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I'm working on a sort-of language as a side project and have fallen down many of the same rabbit holes that you have. I don't think questions are one of the key

I'm working on a sort-of language as a side project and have fallen down many of the same rabbit holes that you have. I don't think questions are one of the key features that make language special because in the language I'm working on questions are an emergent property. There are two structural words in my language, "propose" and "tell". From these words you can build complicated ideas such as lying ("I propose to you: you propose to him: [malicious plan]. [real plan]."). Asking a question can be done with "I propose you tell me ...". Instead of saying "I think", you say something like "I tell myself". The feature of language that seems the most surprisingly powerful is placeholder words. The words like "someone", "somewhere", "somehow". I call these the entropy words because they are the words for the information you don't have. They represent sets of possible things rather than a literal specific thing. "someone moved to Silessia". In fact you can generally substitute a set of things anywhere you would use a literal thing. Any set will do. For example "John/George/Ringo/Paul played in the Beatles." Adjectives can be understood as just specifying a set using set-builder notation. For example "short man" is "{x in Men such that short(x)}". Just from set builder notation, first order logic comes along for free. I originally thought my language would need logic words, but this is not the case.

torben-friis 5y ago
>The feature of language that seems the most surprisingly powerful is placeholder words. The words like "someone", "somewhere", "somehow". >I call these the entropy words because they are the words for the information you don't have. They represent sets of possible things rather than a literal specific thing. As an aside, you might know this, but that's how questions are formed in Chinese. You basically use an enunciative phrase with a placeholder word in the information you're missing ("this pencil is whose", "the dog is where", etc). Going back to the point, I'm not sure whether the limitations of the language are actually a limitation of the brain that uses it. Sure, if you get into your mind that you want to ask a question, and the opposing party is able to understand that, even gestures will do with a little bit of ingenuity. But that has a lot of prerequisites: you need understanding that some information can be useful to you, understanding that other living beings own that information, some abstract thinking to express an idea that is not literal... It's not even about questions I think, there's a jump between "tiger here now" and "tiger potentially here at some point, watch". But still, questions particularly seem to be a clear cut "non existent outside of humans", even in weird emergent forms. There must be a reason they're not there, right?
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Have you looked into the concept of "theory of mind" in developmental psychology and the relevant experiments on children e.g. the "false belief task"? IMHO that is essential to the whole concept of questions; questions only make sense if you have an internal model of someone else's mind that contains different knowledge than you have. Animals which do not have this capability (I'm not well informed on this, but it looks possible that primates don't, e.g. https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ascch/Celia's%20pdfs/1998theoryofmind.pdf) https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ascch/Celia's%20pdfs/1998theoryofmin... would be fundamentally limited below the level of very young kids; and perhaps it's not a coincidence that the theory of mind seems to form at about the same age when kids have seem to have an excess of "why" questions about everything.

torben-friis 5y ago

>The feature of language that seems the most surprisingly powerful is placeholder words. The words like "someone", "somewhere", "somehow". >I call these the entropy words because they are the words for the information you don't have. They represent sets of possible things rather than a literal specific thing. As an aside, you might know this, but that's how questions are formed in Chinese. You basically use an enunciative phrase with a placeholder word in the information you're missing ("this pencil is whose", "the dog is where", etc). Going back to the point, I'm not sure whether the limitations of the language are actually a limitation of the brain that uses it. Sure, if you get into your mind that you want to ask a question, and the opposing party is able to understand that, even gestures will do with a little bit of ingenuity. But that has a lot of prerequisites: you need understanding that some information can be useful to you, understanding that other living beings own that information, some abstract thinking to express an idea that is not literal... It's not even about questions I think, there's a jump between "tiger here now" and "tiger potentially here at some point, watch". But still, questions particularly seem to be a clear cut "non existent outside of humans", even in weird emergent forms. There must be a reason they're not there, right?

PeterisP 5y ago
Have you looked into the concept of "theory of mind" in developmental psychology and the relevant experiments on children e.g. the "false belief task"? IMHO that is essential to the whole concept of questions; questions only make sense if you have an internal model of someone else's mind that contains different knowledge than you have. Animals which do not have this capability (I'm not well informed on this, but it looks possible that primates don't, e.g. https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ascch/Celia's%20pdfs/1998theoryofmind.pdf) https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ascch/Celia's%20pdfs/1998theoryofmin... would be fundamentally limited below the level of very young kids; and perhaps it's not a coincidence that the theory of mind seems to form at about the same age when kids have seem to have an excess of "why" questions about everything.