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How do you approach Heidegger's or Derrida's arguments that 'language is complicated, something magical must be going on'? Will you allow for no qualitatively d

by thwest 14y ago

How do you approach Heidegger's or Derrida's arguments that 'language is complicated, something magical must be going on'? Will you allow for no qualitatively different meaning to language than probabilistic associations of sounds with objects?

stephencanon 14y ago
I can't speak to the OP, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; we are yet to observe anything in the natural world where "something magical [really turned out to be] going on", so this really is an extraordinary claim. It has been several years since I was current with the linguistics literature, but as far as I know no extraordinary evidence has been produced. I don't think that requires that we view language solely as a probabilistic map between sounds and objects. All sorts of emergent behavior appear to be "magical" at first glance.
- thwest 14y ago
  I did not reference linguistics literature, but philosophy literature (a distinction worth making because they are approaching the problem at different levels). I've never been good at the 'language problem' elevator speech, but how is it possible that we can capture the full power of language while using language to describe it? Language is a technology that allows for the production of concepts like 'probability' or 'apple'. Language as a tool is so fundamental to cognition that it becomes difficult to separate the two. Heidegger's Being and Time explores that line of thinking, and Derrida loves to play the game of "well that means you can't say anything!" Both have provided me with insight into what "magic" is referencing here (rather than your fairly pithy absence-of-evidence reference).
  - iandanforth 14y ago
    You're asking if I believe in qualia, and the answer is no. There are firing neurons and that's it. The great variety of ways in which neurons can fire, and the great variety of experiences that shape how neurons fire combine to form an exquisite set of possible firing patterns (this is literally what makes me me and you you) but ultimately, to mis-use Gertrude Stein's famous phrase, 'there is no there there.'
    - gph1 14y ago
      It wasn't at all clear that that is what he was asking you. And you need to qualify the sense in which you "don't believe" in qualia. You don't believe that consciousness has phenomenal properties? Qualia certainly exist in some sense. From what it sounds like, you are just dismissing compelling philosophical issues because it frustrates your beliefs.
      - derleth 14y ago
        > Qualia certainly exist in some sense. As an epiphenomenon of neural firings? Or is saying that 'not allowed' somehow?
    - thwest 14y ago
      I don't believe I referenced qualia. The problem of language is an emergent phenomenon just as the utility of language is. I don't believe in subjective essentialism either.
zmj 14y ago
What could 'meaning' possibly be other than probabilistic associations of sounds and concepts?
- thwest 14y ago
  That is EXACTLY the stance that Chomsky is challenging here. Don't get me wrong, I think the probabilistic view has truth value and is a powerful predictive tool. However, I don't think it captures the phenomenological properties of the act of language based cognition. See my cousin reply referencing Heidegger.
- cdavid 14y ago
  Your observation is so vague and general to the point of being rather meaningless. Almost every physical theory is described by an underlying mapping between inputs. The interesting point is the expression power of your model. : to take an example I am somehow familiar with, current large vocabulary speech recognizers have millions of parameters. They work relatively well, but they are very difficult to interpret, and it is hard to see how they help us understanding how speech recognition actually works in our brain. To make a somehow flawed analogy, every Turing complete language is equivalent, but getting the machine code of a very large project is not very interesting if you want to understand it, while it is mostly enough if you just want to use it.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Do you have any reason to suspect this isn't how the brain works? Maybe language isn't a small set of high level rules. Why should we suspect it to be? The probablistic models seem to be very similar to how real people actually learn informal language. Formal languages of course have high-level rules, and these are well modelled algorithmically.
    - cdavid 14y ago
      I don't particularly have any reason to believe one way or the other. Certainly, the probabilistic models for language are created "out of the blue" without any attempt to model how human learn languages.
lcargill99 14y ago
It's skyhooking. Given enough time and enough compute power, we should be able to completely simulate it. It may not be economically feasible, and it may take a long time.

by thwest 14y ago

stephencanon 14y ago

I can't speak to the OP, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; we are yet to observe anything in the natural world where "something magical [really turned out to be] going on", so this really is an extraordinary claim. It has been several years since I was current with the linguistics literature, but as far as I know no extraordinary evidence has been produced. I don't think that requires that we view language solely as a probabilistic map between sounds and objects. All sorts of emergent behavior appear to be "magical" at first glance.

thwest 14y ago
I did not reference linguistics literature, but philosophy literature (a distinction worth making because they are approaching the problem at different levels). I've never been good at the 'language problem' elevator speech, but how is it possible that we can capture the full power of language while using language to describe it? Language is a technology that allows for the production of concepts like 'probability' or 'apple'. Language as a tool is so fundamental to cognition that it becomes difficult to separate the two. Heidegger's Being and Time explores that line of thinking, and Derrida loves to play the game of "well that means you can't say anything!" Both have provided me with insight into what "magic" is referencing here (rather than your fairly pithy absence-of-evidence reference).
- iandanforth 14y ago
  You're asking if I believe in qualia, and the answer is no. There are firing neurons and that's it. The great variety of ways in which neurons can fire, and the great variety of experiences that shape how neurons fire combine to form an exquisite set of possible firing patterns (this is literally what makes me me and you you) but ultimately, to mis-use Gertrude Stein's famous phrase, 'there is no there there.'
  - gph1 14y ago
    It wasn't at all clear that that is what he was asking you. And you need to qualify the sense in which you "don't believe" in qualia. You don't believe that consciousness has phenomenal properties? Qualia certainly exist in some sense. From what it sounds like, you are just dismissing compelling philosophical issues because it frustrates your beliefs.
    - derleth 14y ago
      > Qualia certainly exist in some sense. As an epiphenomenon of neural firings? Or is saying that 'not allowed' somehow?
  - thwest 14y ago
    I don't believe I referenced qualia. The problem of language is an emergent phenomenon just as the utility of language is. I don't believe in subjective essentialism either.

zmj 14y ago

What could 'meaning' possibly be other than probabilistic associations of sounds and concepts?

thwest 14y ago
That is EXACTLY the stance that Chomsky is challenging here. Don't get me wrong, I think the probabilistic view has truth value and is a powerful predictive tool. However, I don't think it captures the phenomenological properties of the act of language based cognition. See my cousin reply referencing Heidegger.
cdavid 14y ago
Your observation is so vague and general to the point of being rather meaningless. Almost every physical theory is described by an underlying mapping between inputs. The interesting point is the expression power of your model. : to take an example I am somehow familiar with, current large vocabulary speech recognizers have millions of parameters. They work relatively well, but they are very difficult to interpret, and it is hard to see how they help us understanding how speech recognition actually works in our brain. To make a somehow flawed analogy, every Turing complete language is equivalent, but getting the machine code of a very large project is not very interesting if you want to understand it, while it is mostly enough if you just want to use it.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Do you have any reason to suspect this isn't how the brain works? Maybe language isn't a small set of high level rules. Why should we suspect it to be? The probablistic models seem to be very similar to how real people actually learn informal language. Formal languages of course have high-level rules, and these are well modelled algorithmically.
  - cdavid 14y ago
    I don't particularly have any reason to believe one way or the other. Certainly, the probabilistic models for language are created "out of the blue" without any attempt to model how human learn languages.

lcargill99 14y ago

It's skyhooking. Given enough time and enough compute power, we should be able to completely simulate it. It may not be economically feasible, and it may take a long time.