite tautological. In here at least GS theory is chasing its own tail. If not, please define man (again, if I missed it the first time--thanks).

--Brant

[merjet]

We classify man as an animal in biology or evolution theory but that does not mean man has to be classified as an animal in epistemological theory, does it? Animals cannot know things as humans can so within the context of GS, for example, man is not classified as an animal.

I know so little about GS, but why are animals irrelevant to epistemology theory? Human cognition has a lot in common with that of animals. Many animals have perceptual systems much like ours. Human brain chemistry is fundamentally the same as found in other vertebrates. There are neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters.

[tjohnson]

I know so little about GS, but why are animals irrelevant to epistemology theory? Human cognition has a lot in common with that of animals. Many animals have perceptual systems much like ours. Human brain chemistry is fundamentally the same as found in other vertebrates. There are neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters.

We do have much in common in our sensory department but where we are very different is in our symbolic capabilities and from this point of view we should not classify ourselves as animals. In GS, as I mentioned, Korzybski split up life into 3 classes, energy(chemistry)-binding, space-binding, and time-binding. I stress that this is not biology and these classifications are for use in GS only at present. if anyone's interested you can read a short chapter about this here; http://www.esgs.org/uk/art/moh-ch03.htm

The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life.

The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.

And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.

[merjet]

general semanticist,

That's the most interesting excerpt from Korzybski you've posted.

It isn't unique to him. See here.

Also, several philosophers have written about humans and time.

Edit: The "time-binding" paragraph seems much like Popper's "third world." Maybe Barnes will comment on that.

Edited November 6, 2007 by Merlin Jetton

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

GS,

According to this standard, isn't inherited DNA and mutation of it (evolution) for all life time-binding?

Just a thought.

Michael

[tjohnson]

general semanticist,

That's the most interesting excerpt from Korzybski you've posted.

It isn't unique to him. See here.

Also, several philosophers have written about humans and time.

Edit: The "time-binding" paragraph seems much like Popper's "third world." Maybe Barnes will comment on that.

Gee Merlin, I don't see much similarity between that and Korzybski's work but I would be interested to hear what Popper said. This passage was from Korzybski's first book Manhood of Humanity and after defining man thusly he went on to write Science and Sanity which is expressly about the mechanism of time-binding.

The present enquiry originated in my attempt to build a science of man. The first task was to

define man scientifically in non-elementalistic, functional terms. I accomplished that in my book

Manhood of Humanity (New York, E. P. Dutton & Co.), and in it I called the special characteristic

which sharply distinguishes man from animal the time-binding characteristic.