6 ms·

Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages

50 points by Osiris30 8y ago

hprotagonist 8y ago
The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. Uhh... citation needed? Off the top of my head, certainly Proust would disagree.
- gnat 8y ago
  The paper makes citations for these claims. For example: "Modern reworkings of the Aristotelian hierarchy give primacy to sight followed by hearing, touch, and then taste and smell (20, 21). Regardless of the precise characterization, the distal senses of vision and audition are privileged at the expense of the lowly proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell (22)." The relevant citations are: [20] Viberg Å (1984) The verbs of perception: A typological study. Explanations for Language Universals, eds Butterworth B, Comrie B, Dahl Ö (Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin), pp 123–162. http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlescholar&gs_type=article&author[0]=%C3%85+Viberg&title=The+verbs+of+perception:+A+typological+study&publication_year=1984&pages=123-162 http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlesc... [21] San Roque L, et al. (2015) Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies. Cogn Linguist 26:31–60. http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlescholar&gs_type=article&author[0]=L+San%20Roque&title=Vision+verbs+dominate+in+conversation+across+cultures,+but+the+ranking+of+non-visual+verbs+varies&publication_year=2015&journal=Cogn+Linguist&volume=26&pages=31-60 http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlesc... [22] Howes D (2005) Empire of the Senses (Berg, Oxford). http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlescholar&gs_type=article&q_txt=(2005)+Empire+of+the+Senses+(Berg%2C+Oxford) http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlesc....
  - glibgil 8y ago
    We got him
- realusername 8y ago
  Even the concept of Western thought is dubious itself, there's not much in common culturally between "western" countries. There's no common language, values or vision of society.
  - tokyodude 8y ago
    Maybe I don't know what the definition of "Western" countries is but if there's one thing that seems common to me across them it's Christianity. Every western country I've been to is full of churches. There's clearly a lot of thought influenced by those churches. It wasn't until I moved to the other side of the world did I have the experience of cultures not nearly as influenced by Christian thought. I don't have concrete examples of the top of my head but I've read academic papers trying to put forth ideas about universal human behavior that clearly have never lived outside a Christian influenced culture. Even if the author was atheist they didn't seem to notice how those influences shaped their conclusions.
    - realusername 8y ago
      Christianity spread far far more than just "Western" countries, just have a look at Africa or South America, you even have a lot of Christians in Asia. There's probably more christians outside the West than in it.
    - xte 8y ago
      Try looking at how missionary shape south America and Africa... I bet they are not "western" countries, also in Europe "church" power vary from country to country, for instance in France it have both little presence and power, in Spain or Italy have far more presence and power. Christianity itself steal many aspect of ancient religions from Egyptian one to Celtic and Romans one. Just as an example in ex-Celtic area of Europe christmas symbol's are mostly ex-celtic like "decorated fir tree", santa claus (a male dressed with heavy winter clothes red because of the blood of animals he have killed being a hunter), a big wooden log to be burning in the night etc. In ex Viking part of EU santa claus is a female with more "Viking" dress, in the southern christmas nativity scene are far more common while still remain winter/snowy scene certainly not possible in ancient Lebanon etc. Substantially all Christianity events Christmas, all saints, Easter etc are Celtic or Roman or Greek events. Think only about our time measure: ancient Roman count days starting with "ora prima" (first hour) in the morning, Celts use midnight as we use today (an ancient Roman phrase "the Celts are a strange population that count days starting from the nights"). Religions are political means to subjugate populations so their history mostly follow political/military history of the world.
edna314 8y ago
It's interesting that visual perception seems to code better than sound perception, but our main way of communicating, even across cultures, is via sound. Is it because talking is faster than miming?
- FroshKiller 8y ago
  I imagine it has less to do with speed and more to do with not having to keep a speaker in focus in your line of sight to understand speech. And we hear just as well in the dark.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
anchovies 8y ago
I'd go out on a limb and speculate that much of existence was peviously described amid a fog of superstition, with only a handful of objective facts for primitive humans to draw consensus on. Vocalization among animals finds its roots in high energy emotions, typically fear and rage. Barking, roaring, hissing. As you walk up the socialization gradient, vocalization gets combined with body language (raised hackles, charging), facial expressions (staring down with a domineering gaze, bearing teeth). Then, with inversions like group hunting tactics, coordination of remaining silent while stalking prey. Highly social animals have a seemingly partial grasp of fair play. Performing tricks for rewards, or a pet ruining an owner's bed as revenge for a slight. Most "pet" chimpanzee maulings are the consequence of a chimpanzee's perception of a violation of status, noticing a peer enjoy briefly held favouritism, or a favorite toy transgressed by a stranger. When it comes to perception of experience, and descriptions thereof, and objectively related concepts arrive VARY late to the party, so a null finding is unsurprising to me. First you need counting and accounting, in order to quantify, and then to objectify, you you also need codification and enumeration. So already, you have prerequisites of intellect, before anything objective happens. This means writing and consistent phonemes, to establish conrete rules. But speech is operational and practical long before it becomes romanticized with experience. People would be counting and naming discrete essentials as part of primitive trade, long before ascribing color to the sky. Indeed, color probably wasn't important until decoration and desirable possessions became noteworthy. Interesting animal pelts, face paints, stone and shell beads and bird feathers. Probably by the time leather and textiles are normative, you really begin to see vocabulary take off, but still, it's not about what we sense, but material objects to be grasped. Some of the object aspects of sensory description that took centuries to isolate are pretty subtle. How many colors are there? Only six, or many millions? Which parts of the world boast the highest variety of flavorful foods? Quanitfying tone scales, harmonics and other auditory details like timber and rhythm require not only complex materials to emit controlled sound, but also time pieces to measure duration and period. Finally, we have centuries of superstition plagueing the discovery of facts as science. Is the earth round? What happens when we die? How did the world and universe come to be? Did an intelligence conjure us into existence by intent? When will the world end? Are we the most important thing? Is nothingness actually something? So objectivity is not an incidental thing, even if experience is.
evincarofautumn 8y ago
My working model for why colours admit description more readily than smells is that we judge and decompose them in largely the same way, but it’s simply easier to develop a repertoire of colours. They’re everywhere, most people have decent colour vision, and someone can point to them and tell you what they are in relative isolation. Whereas smells (and tastes) are much more diverse, and rarely pure, isolated chemicals but more often complex profiles of many different compounds. A common way that people develop a repertoire of smells is through cooking: now that I have some experience with many different ingredients and styles, I can now readily tell what went into a dish and how I might replicate it, describe new tastes in terms of old ones, and imagine new flavour combinations and how they would work together. Chemistry offers another angle—if you know what I mean by “indolic” then you can probably conjure a mental image of exactly the heavy musk I’m referring to, but you probably have no clue if you haven’t experienced it and been told that that’s what you’re experiencing. You can add specific chemicals to your repertoire of smells. A similar thing seems to hold for recreational drug experiences. If someone has had many different drugs before, especially drugs with similar pharmacodynamics that operate on the same receptors, it’s relatively easy to give them the gist of what something is going to feel like by reference to similar experiences. If they haven’t, there’s only so much you can do to prepare them for what is going to be a novel experience.
- GuiA 8y ago
  Perhaps I'm simplifying/abstracting a bit too much here but - colors are single dimensional (i.e. the wavelength of the light you're seeing) whereas smells are multidimensional/maybe not even really mappable to any continuum.
  - GolDDranks 8y ago
    Actually, color sensation is three dimensional because we have three types of cells that are sensitive to different frequencies. One could maybe argue that the dimensionality of a smell sensation corresponds to the amount of types of receptors we have in our noses.
  - scatters 8y ago

50 points by Osiris30 8y ago

The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. Uhh... citation needed? Off the top of my head, certainly Proust would disagree.

gnat 8y ago
The paper makes citations for these claims. For example: "Modern reworkings of the Aristotelian hierarchy give primacy to sight followed by hearing, touch, and then taste and smell (20, 21). Regardless of the precise characterization, the distal senses of vision and audition are privileged at the expense of the lowly proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell (22)." The relevant citations are: [20] Viberg Å (1984) The verbs of perception: A typological study. Explanations for Language Universals, eds Butterworth B, Comrie B, Dahl Ö (Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin), pp 123–162. http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlescholar&gs_type=article&author[0]=%C3%85+Viberg&title=The+verbs+of+perception:+A+typological+study&publication_year=1984&pages=123-162 http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlesc... [21] San Roque L, et al. (2015) Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies. Cogn Linguist 26:31–60. http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlescholar&gs_type=article&author[0]=L+San%20Roque&title=Vision+verbs+dominate+in+conversation+across+cultures,+but+the+ranking+of+non-visual+verbs+varies&publication_year=2015&journal=Cogn+Linguist&volume=26&pages=31-60 http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlesc... [22] Howes D (2005) Empire of the Senses (Berg, Oxford). http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlescholar&gs_type=article&q_txt=(2005)+Empire+of+the+Senses+(Berg%2C+Oxford) http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlesc....
- glibgil 8y ago
  We got him
realusername 8y ago
Even the concept of Western thought is dubious itself, there's not much in common culturally between "western" countries. There's no common language, values or vision of society.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  Maybe I don't know what the definition of "Western" countries is but if there's one thing that seems common to me across them it's Christianity. Every western country I've been to is full of churches. There's clearly a lot of thought influenced by those churches. It wasn't until I moved to the other side of the world did I have the experience of cultures not nearly as influenced by Christian thought. I don't have concrete examples of the top of my head but I've read academic papers trying to put forth ideas about universal human behavior that clearly have never lived outside a Christian influenced culture. Even if the author was atheist they didn't seem to notice how those influences shaped their conclusions.
  - realusername 8y ago
    Christianity spread far far more than just "Western" countries, just have a look at Africa or South America, you even have a lot of Christians in Asia. There's probably more christians outside the West than in it.
  - xte 8y ago
    Try looking at how missionary shape south America and Africa... I bet they are not "western" countries, also in Europe "church" power vary from country to country, for instance in France it have both little presence and power, in Spain or Italy have far more presence and power. Christianity itself steal many aspect of ancient religions from Egyptian one to Celtic and Romans one. Just as an example in ex-Celtic area of Europe christmas symbol's are mostly ex-celtic like "decorated fir tree", santa claus (a male dressed with heavy winter clothes red because of the blood of animals he have killed being a hunter), a big wooden log to be burning in the night etc. In ex Viking part of EU santa claus is a female with more "Viking" dress, in the southern christmas nativity scene are far more common while still remain winter/snowy scene certainly not possible in ancient Lebanon etc. Substantially all Christianity events Christmas, all saints, Easter etc are Celtic or Roman or Greek events. Think only about our time measure: ancient Roman count days starting with "ora prima" (first hour) in the morning, Celts use midnight as we use today (an ancient Roman phrase "the Celts are a strange population that count days starting from the nights"). Religions are political means to subjugate populations so their history mostly follow political/military history of the world.

edna314 8y ago

It's interesting that visual perception seems to code better than sound perception, but our main way of communicating, even across cultures, is via sound. Is it because talking is faster than miming?

FroshKiller 8y ago
I imagine it has less to do with speed and more to do with not having to keep a speaker in focus in your line of sight to understand speech. And we hear just as well in the dark.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

anchovies 8y ago

I'd go out on a limb and speculate that much of existence was peviously described amid a fog of superstition, with only a handful of objective facts for primitive humans to draw consensus on. Vocalization among animals finds its roots in high energy emotions, typically fear and rage. Barking, roaring, hissing. As you walk up the socialization gradient, vocalization gets combined with body language (raised hackles, charging), facial expressions (staring down with a domineering gaze, bearing teeth). Then, with inversions like group hunting tactics, coordination of remaining silent while stalking prey. Highly social animals have a seemingly partial grasp of fair play. Performing tricks for rewards, or a pet ruining an owner's bed as revenge for a slight. Most "pet" chimpanzee maulings are the consequence of a chimpanzee's perception of a violation of status, noticing a peer enjoy briefly held favouritism, or a favorite toy transgressed by a stranger. When it comes to perception of experience, and descriptions thereof, and objectively related concepts arrive VARY late to the party, so a null finding is unsurprising to me. First you need counting and accounting, in order to quantify, and then to objectify, you you also need codification and enumeration. So already, you have prerequisites of intellect, before anything objective happens. This means writing and consistent phonemes, to establish conrete rules. But speech is operational and practical long before it becomes romanticized with experience. People would be counting and naming discrete essentials as part of primitive trade, long before ascribing color to the sky. Indeed, color probably wasn't important until decoration and desirable possessions became noteworthy. Interesting animal pelts, face paints, stone and shell beads and bird feathers. Probably by the time leather and textiles are normative, you really begin to see vocabulary take off, but still, it's not about what we sense, but material objects to be grasped. Some of the object aspects of sensory description that took centuries to isolate are pretty subtle. How many colors are there? Only six, or many millions? Which parts of the world boast the highest variety of flavorful foods? Quanitfying tone scales, harmonics and other auditory details like timber and rhythm require not only complex materials to emit controlled sound, but also time pieces to measure duration and period. Finally, we have centuries of superstition plagueing the discovery of facts as science. Is the earth round? What happens when we die? How did the world and universe come to be? Did an intelligence conjure us into existence by intent? When will the world end? Are we the most important thing? Is nothingness actually something? So objectivity is not an incidental thing, even if experience is.

evincarofautumn 8y ago

My working model for why colours admit description more readily than smells is that we judge and decompose them in largely the same way, but it’s simply easier to develop a repertoire of colours. They’re everywhere, most people have decent colour vision, and someone can point to them and tell you what they are in relative isolation. Whereas smells (and tastes) are much more diverse, and rarely pure, isolated chemicals but more often complex profiles of many different compounds. A common way that people develop a repertoire of smells is through cooking: now that I have some experience with many different ingredients and styles, I can now readily tell what went into a dish and how I might replicate it, describe new tastes in terms of old ones, and imagine new flavour combinations and how they would work together. Chemistry offers another angle—if you know what I mean by “indolic” then you can probably conjure a mental image of exactly the heavy musk I’m referring to, but you probably have no clue if you haven’t experienced it and been told that that’s what you’re experiencing. You can add specific chemicals to your repertoire of smells. A similar thing seems to hold for recreational drug experiences. If someone has had many different drugs before, especially drugs with similar pharmacodynamics that operate on the same receptors, it’s relatively easy to give them the gist of what something is going to feel like by reference to similar experiences. If they haven’t, there’s only so much you can do to prepare them for what is going to be a novel experience.

GuiA 8y ago
Perhaps I'm simplifying/abstracting a bit too much here but - colors are single dimensional (i.e. the wavelength of the light you're seeing) whereas smells are multidimensional/maybe not even really mappable to any continuum.
- GolDDranks 8y ago
  Actually, color sensation is three dimensional because we have three types of cells that are sensitive to different frequencies. One could maybe argue that the dimensionality of a smell sensation corresponds to the amount of types of receptors we have in our noses.
- scatters 8y ago