3 ms·

language is much less the scaffold of the mind than people think it is. You know that feeling when you can't remember somebody's name, or you can't remember the

language is much less the scaffold of the mind than people think it is. You know that feeling when you can't remember somebody's name, or you can't remember the word for something? You have no trouble thinking of the thing, you just can't come up with the word? That's the scaffolding of the brain, not the words.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
V-2 5y ago
If you can't remember the word, you must have nevertheless have learned it at some point in the past (and then forget). By learning it, you've imprinted the concept in your mind. Afterwards you just lost the identifier. But still, language was how you were able to acquire the idea to begin with. Remembering a person is different, but a person isn't an abstract entity.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  No. You can meet people and get to know them without learning their names. You can learn to shoe horses without knowing the word horseshoe, and you can even get a very clear grasp of what a horseshoe does, as a deaf person would.
  - V-2 5y ago
    Me: "Remembering a person is different, but a person isn't an abstract entity." You: "No. You can meet people and get to know them without learning their names." I'm confused, as I can't see how your observation - insightful as it is - is supposed to contradict what I wrote. Did you not read my comment in full, or is there something I am missing?
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  It was only after learning the word "pain" that I felt it.
  - V-2 5y ago
    This doesn't address (much less invalidate) my point. Pain is not an abstract concept. This distinction (between non-abstract and abstract entities) already becomes blurred when it comes to things like colors. In their case your quip starts to break down - contrary to our intuition, it turns out that you do need the word in order to experience the concept. To some extent at least. It's been proven that - even though colors exist on physical level - languages (vocabulary) do have an impact on how humans perceive them. Eg. "Researchers found that Greek and Russian speakers, who have dedicated words for light and dark blue, were more likely to see a light blue triangle against a dark blue background (and vice versa), than they were to identify green triangles against green backgrounds. Speakers of German, which has no such distinction, were no better at seeing shades of blue triangles than green."
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- mr_toad 5y ago
  It seems unlikely that language is needed to learn abstract concepts, otherwise animals wouldn’t be able to learn.
  - V-2 5y ago
    Last time I checked, abstract concepts weren't exactly where animals excelled...
- mannykannot 5y ago
  Some philosophers hold that learning about something by acquaintance or experience (including the experience of trying to do something, which, when we are successful, gives us know-how) is different from learning, and coming to believe in, a collection of true propositions. Others, such as Stanley and Williamson in their influential paper "Knowing How", argue that all knowledge is, fundamentally, propositional knowledge - a position known as intellectualism. I have always had strong doubts about the latter position, and I do not think it can survive the challenge presented by the sort of cases presented in this article. With knowledge by acquaintance or experience (including of pain), we grasp the concept before we have a name for it, and the name is an optional relationship. I am well aware of this because I have a small problem remembering names, but when it happens, it does not interfere in any other way in my knowledge of that person. When it happens, I have, indeed, temporarily forgotten a name that I once knew (or at least lost conscious access to it), but it seems plausible that most of what I still know about them could have been learned without ever knowing their name. Language can supplement our experience in at least a couple of ways: we can learn some concepts that might, in principle, be learned by experience, but we have not actually done so (this is not quite the same, however, which might explain my yearning to visit places with an interesting history, even if everything from that time have crumbled to dust, and so, intellectually, I realize that such a visit will not lead to significant new insights.) Secondly, it is not clear to me that one could gain abstract concepts such as the square root of -1 or entropy by language-free experience alone, which I think is the thesis expressed in the article's title. [1] Stanley, Jason and Timothy Williamson, 2001, “Knowing How”, Journal of Philosophy, 98(8): 411–444. doi:10.2307/2678403
- kaba0 5y ago
  I’m fairly sure that the few n years of our lives are full of examples of very abstract things we didn’t learn through language. Like, the whole of 3D space, physics, object permanence, etc are most definitely not learnt through language at all (though arguably, we might have some innate knowledge on some of these categories? I believe 3D objects reliably break down into the same basic 3D shapes in all humans)
  - V-2 5y ago
    The idea of object permanence is not abstract in the sense that I mean. You get to experience it. But could anyone grasp eg. the idea of Einstenian time dilation without language? Or 4+ dimensions?
gumby 5y ago
The scaffold does not remain once the building is complete. Once you have learnt an abstract idea like “justice” (to use an example from the article) you can still reason about it even if you lose the word.
- tim333 5y ago
  Though you can have an idea about things like justice without any language scaffolding. I got a quite a few views on an edit I did of Frans de Waal's talk where monkeys get annoyed by injustice https://youtu.be/-dMoK48QGL8 https://youtu.be/-dMoK48QGL8
unsui 5y ago
Those are simply incidents where the scaffold foothold temporarily slips. A true counterexample is pure interaction without words, akin to what dogs and other animals do (excepting things like recognizing their name), or meditative state where the conscious mind is no longer driving. Words provide an information-space regularity mapping to similar constructs in other minds, a shared "game" with shared (crowdsourced) rules. This, in turns, allows the cognitive chunking of words/ideas mappings so that they can in turn be used as constructs within larger intentional chunks, largely automated by your brain machinery, so that you don't even have to be aware of the syntax, only the semantics. A world without words would be like navigating in an ocean without lighthouses and stars: anything is possible, but you never really know where you are and where anything else is (including others' minds)
hyperpallium2 5y ago
Better: "Scaffold of the Neocortex". Repiles and mammals know what things are, and can reason about them, a little. Human-level reasoning requires something like language, for generality. Particularly, to reason about reasoning - to argue, to see the argument of another, to see their point of view, to trade disimilar things, to "see where you went wrong", to deceive. It's analogous to: animals are FSA; we are TMs. You can argue for the intelligence of other animals, but they can't argue for yours.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

V-2 5y ago

If you can't remember the word, you must have nevertheless have learned it at some point in the past (and then forget). By learning it, you've imprinted the concept in your mind. Afterwards you just lost the identifier. But still, language was how you were able to acquire the idea to begin with. Remembering a person is different, but a person isn't an abstract entity.

fsckboy 5y ago
No. You can meet people and get to know them without learning their names. You can learn to shoe horses without knowing the word horseshoe, and you can even get a very clear grasp of what a horseshoe does, as a deaf person would.
- V-2 5y ago
  Me: "Remembering a person is different, but a person isn't an abstract entity." You: "No. You can meet people and get to know them without learning their names." I'm confused, as I can't see how your observation - insightful as it is - is supposed to contradict what I wrote. Did you not read my comment in full, or is there something I am missing?
hyperpallium2 5y ago
It was only after learning the word "pain" that I felt it.
- V-2 5y ago
  This doesn't address (much less invalidate) my point. Pain is not an abstract concept. This distinction (between non-abstract and abstract entities) already becomes blurred when it comes to things like colors. In their case your quip starts to break down - contrary to our intuition, it turns out that you do need the word in order to experience the concept. To some extent at least. It's been proven that - even though colors exist on physical level - languages (vocabulary) do have an impact on how humans perceive them. Eg. "Researchers found that Greek and Russian speakers, who have dedicated words for light and dark blue, were more likely to see a light blue triangle against a dark blue background (and vice versa), than they were to identify green triangles against green backgrounds. Speakers of German, which has no such distinction, were no better at seeing shades of blue triangles than green."
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
mr_toad 5y ago
It seems unlikely that language is needed to learn abstract concepts, otherwise animals wouldn’t be able to learn.
- V-2 5y ago
  Last time I checked, abstract concepts weren't exactly where animals excelled...
mannykannot 5y ago
Some philosophers hold that learning about something by acquaintance or experience (including the experience of trying to do something, which, when we are successful, gives us know-how) is different from learning, and coming to believe in, a collection of true propositions. Others, such as Stanley and Williamson in their influential paper "Knowing How", argue that all knowledge is, fundamentally, propositional knowledge - a position known as intellectualism. I have always had strong doubts about the latter position, and I do not think it can survive the challenge presented by the sort of cases presented in this article. With knowledge by acquaintance or experience (including of pain), we grasp the concept before we have a name for it, and the name is an optional relationship. I am well aware of this because I have a small problem remembering names, but when it happens, it does not interfere in any other way in my knowledge of that person. When it happens, I have, indeed, temporarily forgotten a name that I once knew (or at least lost conscious access to it), but it seems plausible that most of what I still know about them could have been learned without ever knowing their name. Language can supplement our experience in at least a couple of ways: we can learn some concepts that might, in principle, be learned by experience, but we have not actually done so (this is not quite the same, however, which might explain my yearning to visit places with an interesting history, even if everything from that time have crumbled to dust, and so, intellectually, I realize that such a visit will not lead to significant new insights.) Secondly, it is not clear to me that one could gain abstract concepts such as the square root of -1 or entropy by language-free experience alone, which I think is the thesis expressed in the article's title. [1] Stanley, Jason and Timothy Williamson, 2001, “Knowing How”, Journal of Philosophy, 98(8): 411–444. doi:10.2307/2678403
kaba0 5y ago
I’m fairly sure that the few n years of our lives are full of examples of very abstract things we didn’t learn through language. Like, the whole of 3D space, physics, object permanence, etc are most definitely not learnt through language at all (though arguably, we might have some innate knowledge on some of these categories? I believe 3D objects reliably break down into the same basic 3D shapes in all humans)
- V-2 5y ago
  The idea of object permanence is not abstract in the sense that I mean. You get to experience it. But could anyone grasp eg. the idea of Einstenian time dilation without language? Or 4+ dimensions?

gumby 5y ago

The scaffold does not remain once the building is complete. Once you have learnt an abstract idea like “justice” (to use an example from the article) you can still reason about it even if you lose the word.

tim333 5y ago
Though you can have an idea about things like justice without any language scaffolding. I got a quite a few views on an edit I did of Frans de Waal's talk where monkeys get annoyed by injustice https://youtu.be/-dMoK48QGL8 https://youtu.be/-dMoK48QGL8

unsui 5y ago

Those are simply incidents where the scaffold foothold temporarily slips. A true counterexample is pure interaction without words, akin to what dogs and other animals do (excepting things like recognizing their name), or meditative state where the conscious mind is no longer driving. Words provide an information-space regularity mapping to similar constructs in other minds, a shared "game" with shared (crowdsourced) rules. This, in turns, allows the cognitive chunking of words/ideas mappings so that they can in turn be used as constructs within larger intentional chunks, largely automated by your brain machinery, so that you don't even have to be aware of the syntax, only the semantics. A world without words would be like navigating in an ocean without lighthouses and stars: anything is possible, but you never really know where you are and where anything else is (including others' minds)

hyperpallium2 5y ago

Better: "Scaffold of the Neocortex". Repiles and mammals know what things are, and can reason about them, a little. Human-level reasoning requires something like language, for generality. Particularly, to reason about reasoning - to argue, to see the argument of another, to see their point of view, to trade disimilar things, to "see where you went wrong", to deceive. It's analogous to: animals are FSA; we are TMs. You can argue for the intelligence of other animals, but they can't argue for yours.