7 ms·
14 years later, the answer is still no.
by meepmorp 6y ago
14 years later, the answer is still no.
- joe_the_user 6y agoYeah, Dan Everett managed a few good years of self-promotion via his Piraha/"I have disproved Chomsky" thing but it really hasn't amounted to much. IE, 14 years later, Everett's claims about the Piraha remain unproven and pretty much hinge on him being the primary translator of it. Notice that wikipedia descriptions of Piraha are essentially descriptions of what Everett says about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language
- meepmorp 6y agoI saw him give a talk about Pirahã and recursion in 2007 or 2008, and his argument depended entirely on data that he collected and translated. Pointing that out made him really defensive; understandable, perhaps, but recursion has been found in literally every other language in the world. You can't be that surprised when people have serious reservations an argument that hinges on the validity of a tiny data set from a language that only you understand. I stopped paying attention after that, though. Maybe there's other people doing work on it now.
- raihansaputra 6y agoYeah. Possibly a black swan knowledge (every swan is white until a black one is found much later) but can't be accepted as valid until someone else verified it.
- garbagetime 6y agoDoesn't matter if some specific language lacks recursion. UG refers to a capacity of the human mind: if it happens to be the case that there is some language which does not feature recursion, that does not show that humans do not have that capacity. Just like how if there was a person somewhere who had grown up in isolation and never learned a language wouldn't show anything about UG.
- bedobi 6y agoBut don't you see how you've just made the hypothesis unfalsifiable?
- garbagetime 6y agoDo you also think the claims that dogs can talk or that humans can fly are unfalsifiable? All we are discussing is a biological system, and biological systems are things that may be investigated.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoso from that wikipedia page: "Chomsky has replied that he considers recursion to be an innate cognitive capacity that is available for use in language but that the capacity may or may not manifest itself in any one particular language" which makes me wonder - do they show an innate understanding of the concepts when it is discussed with them.
- throwawayboise 6y agoHow would you discuss it with them if indeed it is true that it isn't expressible in their language?
- tsimionescu 6y agoThe langauge could lack recursion but still be powerful enough to express what recursion is (just like English doesnt have pitch accent, but you can discuss pitch accent in Emglish). Alternatively, someone who speaks Piraha natively could learn English and discuss about this concept in English.
- coldtea 6y agoYou could describe it using a stack.
- rozab 6y agoApparently they asked Everett to teach them basic numeracy skills (counting to 10, 1+1=2, etc) and were unable to grasp it even with months of study.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoCould he teach it to the children? If not it would start to seem like an argument that members of the tribe lacked mental faculties that the rest of humanity display (unless severely disabled) and for me would really call his claims into doubt without a lot of research from multiple sources.
- eindiran 6y agoI would go further than that and claim that most mainstream linguists have accepted the Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodriguez reanalysis of Everett's data: * https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000411 https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000411 * http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/Nevins_Pesetsky_Rodrigues_2_Evidence_and_Argumentation_Reply_to_Everett.pdf http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/Nevins_Pesetsky_Rodri...
- AntiImperialist 6y agoExcept Everett was the only one who actually learned the language.
- mildavw 6y agoA young missionary spends several decades living among and learning the language of a remote Amazon tribe. He finds that his interest in languages and linguistics exceeds that of spreading Christianity and makes a career change. Then, either A) He realizes that he’s the only one who speaks this language and concocts a scheme to seek fame and fortune by falsely claiming it contradicts the leading theory of linguistics because no one can prove him wrong. Mwahaha! Or B) As he learns about linguistic theories, he realizes that the language he learned as a missionary contradicts the leading theory of linguistics. This is academically interesting, so he writes a paper and gives talks describing what he found. While A is certainly possible, it seems B is more likely.
- czzr 6y agoC) His desire to prove something new leads him to overstate / overemphasise / mislead himself on degrees of difference.
- npunt 6y agoYep, a somewhat related example is how statistical analysis of Mendel's seed data [1] revealed that some bias crept in because its too perfect. In Mendel's case he was right about the genetics of inheritance (and the bias likely unconscious), which goes to show even when we're dedicated to the truth our capacity for self-deception exists. [1] http://blog.thegrandlocus.com/2016/04/did-mendel-fake-his-results http://blog.thegrandlocus.com/2016/04/did-mendel-fake-his-re...
- joe_the_user 6y agoIs there a term for this sort of fallacious argument? It's based on "either this person is a liar or what they're saying must be true". The third, not mentioned possibility, is that a person can fool themselves. And if you're talking the scientific investigation of complex phenomena like language, fooling one's self is common. Indeed, unless a researcher is using tremendous care, their chance of at least partly fooling themselves is very high. Scientific processes and checks and balances exist because of this. That Everett essentially ignored these and primarily argued his case in the press leads me being very dubious of him. But this still doesn't he's a "liar", that he believes what he claims is plausible but doesn't change anything else.
- bedobi 6y agoIrrespective of Pirahã, I still think Chomsky and anyone who agrees with him are wrong. Yes, he's come up with some useful abstractions and has identified, articulated and put into models ubiquitous features in human languages and cultures, but for him or anyone else to make universal claims... It seems arrogant and ridiculous to say the least.
- bawolff 6y agoIsn't that how science preceeds? Someone makes a universal claim, and either its disproven or it isn't. I don't think its wrong to swing for the fences, after all, the wider the claim the easier it is to disprove.
- bedobi 6y agoIntuitively, at least to me, human languages and cultures don't lend themselves to universal laws. And I guess I just don't see the point making any claims of universal laws. You could just say "these are incredibly ubiquitous features and here's some useful abstractions and models" without claiming universality.
- tsimionescu 6y agoThat is exactly the major insight from Chomsky - that it's wrong to think about language the way you are. Language is a human capacity, so in fact there MUST be universal laws that govern it (to be more specific, this is true of human languages; aliens could have entirely different languages, but for any particular alien species, there will have to be some laws of the structure of that species' language). How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? As Chomsky would say, if you think about it for a while, you will see that the alternative actually makes no sense. That is not to say that the laws that Chomsky has identified must be correct. He could even be wrong about searching for universal laws at the level of grammar. But he has shown conclusively that there must be some universal structure that underpins all natural human languages.
- derriz 6y agoMy problem with Chomsky's view of linguistics is that lacks falsifiability which makes it fundamentally unscientific. I'm not even sure what Chomky's theory is as it has become more and more vague over the decades as evidence has emerged which contradicts it. In its original form, it was fairly specific and made quite strong claims. One claim, for example, was that we humans uniquely have a specialized language organ/section of brain that evolved at some point in time. No evidence has emerged to support this idea as it seems language skills are not concentrated in a single area of the brain (unlike vision for example). And it actually seems implausible that a genetic mutation would produce a language "organ" as it would confer no advantage to an individual in a society where your peers had no language skills. And you'd imagine that a "fundamental theory" of language would have some practical application but Chomsky's theories don't seem to have any. For example, you'd imagine that it would provide the basis for the study of language acquisition. I remember a friend with a doctorate in clinical child linguistics laughing when I enquired about how their work in therapeutics for children struggling with language problems used Chomsky's theories. Apparently this "fundamental theory" of language has absolutely no application in this area and earlier attempts to apply it led absolutely nowhere. She says that clinicians ignore it - it has no relevance. Even in AI natural language processing it led nowhere when it was the foundation of AI research in this area from the 60s to the 80s. All breakthroughs in this area use statistical approaches. I find linguistics fascinating particularly historical linguistics and I used to be quite surprised at how authors in the area seemed to tip-toe around Chomsky's theories - reading between the lines in Guy Deutscher popular book on the evolution of language, for example, he espouses a theory which seems fundamentally at odds with that of Chomsky's (and also seems far more plausible to me than the idea that language ability just sprang into existance through a random genetic mutation) but he seems to go out his way to credit Chomsky's brilliance. Having observed the villification of Everett - far beyond what I think would have been reasonable - I now understand why linguists genererally either ignore Chomsky's theory or pay some sort of lip-service to give it credit rather than attack it outright. Doing the latter is academic suicide it seems. As an amatuer in the area, it looks to me like the Emporer has no clothes. It's a theory which is defended vigourously but has no appparent application and is not truly falsifiable. Even when contradictory evidence emerges, the theory is "refined" not into something more useful - the way most scientific theories evolve - but into something vaguer and even less useful.
- bambax 6y agoYeah, maybe, but "Don't sleep, there are snakes" is still a great book though.