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That only makes sense if you conceive of language as primarily an instrument of communication rather than of thought; that is, language is merely communication

That only makes sense if you conceive of language as primarily an instrument of communication rather than of thought; that is, language is merely communication turned up to eleven. What inclines you to believe that's the case? That isn't to say that a "mechanism" for symbolic thought needs to resemble human language in any particular way, at least as far as serialization goes.

ollyfg 11y ago
This reminds me of the way Big Brother is working on a new language that doesn't have words for things you're not allowed to do - if there's no word for it, how can you think about doing it?
panic 11y ago
The entire concept of a "symbol" is a very human thing -- there are no natural symbols outside the human mind (except maybe inside of a computer, a human invention). Do you need to use symbols in order to organize matter into "technology"? Edit: it occurs to me that DNA/RNA are made of natural symbols, which is a pretty good argument for symbols being important.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  I think all of this is explained by a linguistics 101 course (I have seen a few excerpts of one lecture). A good reason to use symbols in communication is for reliability (which is needed in the DNA). With a discrete set of symbols you have most likely no degradation (instead some recovery occurs -- like when you interpret a poorly written letter), and with a small chance you understand a completely different symbol. This stops error propagation. Moreover, symbols allow for easy combination, which expands indefinitely the vocabulary with a fixed cost.
- Scarblac 11y ago
  Bee dancing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance ) is a clear example of symbolism.
Natsu 11y ago
I see language as a sort of 'programming' that we acquire. If it's like software, it should require relatively compatible hardware in order to run the program. It doesn't seem like chimps are able to acquire that the same as humans are, given things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky The signs end up being things like "Grape eat Nim" or "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
- stan_rogers 11y ago
  You see much the same sort of thing with people who are language-deprived at an early age. Leaving "Genie"[1] out of the mix (because it has been argued by at least one of the people who studied her that she was probably impaired in areas other than language—though I'm inclined to believe that her other cognative impairments were as likely to be the result of language deprivation as the cause of her language impairment), we have seen similar problems with real grammar among the Nicaraguan deaf community: the kids who were older when the schools for the deaf opened never developed a language capacity in the same way that the really young children did. (It has to be kept in mind that Nicaraguan Sign Language[2] is essentially a spontaneous creole developed by the kids themselves from the rough pidgin mimicas each child brought into the community from home. The grammar of the language came from usage in the school community; it wasn't externally imposed, and isn't related to any of the French-derived sign languages.) Hawaiian Creole English ("Pidgin" to its speakers) can also be demonstrated to be largely the creation of children, building upon the true pidgin (with no consistent grammar) their parents, who came from a variety of quite different languages communities, spoke. You might think that things like this might reinforce the idea that language capacity is innate in humans, and that it differs in qualitative (and not merely quantitative) ways from communication in other species, but people are still wrapped up in some combination of strict behaviourism and the tabula rasa on the one hand and cultural constructionism on the other hand that they can't seem to see the data sitting in front of them. I don't think we'll get very far until we accept that the communicative aspect of language is merely a lossy format for serializing and transmitting internal data structures that may or may not have any correspondence with physical realities (apart from neuronal state). "A language" is just an agreed-upon format, like JSON, XML, or Gerry Sussman's "everything is a Lisp" notation(s), but without that config file, the general-purpose serializer/deserializer library is just unreachable code. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

ollyfg 11y ago

This reminds me of the way Big Brother is working on a new language that doesn't have words for things you're not allowed to do - if there's no word for it, how can you think about doing it?

panic 11y ago

The entire concept of a "symbol" is a very human thing -- there are no natural symbols outside the human mind (except maybe inside of a computer, a human invention). Do you need to use symbols in order to organize matter into "technology"? Edit: it occurs to me that DNA/RNA are made of natural symbols, which is a pretty good argument for symbols being important.

darkmighty 11y ago
I think all of this is explained by a linguistics 101 course (I have seen a few excerpts of one lecture). A good reason to use symbols in communication is for reliability (which is needed in the DNA). With a discrete set of symbols you have most likely no degradation (instead some recovery occurs -- like when you interpret a poorly written letter), and with a small chance you understand a completely different symbol. This stops error propagation. Moreover, symbols allow for easy combination, which expands indefinitely the vocabulary with a fixed cost.
Scarblac 11y ago
Bee dancing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance ) is a clear example of symbolism.

Natsu 11y ago

I see language as a sort of 'programming' that we acquire. If it's like software, it should require relatively compatible hardware in order to run the program. It doesn't seem like chimps are able to acquire that the same as humans are, given things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky The signs end up being things like "Grape eat Nim" or "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."

stan_rogers 11y ago
You see much the same sort of thing with people who are language-deprived at an early age. Leaving "Genie"[1] out of the mix (because it has been argued by at least one of the people who studied her that she was probably impaired in areas other than language—though I'm inclined to believe that her other cognative impairments were as likely to be the result of language deprivation as the cause of her language impairment), we have seen similar problems with real grammar among the Nicaraguan deaf community: the kids who were older when the schools for the deaf opened never developed a language capacity in the same way that the really young children did. (It has to be kept in mind that Nicaraguan Sign Language[2] is essentially a spontaneous creole developed by the kids themselves from the rough pidgin mimicas each child brought into the community from home. The grammar of the language came from usage in the school community; it wasn't externally imposed, and isn't related to any of the French-derived sign languages.) Hawaiian Creole English ("Pidgin" to its speakers) can also be demonstrated to be largely the creation of children, building upon the true pidgin (with no consistent grammar) their parents, who came from a variety of quite different languages communities, spoke. You might think that things like this might reinforce the idea that language capacity is innate in humans, and that it differs in qualitative (and not merely quantitative) ways from communication in other species, but people are still wrapped up in some combination of strict behaviourism and the tabula rasa on the one hand and cultural constructionism on the other hand that they can't seem to see the data sitting in front of them. I don't think we'll get very far until we accept that the communicative aspect of language is merely a lossy format for serializing and transmitting internal data structures that may or may not have any correspondence with physical realities (apart from neuronal state). "A language" is just an agreed-upon format, like JSON, XML, or Gerry Sussman's "everything is a Lisp" notation(s), but without that config file, the general-purpose serializer/deserializer library is just unreachable code. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language