7 ms·

A major reason was that there was a dogma that language is uniquely human phenomenon. It was already part of the hugely Decartes' philosophy of mind and got a s

A major reason was that there was a dogma that language is uniquely human phenomenon. It was already part of the hugely Decartes' philosophy of mind and got a strong revival with Chomskian linguistics and the "cognitive revolution" in the late 1950's. There was sporadaric research into animal linguistics, e.g. the Koko study, but those were dismissed on the grounds that animals can't have language by definition. The ethics of enslaving and torturing animals is definitely part of the motivation for the dogma.

Fripplebubby 2y ago
To be clear - as of today, many researchers would agree that language is still a uniquely human phenomenon. They discuss this pretty explicitly in the article linked, how it is important to draw a distinction between language and communication. There are no non-human species that have been found to use language for the Chomskian definition of language (using a finite set of symbols to represent an infinite number of communicable meanings). However, this "dogma" as you call it is beginning to be weakened as researchers document more nuance and complexity in non-human communication than ever before, and so some researchers begin to say, "maybe we shouldn't have this all-or-nothing view of language". But it is simply not true that researchers are suppressing evidence of language in animals out of a desire to enslave and torture them.
- circlefavshape 2y ago
  > using a finite set of symbols to represent an infinite number of communicable meanings This always seemed wildly implausible to me. A very large number of communicable meanings, sure, but infinite?
  - Majromax 2y ago
    > This always seemed wildly implausible to me. A very large number of communicable meanings, sure, but infinite? This is "trivial" in the boring kind of way. With just digits, we can communicate an infinite set of distinct numbers simply by counting.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      We can't really communicate an infinite amount of numbers. People just can't read or remember too many digits.
      - Affric 2y ago
        We can. Scientific notation with 1 significant figure can be meaningful because we can use it to figure out order relations. It’s an infinite language.
  - conradev 2y ago
    David Deutsch claims in “The Beginning of Infinity” this is a property called universality, and that we have it. A short excerpt: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HDyePg6oySYQ9hY4i/david-deutsch-on-universal-explainers-and-ai https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HDyePg6oySYQ9hY4i/david-deut... The whole book is worth reading, though, as it lays it out in more detail.
  - gyomu 2y ago
    Seems trivially demonstrable because you can just chain things forever? Mary ran after the dog and the dog was brown and a cat came along and…
    - MourYother 2y ago
      > you can just chain thing forever I think you're going to find out that no, you can't, and this impossibility is going to trivially demonstrate itself.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - bornfreddy 2y ago
        Recite 99 bottles of beer on the wall, but start from 1 and change so the number increases? Stop when there are no remaining numbers or when you reach infinity, whichever comes first.
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        So, is this a proposal to test how long it takes for you to lose your count?
        nick__m 2y ago
        They are talking as if language was some platonic construct like a Turing machine with an infinite tape and you are talking about the concrete reality where there are no such things as an infinite tape. Both viewpoints are useful, they can prove general properties that hold for arbitrary long sequence of words and you put a practical bound on that length.
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        The question is if human are capable of infinitely extensible language. That's clearly false. It's not about some platonic mathematical simplification. Humans patently do not fit the Chomsky criterium for intelligence. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's physically impossible for any real being to fit it.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    Since English has several possible sentences that are infinite in length, made up of only one word even https://medium.com/luminasticity/grammatical-infinities-what-they-are-32ed7e37cc05 https://medium.com/luminasticity/grammatical-infinities-what... I have to agree with all the this is trivial comments.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Whatever "finite set of symbols" humans use to communicate is not the finite set of symbols that form letters or words. Communication isn't discrete in practical sense, it's continuous - any symbol can take not just different meanings, but different shades and superposition of meanings, based on the differences in way it's articulated (tone, style of writing - including colors), context in which it shows, and context of the whole situation. The only way you can represent this symbolically is in the trivial sense like you can represent everything, because you can use few symbols to build up natural numbers, and then you can use those numbers to approximate everything else. But I doubt it's what Chomsky had in mind.
- jampekka 2y ago
  > There are no non-human species that have been found to use language for the Chomskian definition of language (using a finite set of symbols to represent an infinite number of communicable meanings) It's far from clear whether humans are capable of the Chomskian criteria of language. And Chomskian linguistics have more or less collapsed with the huge success of statistical methods.
  - earthboundkid 2y ago
    Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument is, if anything, strengthened by LLMs. You need to read the entire internet to make statistical methods work at producing grammatical texts. Children don't read the entire internet but do produce grammatical texts. Therefore &c. QED.
    - jjk7 2y ago
      Children do get ~6000 hours a year of stimulus. Spoken, unspoken, written, and body language. Even then they aren't able to form language proficiently until 5 or 6 years old. Does the internet contain 30,000 hours of stimulus?
      - culi 2y ago
        > Does the internet contain 30,000 hours of stimulus? Is this a joke?
        jjk7 2y ago
        I'm sure someone else could calculate the informational density of all of the text on the internet vs. 30,000 hours of sight, smell, touch, sound, etc density. My intuition tells me it's not even close.
        culi 2y ago
        I agree its not even close! A single day of YouTube uploads alone is 720,000 hours!
- its_bbq 2y ago
  This is not really the point though. Why is "uses Chomskian language" the criteria for whether it not it's okay to to change and slaughter a living being?
  - melagonster 2y ago
    I do not know anyone did this. I don't think biologist care about this.
  - Fripplebubby 2y ago
    There is and remains a desire to explain exactly how it is that humans are different than other animals. Language or the language faculty has been touted by some as this thing.
- 6510 2y ago
  Those researchers are just making noises. It doesn't mean anything.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > "maybe we shouldn't have this all-or-nothing view of language" That idea seems like a strawperson, not something anyone seriously thinking about it would say. Everyone sees animals communicate.
  - Fripplebubby 2y ago
    It's not a question of communication, it's a question of language.
netdevnet 2y ago
Your usage of "language" here is akin to laymen usage of "hypothesis" and "theory" and then trying to apply it in an academic context. Same sequence of letters but different meaning. In linguistics, "language" has a specific definition that only humans have been shown to have. Some trained individuals like Koko do seem to demostrate an very limited ability to use "language" in the linguistics sense. You might argue that the definition itself is arbitrary and coming from the same place that geocentrism, creationism and flat-Earth views come from. I can't argue for or against that. I suspect things as more nuanced than the current definition that we have though, especially after the recent study from the Scientific American that heated up Hacker News in a way that only "Is CS a science" articles can.
- jampekka 2y ago
  There's no consensus on the definition of what language is. Chomskian linguistics does posit that human language is based on (innate) recursive grammars (narrow language faculty hypothesis), but this has always been a contentious question. And per that definition humans too have demonstrated only very limited ability in e.g. infinite embedding.
  - netdevnet 2y ago
    > There's no consensus on the definition of what language is. That's according to you. Just because a few apples disagree doesn't mean there is no consensus.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  My dog can push buttons to let me know what he wants. Those buttons speak in English. Is that language?
  - throwup238 2y ago
    I think it only counts if he can express that he wants you to urinate on the same fire hydrant after he does. That’s the minimum level of complexity science will accept.
jerf 2y ago
However, another major reason is that people have repeatedly gone seeking for language-like or human-language-level behaviors in animals, and repeatedly and consistently failed. It is also worth pointing out that detecting language is a great deal easier than understanding language. Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c is reasonably recognizable as clearly some sort of language even if we have no (unassisted) human idea what it is saying. We can tell with quite high confidence that most animal sounds are not hiding some deeper layer of information content. Such exceptions as there are, like whalesong, take you back to my first paragraph, though. The idea that language is a uniquely human phenomenon may be "dogma", but it is also fairly well-founded in fact. It should also not be that surprising; had another species developed language first, they'd be the ones looking around at their surroundings being surprised they are the only ones with proper language, because they'd probably be the dominant species on the planet. It isn't a "humanist" bias, in some sense that humans are super special because they're humans, it's a "first species to high language" bias, which happens on this planet to be humans.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
There still is, as far as I can tell. Whenever my curiosity drives me to take a psychology or philosophy class I end up with the feeling that they think part of their job is to reassure the rest of the humans that we are in fact special. It feels like some kind of leftover from when that kind of work was done by monks.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Really? I distinctly remember a lot of pissed off kids in my college philosophy and psychology classes trying to defend their religious beliefs and that we are more than just monkeys with fancier tools. Most of the religious folks (at least vocally) dropped out of Philosophy 101 after 2 weeks. It was incredibly entertaining. I guess this was 20 years ago, but assuming we are a more secular society I guess I thought that would still be the case.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Hum... So, you are in full agreement with the GP?
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    It's a bit different at the intro level. I'm talking about the professors and the grad students. It's not that they're directly religious, but I get a status-quo-preserving kind of feeling from them. Like maybe they're influenced by a tradition of not calling your patron an ape--or somesuch.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      Weird, I would think it would be much less hand-holdy at that level.
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        It feels more like gatekeeping: let nobody who thinks animals talk to each other call themselves a psychologist.
mmooss 2y ago
> those were dismissed on the grounds that animals can't have language by definition. What modern person said that? I've read a bit about it and didn't encounter that. > The ethics of enslaving and torturing animals is definitely part of the motivation for the dogma. What does that have to do with language?

Fripplebubby 2y ago

To be clear - as of today, many researchers would agree that language is still a uniquely human phenomenon. They discuss this pretty explicitly in the article linked, how it is important to draw a distinction between language and communication. There are no non-human species that have been found to use language for the Chomskian definition of language (using a finite set of symbols to represent an infinite number of communicable meanings). However, this "dogma" as you call it is beginning to be weakened as researchers document more nuance and complexity in non-human communication than ever before, and so some researchers begin to say, "maybe we shouldn't have this all-or-nothing view of language". But it is simply not true that researchers are suppressing evidence of language in animals out of a desire to enslave and torture them.

circlefavshape 2y ago
> using a finite set of symbols to represent an infinite number of communicable meanings This always seemed wildly implausible to me. A very large number of communicable meanings, sure, but infinite?
- Majromax 2y ago
  > This always seemed wildly implausible to me. A very large number of communicable meanings, sure, but infinite? This is "trivial" in the boring kind of way. With just digits, we can communicate an infinite set of distinct numbers simply by counting.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    We can't really communicate an infinite amount of numbers. People just can't read or remember too many digits.
    - Affric 2y ago
      We can. Scientific notation with 1 significant figure can be meaningful because we can use it to figure out order relations. It’s an infinite language.
- conradev 2y ago
  David Deutsch claims in “The Beginning of Infinity” this is a property called universality, and that we have it. A short excerpt: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HDyePg6oySYQ9hY4i/david-deutsch-on-universal-explainers-and-ai https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HDyePg6oySYQ9hY4i/david-deut... The whole book is worth reading, though, as it lays it out in more detail.
- gyomu 2y ago
  Seems trivially demonstrable because you can just chain things forever? Mary ran after the dog and the dog was brown and a cat came along and…
  - MourYother 2y ago
    > you can just chain thing forever I think you're going to find out that no, you can't, and this impossibility is going to trivially demonstrate itself.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - bornfreddy 2y ago
      Recite 99 bottles of beer on the wall, but start from 1 and change so the number increases? Stop when there are no remaining numbers or when you reach infinity, whichever comes first.
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        So, is this a proposal to test how long it takes for you to lose your count?
        nick__m 2y ago
        They are talking as if language was some platonic construct like a Turing machine with an infinite tape and you are talking about the concrete reality where there are no such things as an infinite tape. Both viewpoints are useful, they can prove general properties that hold for arbitrary long sequence of words and you put a practical bound on that length.
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        The question is if human are capable of infinitely extensible language. That's clearly false. It's not about some platonic mathematical simplification. Humans patently do not fit the Chomsky criterium for intelligence. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's physically impossible for any real being to fit it.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  Since English has several possible sentences that are infinite in length, made up of only one word even https://medium.com/luminasticity/grammatical-infinities-what-they-are-32ed7e37cc05 https://medium.com/luminasticity/grammatical-infinities-what... I have to agree with all the this is trivial comments.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Whatever "finite set of symbols" humans use to communicate is not the finite set of symbols that form letters or words. Communication isn't discrete in practical sense, it's continuous - any symbol can take not just different meanings, but different shades and superposition of meanings, based on the differences in way it's articulated (tone, style of writing - including colors), context in which it shows, and context of the whole situation. The only way you can represent this symbolically is in the trivial sense like you can represent everything, because you can use few symbols to build up natural numbers, and then you can use those numbers to approximate everything else. But I doubt it's what Chomsky had in mind.
jampekka 2y ago
> There are no non-human species that have been found to use language for the Chomskian definition of language (using a finite set of symbols to represent an infinite number of communicable meanings) It's far from clear whether humans are capable of the Chomskian criteria of language. And Chomskian linguistics have more or less collapsed with the huge success of statistical methods.
- earthboundkid 2y ago
  Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument is, if anything, strengthened by LLMs. You need to read the entire internet to make statistical methods work at producing grammatical texts. Children don't read the entire internet but do produce grammatical texts. Therefore &c. QED.
  - jjk7 2y ago
    Children do get ~6000 hours a year of stimulus. Spoken, unspoken, written, and body language. Even then they aren't able to form language proficiently until 5 or 6 years old. Does the internet contain 30,000 hours of stimulus?
    - culi 2y ago
      > Does the internet contain 30,000 hours of stimulus? Is this a joke?
      - jjk7 2y ago
        I'm sure someone else could calculate the informational density of all of the text on the internet vs. 30,000 hours of sight, smell, touch, sound, etc density. My intuition tells me it's not even close.
        culi 2y ago
        I agree its not even close! A single day of YouTube uploads alone is 720,000 hours!
its_bbq 2y ago
This is not really the point though. Why is "uses Chomskian language" the criteria for whether it not it's okay to to change and slaughter a living being?
- melagonster 2y ago
  I do not know anyone did this. I don't think biologist care about this.
- Fripplebubby 2y ago
  There is and remains a desire to explain exactly how it is that humans are different than other animals. Language or the language faculty has been touted by some as this thing.
6510 2y ago
Those researchers are just making noises. It doesn't mean anything.
mmooss 2y ago
> "maybe we shouldn't have this all-or-nothing view of language" That idea seems like a strawperson, not something anyone seriously thinking about it would say. Everyone sees animals communicate.
- Fripplebubby 2y ago
  It's not a question of communication, it's a question of language.

netdevnet 2y ago

Your usage of "language" here is akin to laymen usage of "hypothesis" and "theory" and then trying to apply it in an academic context. Same sequence of letters but different meaning. In linguistics, "language" has a specific definition that only humans have been shown to have. Some trained individuals like Koko do seem to demostrate an very limited ability to use "language" in the linguistics sense. You might argue that the definition itself is arbitrary and coming from the same place that geocentrism, creationism and flat-Earth views come from. I can't argue for or against that. I suspect things as more nuanced than the current definition that we have though, especially after the recent study from the Scientific American that heated up Hacker News in a way that only "Is CS a science" articles can.

jampekka 2y ago
There's no consensus on the definition of what language is. Chomskian linguistics does posit that human language is based on (innate) recursive grammars (narrow language faculty hypothesis), but this has always been a contentious question. And per that definition humans too have demonstrated only very limited ability in e.g. infinite embedding.
- netdevnet 2y ago
  > There's no consensus on the definition of what language is. That's according to you. Just because a few apples disagree doesn't mean there is no consensus.
throwawaymaths 2y ago
My dog can push buttons to let me know what he wants. Those buttons speak in English. Is that language?
- throwup238 2y ago
  I think it only counts if he can express that he wants you to urinate on the same fire hydrant after he does. That’s the minimum level of complexity science will accept.

jerf 2y ago

However, another major reason is that people have repeatedly gone seeking for language-like or human-language-level behaviors in animals, and repeatedly and consistently failed. It is also worth pointing out that detecting language is a great deal easier than understanding language. Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c is reasonably recognizable as clearly some sort of language even if we have no (unassisted) human idea what it is saying. We can tell with quite high confidence that most animal sounds are not hiding some deeper layer of information content. Such exceptions as there are, like whalesong, take you back to my first paragraph, though. The idea that language is a uniquely human phenomenon may be "dogma", but it is also fairly well-founded in fact. It should also not be that surprising; had another species developed language first, they'd be the ones looking around at their surroundings being surprised they are the only ones with proper language, because they'd probably be the dominant species on the planet. It isn't a "humanist" bias, in some sense that humans are super special because they're humans, it's a "first species to high language" bias, which happens on this planet to be humans.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

There still is, as far as I can tell. Whenever my curiosity drives me to take a psychology or philosophy class I end up with the feeling that they think part of their job is to reassure the rest of the humans that we are in fact special. It feels like some kind of leftover from when that kind of work was done by monks.

bongodongobob 2y ago
Really? I distinctly remember a lot of pissed off kids in my college philosophy and psychology classes trying to defend their religious beliefs and that we are more than just monkeys with fancier tools. Most of the religious folks (at least vocally) dropped out of Philosophy 101 after 2 weeks. It was incredibly entertaining. I guess this was 20 years ago, but assuming we are a more secular society I guess I thought that would still be the case.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Hum... So, you are in full agreement with the GP?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  It's a bit different at the intro level. I'm talking about the professors and the grad students. It's not that they're directly religious, but I get a status-quo-preserving kind of feeling from them. Like maybe they're influenced by a tradition of not calling your patron an ape--or somesuch.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    Weird, I would think it would be much less hand-holdy at that level.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      It feels more like gatekeeping: let nobody who thinks animals talk to each other call themselves a psychologist.

mmooss 2y ago

> those were dismissed on the grounds that animals can't have language by definition. What modern person said that? I've read a bit about it and didn't encounter that. > The ethics of enslaving and torturing animals is definitely part of the motivation for the dogma. What does that have to do with language?