Gell-Mann on Languages

The great physicist Murray Gell-Mann has a hobby of studying the origins of languages.

Here is a two minute interview from March 2007 where he talks of his interest at a TED conference:



And here is an hour long talk he gave at CERN in 2011:



The study of anthropology, genetics, and language evolution are helping us to understand the spread of modern man out of Africa. Fascinating stuff.

Derek Bickerton's "Adam's Tongue"

This is an excellent overview of language and why humans are so special. I've followed this debate about language for 40 years. This book is the best of the bunch and it delivers good news. We are actually understanding how language evolved.

I remember getting excited about experiments in the late 1960s and early 1970s to teach language to chimps. At the time I was outraged by linguists played down the language abilities of the chimps. I now realize that I was a victim of "enthusiastic" scientists who gave a positive spin to their research and oversold the results. Bikerton's book explains why those experiments to teach "language" to chimps failed miserably. I can now say that I understand why things turned out they way they did. This is the first book that has really explained it all to me.

What I especially appreciate about this book is Bickerton's attempt at a theory of language evolution in the following stages. I've used Bickerton's language and added my interpretation in an italicized parenthetical comment:

1. Animals have concepts that won't merge. (The term "merge" is technical and means that the elements come together in a meaningful understanding like words joined to paint a bigger picture)


2. Proto-humans start talking. (These early "words" are simple references to things present that can be pointed at (indexical signs) or can be imitated (iconic signs) and generally mean specific instances and not generalized concepts)


3. Talking produces typical human concepts. (I.e., the use of the words in many different contexts helps loosen them from being immediate references to something more abstract and general, i.e. more "conceptualized")


4. Merge appears and starts merging typically human concepts. (Humans put words together and they create a new understanding such as "cattle nearby" or "snake bit Joe")


5. The brain maybe gets rewired (plausible but not certain). (The idea is that initial words used together didn't immediately translate into "aha! we can use these words to make language with complicated speech". Instead, words were initially used to support "catchment scavenging", i.e. the finding of dead animals in a small territory closely monitored but after other predators had taken the meat and left only the bones to be cracked for the marrow. Then humans learned to use words to recruit bigger groups to aggressively go after downed or weak animals before other predators killed them so that they could use newly invented stone tools to cut chunks off and retreat and eat their fill. This recruitment required a proto-language and once this was in place the capabilities of language could be expanded and the brain evolved to facilitate processes for language use and understanding.)


6. Capacities for complex thought, planning, etc. develop. (This was the full blossoming of language beyond foraging into social interactions, tool development, story-telling, and cultural development.)

The above strikes me as both reasonable as a reconstruction of the evolutionary path.

The book makes the very clear distinction between "animal communication systems" (vervet monkeys with their various calls to identify predators) and true language. It also clarifies the distinction between proto-languages like pidgins and real languages with syntax that is built around the ability of use to "merge" elements of language in blocks of understanding. Also, an element of language isn't captured by words: we use intonation and body movement to help express meaning, e.g. questions are asked with a rising tone in English. The words don't show this, but real human language uses this clue to help pass meaning from speaker to recipient. This book has helped me finally have a real, and deep, understanding of language issues and why the animal experiments with "language" failed.

The book is a surprisingly full and rich elaboration of this theory with many useful details of previous theories of language and other sciences that have all been brought together to make possible this latest theory of language evolution. This is definitely a book to be recommended as readable and covering a significant scientific field that more people should understand and appreciate.

Through the Language Glass Redux

I had previously posted on Guy Deutscher's book Through the Language Glass" which discusses how language can help shape reality. The book rejects the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but presents a broader slice of language science to show early roots of the concept and the latest thinking which reaffirms the early findings that language does shape our cognition.

Here is a video that shows research into this area:



I especially enjoy the bit at at 3:00 into the video where selecting colour "differences" are shown. Since I'm red-green colour blind and "see" differences from what other see and have difficulties on standard colour blindness tests, I enjoy this bit showing this tribe being able to spot differences that Westerners can't while struggling to spot differences which are trivial for Westerners to see. Colour is a strange mixture of physiology and language. It is physically real and socially real with language overlapping differently and physiology overlapping differently in this one world that we share.

At 7:40 into the video when the experimenter asks "do we all see the same colours?" which is quite silly. It is well known that colour blind people see something different because their retina contains aberrant colour pigments in the cone cells. As a colour blind person I have to see something different but I conform to the colour language of the larger linguistic community and simply have to throw up my hands when tested closely and find I fail to meet their standards. I see "all the colours" but a careful test shows I can't make the distinctions normal people make.

And for more discussion of language, here is a previous post on language and reality I included a bloggingheads.tv video of Yale philosophy professor Joshua Knobe and the Stanford psychology professor, Lera Boroditsky, discussing language and thought.

It is wonderful to see progress in this field. And it is fascinating to think how our "inner selves" are shaped by the outer world. This ties back to the wonderful private language argument by Ludwig Wittgenstein:

... all language is essentially public: that language is at its core a social phenomenon. This would have profound implications for other areas of philosophical study. For instance, if one cannot have a private language, it might not make any sense to talk of private sensations such as qualia; nor might it make sense to talk of a word as referring to a concept, where a concept is understood to be a private mental state.

Fascinating stuff to think about.

Patricia T. O'Conner's "Origins of the Specious"

This is a fun read about the English language, misuses and word origins, confusions and bad grammarians, and lots of lovely word play.

This isn't meant to teach you. It is a book to entertain you and get you more aware of the deep history of English and how we oft go astray in our "understandings" of proper word use. Here's an example:

If Americans aren’t sprinkling their English with real or imagined French, they’re mixing both languages in a stew of Franglais. And if a word looks the slightest bit French, we’ll pronounce it like French, even a word that’s been ye olde Englische since Chaucer’s day. I’m thinking of “homage,” which has been part of the English language since 1290. It should be pronounced HOM-idge or OM-idge. Whether or not the h is pronounced, the accent is on the first syllable. The French pronunciation oh-MAHJ is incorrect – and affected to boot – unless you’re in Marseilles (where it’s spelled hommage). Yes we did get “homage” from the French way back when, be we also get “adroit” and “toilet” and “voyage” from them, but we don’t say ah-DWAH, twa-LAY, and vwah-YAZH.

I definitely recommend this book as an entertaining way to while away a day.

Guy Deutscher's "Through the Language Glass"

This was a very well written, very entertaining, very informative book. It walks you through 150 years theorizing by linguists starting with the puzzle of why the Greeks wrote their classic with such few colour words and misapplied them so badly, e.g. sailing through a "wine-dark" sea, sheep are violet, the honey is green, and the sky is never blue.

The book looks at early claims by politician-scientist William Gladstone, that primitive tribes had under-developed visual systems that can be traced as developing in a clear progression from

black & white > red > yellow > green > blue

He shows that early anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists ruled out this theory, but confirmed that languages around the world showed this peculiar "progression" from limited colour vocabularies to increasingly larger ones using the above progression.

He then introduces the Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language defines your mental universe. George Steiner presents this as:

The use of the future tense has momentous consequences for the human soul and mind, as it shapes our concept of time and rationality, even the very essence of our humanity. "We can be defined as the mammal that uses the future of the verb 'to be,'" he explains. The future tense is what gives us hope for the future and without it we are all condemned to end "in Hell, that is to say, in a grammar without futures."

Whose overstatement of the case ended up being rejected by linguists by mid-20th century as the Boas-Jakobson assumption that all languages are equally expressive: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." This was an assumption of essential identity among languages.

But Guy Deutscher spends the last half of his book pointing out that linguists are coming back to the original 1858 insights of Gladstone. Yes, there is a progression from limited and simple colour terms (misapplied from our perspective) to the fuller spectrum of large book-based cultures, but it isn't because your visual systems changed, it is because we are constrained by our environment and the limited need for colour sophistication. And, yes, language does shape your conception and understanding of the world, but not in the over-heated and over-sold Sapir-Whorf view, but in more subtle ways. Here is the best summary:

In the light of the experiments reported in this chapter, color may be the area that comes closest in reality to the metaphor of language as a physical lens and does not affect the photons that reach the eye. But the sensation of color is produced in the brain, not the eye, and the brain does not take the signals from the retina at face value, as it is constantly engaged in a highly complex process of normalization, which creates an illusion of stable colors under different lighting conditions. The brain achieves this "instant fix" effect by shifting and stretching the signals from the retina, by exaggerating some differences while playing down others. No one knows how the brain does all this, but what is clear is that it relies on past memories and on stored impressions. It has been shown, for instance, that a perfectly gray picture of a banana can appear slightly yellow to us,because the brain remembers bananas as yellow and so normalizes the sensation toward what it expects to see. ...

It is likely that the involvement of language with the perception of color takes place on this level of normalization and compensation, where the brain relies on its store of past memories and established distinctions in order to decide how similar certain colors are. And although no one knows yet what exactly goes on between the linguistic and the visual circuits, the evidence gathered so far amounts to a compelling argument that language does affect our visual sensation.

...

More generally, the explanation of cognitive differences between ethnic groups has shifted over the last two centuries, from anatomy to culture. In the nineteenth century, it was generally assumed that there were significant inequalities between the hereditary mental faculties of different races, and that these biological inequalities were the main reason for their varying accomplishments. On e of the jewels in the crown of the twentieth century was the recognition of the fundamental unity of mankind in all that concerns its cognitive endowment. So nowadays we no longer look primarily to the genes to explain variations in mental characteristics among ethnic groups. But in the twenty-first century, we are beginning to appreciate the differences in thinking that are imprinted by cultural conventions and, in particular, by speaking in different tongues.

This is a delightful, entertaining, historical, and scientifically sophisticated book that will open your eyes to many new things. It is well worth a read.

Previous postings on this topic include:

• What is a Neo-Whorfian Cognitive Scientist?


• Language and Thought


• Language and Our Construction of Reality, Whorf Revisited

Love that Krugman

Paul Krugman has a way with words and sense of humour that I truly enjoy. Consider yesterday's post on the anniversary of D-Day:

Is it just me, or is there a remarkable absence of D-Day related stories in today’s news? Maybe editors are too busy saving Ryan’s privatization.

For those not "au courant" with politics, the reference is to Paul Ryan's 2010 plan to privatize social security, employer-sponsored health care, and medicare. And you have to recall the D-day movie Saving Private Ryan.

Krugman is not only a genius at economics, he is a genius with words. How he comes up with these gems is beyond me. You gotta love him!

Brian Christian's "The Most Human Human"

This was an amazingly entertaining book. It was a grand tour of knowledge dressed up as reportage about competing at the Turing Prize as a contestant trying to convince judges you are human while computers do their best to convince the judges that they are in fact "the humans". Like a good Hollywood move, the guys in the white hats win, Cristian comes out... spoiler alert!... triumphant and wins the "most human human" prize.

As a tale of prepping to present himself as a "genuine human" in the Turing test for the Loebner Prize, this book presents an interesting and entertaining tale. The author delves into a richness of subject matter that is unexpected. He explores what it means to be a real person and just how you could use language to try to convince a blind judge that your are really a "human". Getting there involves many detours into arcane specialized knowledge.

What I liked about the book was the amazing depth of knowledge of many fields served up as a charming story in the context of prepping and competing in the Turing test. I actually learned many new things in philosophy and computers, my two fields of expertise, from reading this book. I also learned interesting bits about psychology, linguistics, chess, poetics, and poetry. All this learning while being cleverly entertained!

I learned of entropy, lossless and lossy compression, of aposiopesis, synecdoche, and enthymemes. of computability and complexity theory, of the chatterbots ELIZA and PARRY, and so on. Delightful stuff.

By the way, he points us at the "Shannon Game" and invites us to play it (click here). I can honestly say it is one of the most frustrating things I've ever done. It humiliates you because you think you know language and what letters to expect when, but as confident as I was, I came out a loser, a humbling experience.

Like a delightful musical composition, this book ends with a coda, an epilogue where he looks at another field of computers -- computer graphics -- and in less than a dozen pages riffs a variation on the theme of the book how the effort to present "real stuff" makes you much more critical and appreciative of the reality:

Being a computer graphics person brings with it, as most jobs do, a certain way of looking at and of noticing the world. My own poetry background, for instance, gives me an urge to read things against the grain of the author's intended meaning. I read a newspaper headline the other day that said "UK Minister's Charm Offensive." This to me was hilarious. Of course they mean "offensive" as a noun, as in the tactical deployment of charm for diplomacy purposes, but I kept reading it as an adjective, as though the minister's creepy unctuousness had really crossed the line this time. My friends in the police force and the military can't enter a room without sussing out its entrances and exits; for the one in the fire department, it's alarms and extinguishers.

...

Reflection and refraction are difficult to simulate on a computer. So is water distortion. So-called "caustics," the way that a glass of wine refocuses its light into a red point on your table, are particularly hard to render.

Reflection and refraction are also fairly computationally nasty because they have the habit of multiplying off of each other. You put two mirrors in front of each other, and the images multiply to infinity in no time flat. Light travels roughly 200,000 miles per second: that's a lot of ping-pong,and way beyond the where most rendering algorithms tap out. Usually a programmer will specify the maximum acceptable number of reflections or refractions and cap it there, after which point a kind of software deus ex machina sends the light directly back to the eye: no more bouncing.

...

I love these moments when the theory, the models, the approximations, as good as they are, aren't good enough. You simply must watch. Ah, so this is how nature does it. This is what it looks like. I think it's important to know these things, to know what can't be simulated, can't be made up, can't be imagined -- and to seek it.

Try the book. I think you will be surprised at how enjoyable it is.

Errol Morris Wrangles Philosophy

Having been a graduate student in philosophy many years ago and studied Thomas Kuhn, Saul Kripke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others mentioned in the following posts, I found this philosophical rant by film-maker Errol Morris fascinating. This brings back memories of my graduate student days, of the philosophy of science, of paradigm shifts, of possible worlds, of meaning, or reference, etc. In these postings Morris has exorcized his demons of graduate school.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Some of my favourite "moments" in the above essay:

I asked him, “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’ ”

...

I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other.

The end result was that Kuhn threw me out of Princeton. He had the power to do it, and he did it. God only knows what I might have said in my second or third year. At the time, I felt that he had destroyed my life. Now, I feel that he saved me from a career that I was probably not suited for.

This reminds me of my student years. I constantly questioned my professors and found them wanting. Sure they were learned and smart, but most were brittle and dead to new ideas and were resistant to questioning. They preferred the students to sit at their feet and lap up the wisdom on offer.

Kripke’s theory provides an alternative to what had become known as the description theory, an amalgam of ideas proposed by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (And to that mix, in the ‘50s and ‘60s you can add Peter Strawson and John Searle.) Here’s one way to distinguish between Kripke’s theories and the description theory that preceded it.

You have two fish in a fishbowl. One of them is golden in color; the other one is not. The fish that is golden in color, you name “Goldie.” The other fish you name “Greenie.” Perhaps you use the description “the gold fish” and point to the one that is golden in color. You are referring to the gold fish, Goldie. Over the course of time, however, Goldie starts to change color. Six months later, Goldie is no longer golden. Goldie is now green. Greenie, the other fish — the fish in the bowl that was green in color — has turned golden. Goldie is no longer “the fish that is golden in color.” Greenie is. But Goldie is still Goldie even though Goldie has changed color. The description theory would have it that Goldie means the fish that is golden in color, but if that’s true then when we refer to Goldie, we are referring to the other fish. But clearly, Goldie hasn’t become a different fish; Goldie has merely changed his (or her) appearance.


It’s Kripke’s version of “Where’s Waldo.” If the description theory (courtesy of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein) is correct, then Goldie is on the right. If Kripke’s historical-chain of reference theory is correct, then Goldie remains Goldie no matter what color Goldie is.

You could also think of Goldie and Greenie in terms of beliefs, although this is not how the description theory was originally framed. Goldie is the fish that you believe is golden in color. But Goldie starts to change color. I can believe anything I want about Goldie. I can even believe that Goldie isn’t a fish, but Goldie — that fish out there swimming around in a fishbowl — remains Goldie.

These were the kind of logical "puzzles" I loved. This was why I graduate student pursuing logic in the philosophy faculty.

The most important and most controversial aspect of Kuhn’s theory involved his use of the terms “paradigm shift” and “incommensurability.” That the scientific terms of one paradigm are incommensurable with the scientific terms of the paradigm that replaces it. A revolution occurs. One paradigm is replaced with another. And the new paradigm is incommensurable with the old one. He made various attempts to define it — changing and modifying his definitions along the way.

When I read Kuhn's book the issue of "incommensurability" never came up. I took the simplistic view that a paradigm switch was a benign "larger view" that incorporated the previous science as a special limited case. So in Einstein's theory Newtonian equations hold as a limited case when speeds are near zero. Sure there were philosophical differences. Newton viewed space and time as absolute and Einstein showed they were dynamic and relativistic depending on your frame of reference.

In John Ford’s movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) becomes an archetypal hero for shooting and killing Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), the paid stooge of the cattle barons. But Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) – literally hidden in the shadows – is really the man who shoots him. Stoddard gets Doniphon’s girl and goes on to a spectacular political career – governor, senator, etc. Doniphon is the unsung hero. After many years, Stoddard, following Doniphon’s death tells a local newspaper editor what really happened, but the editor refuses to print it, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

A legend that is not true can never become fact, but it can get printed as fact, anyway. With Hippasus, it is pretty easy to imagine why the legend of his drowning got “printed” even before there was printing. Someone believed that there should have been a crisis even if there wasn’t any. They believed that the Pythagoreans should have been upset about the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes. But it was a retrospective belief, that is, a belief formed hundreds, if not thousands of years, after the crisis was supposed to have occurred. I find it mildly amusing – possibly even ironic – that Kuhn’s metaphor for “incommensurability” could have been derived from a Whiggish interpretation of an apocryphal story.

This is simply wonderful. I love the way Morris has brought his film-making into this discussion. And I love the way he nails Kuhn.

But there is a messier problem. Why stop at historical relativism? Why not imagine each and every person in a different island universe? And indeed, Kuhn at least in one instance seems to embrace that possibility. In one particularly bizarre passage in “The Road Since Structure,” he suggests that his critics are writing about two different Thomas Kuhns – Kuhn No. 1 and Kuhn No. 2.

...

To me Kuhn’s claim – that there are two Thomas Kuhns plus two books by the same name and author – suggests that there may be no coherent reading of Kuhn’s philosophy. Kuhn, of course, sees it differently. For Kuhn, the multiplicity of Kuhns and Kuhn-authored-books-with-the-same-title provides further proof of his belief that people with “incommensurable” viewpoints can’t talk to each other. That they live in different worlds.

This is the slippery slope of solipsistic theories of knowledge.

Years ago, Bertrand Russell wrote “Nightmares of Eminent Persons” (1954). (Supposedly, he was trying to meet alimony payments.) Among the various nightmares – the Mathematicians’s Nightmare, Stalin’s Nightmare, the Psychoanalyst’s Nightmare, Dr. Bowdler’s Nightmare – is the Existentialist’s Nightmare. At the conclusion of the nightmare, the existentialist is screaming, “I don’t exist. I don’t exist.” Poe’s raven appears, speaking in the voice of the French poet Mallarmé: “You do exist. You do exist. It’s your philosophy that doesn’t exist.”

I absolutely love this little tale of being hoisted on your own petard.

I often think of the attraction of smoking, that it simplifies the world into three parts. There’s you, there’s the cigarette, and everything else is the ashtray.

(This catches Errol Morris' latent hostility toward Thomas Kuhn who threw his ashtray at Morris.)

Please remember: This is not an empty intellectual exercise. It is not a matter of indifference whether it was God or natural selection that produced the complexity of life on earth. Nor whether there is such a thing as global warming. The devaluation of scientific truth cannot be laid on Kuhn’s doorstep, but he shares some responsibility for it.

One more parable. For those who truly believe that truth is subjective or relative (along with everything else), ask yourself the question – is ultimate guilt or innocence of a crime a matter of opinion? Is it relative? Is it subjective? A jury might decide you’re guilty of a crime that you haven’t committed. You’re innocent. (It’s possible. The legal system is rife with miscarriages of justice.) Nevertheless, we believe there is a fact of the matter. You either did it or you didn’t. Period.

If you were strapped into an electric chair, there would be nothing relative about it. Suppose you are innocent. Would you be satisfied with the claim there is no definitive answer to the question of whether you’re guilty or innocent? That there is no such thing as absolute truth or falsity? Or would you be screaming, “I didn’t do it. Look at the evidence. I didn’t do it.” Nor would you take much comfort in the claim, “It all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?” Or “what paradigm are you in?”

(I like the way this makes clear that relativism is not an answer and Kuhn's incommensurability in of no use, and in fact a real danger as a glib answer. Morris still harbours a grudge against Kuhn and I have one for a "philosophy of education" professor I had who treated my claim that moral judgements could be objective as rank foolishness. But I didn't buy into ethical relativism and that outraged this professor. I am a realist who can subscribe to G. E. Moore's "ethical non-naturalism" or to Sam Harris' program to develop a science of morality. I waver, but one thing I'm sure of, moral judgements are of real facts not subjective whims or culturally defined tastes.)

It’s always been unclear to me, in social protest, is the important thing to be there, to be arrested, to be beaten, to be in the newspaper, to be booked, or to be incarcerated? Maybe all of the above.

Given the events in Wisconsin and other states, the above questions are as relevant today as they were in the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war.

The issue of murder, mass murder, has stayed with me over the years. It’s certainly part of the film that I made with Robert S. McNamara, “The Fog of War.” I remember sitting in the Firestone Library and reading volumes upon volumes of the transcripts of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Ultimately I had the opportunity to go with Robert McNamara to the International Criminal Court [ICC] in the Hague, to show “The Fog of War” to the court, and to answer questions with McNamara.

And my two favorite moments from that experience – going with McNamara to visit the archivist for the ICC. McNamara told him, “I wish that they had these statutes governing war crimes back when I was secretary of defense,” and the archivist replied, “But, sir, they did.” Another completely bizarre experience, beyond Kafkaesque, seeing Milosevic on the stand. None of the proceedings had anything whatsoever to do with the content of the charges against him. It was all procedural — procedures about procedures about procedures, epicycle upon epicycle upon epicycle. And yet, the knowledge that Milosevic’s crimes were being addressed, even if only in a vague and uncertain way, was gratifying. At least someone was doing something.

I'm from the same generation as Errol Morris, so I'm very much caught up in the same issues as he is. Not just graduate school, not just philosophy, not just war & mass murder, but a stance toward life that was prevalent in many of the 60s generation.

Years later, I’ve come to realize that there was a debate embodied here about the nature of language – of whether truth is socially constructed or whether ultimately concerns the relationship between language and reality. I feel very strongly, even though the world is unutterably insane, there is this idea that we can reach outside of that insanity and find truth, some kind of certainty. ... There are endless obstacles and impediments to finding the truth – You might never find it; it’s an illusive goal. But there’s something to remember, there’s a world out there that we can apprehend, and it’s our job to go out there and apprehend it. It’s one of the deepest lessons that I’ve taken away from my experiences here.

This is more than philosophical. Morris makes it clear that this is a living issue with him, present in his films, and present in his engagement with the world.

Freeman Dyson's Review of a James Gleick Book

The NY Review of Books has a wonderful review of James Gleick's new book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood written by one of my favourite mathematicians, Freeman Dyson. Here are some key bits:

The consequences of the information flood are not all bad. One of the creative enterprises made possible by the flood is Wikipedia, started ten years ago by Jimmy Wales. Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it. Distrust and productive use are not incompatible. Wikipedia is the ultimate open source repository of information. Everyone is free to read it and everyone is free to write it. It contains articles in 262 languages written by several million authors. The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate. It is often unreliable because many of the authors are ignorant or careless. It is often accurate because the articles are edited and corrected by readers who are better informed than the authors.

Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions. It illustrates Shannon’s law of reliable communication. Shannon’s law says that accurate transmission of information is possible in a communication system with a high level of noise. Even in the noisiest system, errors can be reliably corrected and accurate information transmitted, provided that the transmission is sufficiently redundant. That is, in a nutshell, how Wikipedia works.

I love the idea of bottom-up knowledge. Too much of our life is controlled by top-down autocrats busy trying to mold us to fit their version of what we should be ("proper" citizens, "dutiful" servants, patient and loyal consumers).

And Dyson catches the joys of science:

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.

Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I love the great "democratic" thrusts of our age: science, democratic governance, popular culture, Wikipedia, etc. These are expressions of individuals that rise up and catch wind if enough people are attracted, or they can fail -- like democracy in Germany in 1933 -- if not enough people are willing to stand up for individual rights and individual beliefs.

And this bit shows Dyson's great optimism:

The explosive growth of information in our human society is a part of the slower growth of ordered structures in the evolution of life as a whole. Life has for billions of years been evolving with organisms and ecosystems embodying increasing amounts of information. The evolution of life is a part of the evolution of the universe, which also evolves with increasing amounts of information embodied in ordered structures, galaxies and stars and planetary systems. In the living and in the nonliving world, we see a growth of order, starting from the featureless and uniform gas of the early universe and producing the magnificent diversity of weird objects that we see in the sky and in the rain forest. Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information. The technology arising from Shannon’s discoveries is only a local acceleration of the natural growth of information.

The visible growth of ordered structures in the universe seemed paradoxical to nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, who believed in a dismal doctrine called the heat death. Lord Kelvin, one of the leading physicists of that time, promoted the heat death dogma, predicting that the flow of heat from warmer to cooler objects will result in a decrease of temperature differences everywhere, until all temperatures ultimately become equal. Life needs temperature differences, to avoid being stifled by its waste heat. So life will disappear.

This dismal view of the future was in startling contrast to the ebullient growth of life that we see around us. Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox. The best popular account of the disappearance of the paradox is a chapter, “How Order Was Born of Chaos,” in the book Creation of the Universe, by Fang Lizhi and his wife Li Shuxian. Fang Lizhi is doubly famous as a leading Chinese astronomer and a leading political dissident. He is now pursuing his double career at the University of Arizona.

The belief in a heat death was based on an idea that I call the cooking rule. The cooking rule says that a piece of steak gets warmer when we put it on a hot grill. More generally, the rule says that any object gets warmer when it gains energy, and gets cooler when it loses energy. Humans have been cooking steaks for thousands of years, and nobody ever saw a steak get colder while cooking on a fire. The cooking rule is true for objects small enough for us to handle. If the cooking rule is always true, then Lord Kelvin’s argument for the heat death is correct.

We now know that the cooking rule is not true for objects of astronomical size, for which gravitation is the dominant form of energy. The sun is a familiar example. As the sun loses energy by radiation, it becomes hotter and not cooler. Since the sun is made of compressible gas squeezed by its own gravitation, loss of energy causes it to become smaller and denser, and the compression causes it to become hotter. For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past.

I thoroughly enjoyed Freeman Dyson's review. Now I can look forward to reading James Gleick's book. I've got myself signed up for the first copy at the local library!

This review points at an article by James Gleick that was published too late to be included in his book. It was published as the article "The Information Palace" in the NY Review of Books:

The word “information” has grown urgent and problematic—a signpost seen everywhere, freighted with new meaning and import. We hardly need the lexicographers of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell us that, but after all, this is what they live for. It is a word, they tell us, “exhibiting significant linguistic productivity,” a word that “both reflects and embodies major cultural and technological change,” therefore a word crying out for their attention. In their latest quarterly revision, December 2010, just posted, the entry for “information” is utterly overhauled. (The OED, in case you hadn’t noticed, has evolved into an enterprise of cyberspace, rather than a mere book.)

The renovation has turned a cottage into a palace. Information, n., now runs 9,400 words, the length of a novella. It is a sort of masterpiece—an adventure in cultural history. A century ago “information” did not have much resonance. It was a nothing word. “An item of training; an instruction.” Now (as people have been saying for fifty years) we are in the Information Age. Which, by the way, the OED defines for us in its dry-as-chili-powder prose: “the era in which the retrieval, management, and transmission of information, esp. by using computer technology, is a principal (commercial) activity.”

...

Originally—and by originally I mean in the fourteenth century, when the written record begins, as far as the OED can tell—the word had a sinister flavor. It budged its way into the old gruff Anglo-Saxon as part of the Norman invasion. It meant something like “accusation” or “incrimination.” The earliest citation comes from the Rolls of Parliament for 1386: “Thanne were such proclamacions made‥bi suggestion & informacion of suche that wolde nought her falsnesse had be knowen to owre lige Lorde.” For centuries thereafter, informations were filed, or recorded, or laid, against people.

From then to now the word takes a twisty path, and the OED‘s lexicographers hold our hand around every corner. Information can be “a teaching; an instruction.” It can be “divine influence or direction; inspiration, esp. through the Holy spirit.” It can be “that of which one is apprised or told; intelligence, news.”

And this bit of sleuthing in the OED gives Gleick:

By the way, how do we know people have been talking about the Information Age for fifty years? The OED tells us. The first recorded usage is attributed to “R. S. Leghorn in H. B. Maynard Top Managem. Handbk. xlvii. 1024,” 1960. He turns out to have been Richard Leghorn, founder of Itek Corporation, which made aerospace spy cameras, and later Chief of Intelligence and Reconnaissance Systems Development at the Pentagon. In a single sentence Leghorn invented the phrase and predicted it would not catch on:

Present and anticipated spectacular informational achievements will usher in public recognition of the “information age,” probably under a more symbolic title.

No better title has come along. Along with information age, the OED now recognizes information storage, information transfer, information processing, information retrieval, information architecture, information superhighway, plus (the bad news) information explosion, gap, warfare, overload, and fatigue.

Some Things to Think About

From a post by George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at UC Berkely:

Here are just a few examples of presently untellable truths:

• There is a Principle of Conservation of Government: If conservatives succeed in cutting government by the people for the public good, our lives will still be governed, but now by corporations. We will have government by corporations for corporate profit. It will not be a kind government. It will be a cruel government, a government of foreclosures, outsourcing, union busting, outrageous payments for every little thing, and pension eliminations.


• The moral missions of government include the protection and empowerment of citizens. Protection includes health care, social security, safe food, consumer protection, environmental protection, job protection, etc. Empowerment is what makes a decent life possible – roads and infrastructure, communication and energy systems, education, etc. No business can function without them. This has not been discussed adequately. Government serving those moral missions is what makes freedom, fairness, and prosperity possible. Conservatives do not believe in those moral missions of government, and when in power, they subvert the ability of government to carry out those moral missions.


• The moral missions of government impose a distinction between necessities and services. Government has a moral mission to provide necessities: Adequate food, water, housing, transportation, education, infrastructure (roads and bridges, sewers, public buildings), medical care, care for elders, the disabled, environmental protection, food safety, clean air, and so on. Necessities should never be subordinated to private profit. The public should never be put at the mercy of private profit. Public funds for necessities should never be diverted to private profit.


• Services are very different; they start where necessities end. Private service industries exist to provide services — car rentals, parking lots, hair salons, gardening, painting, plumbing, fast food, auto repair, clothes cleaning, and so on. It is time to stop speaking of government “services” and speak instead of government providing necessities. Similarly, “spending” does not suggest providing necessities. “Spending” suggests services that could just as well be eliminated or provided by private industry. Economists should drop the term “spending” when discussing necessities.


• The market is supposed to be “efficient” at distributing goods and services, and sometimes, with appropriate competition, it is. But the market is most often inefficient at proving necessities, because every dollar that goes to profit is a dollar that does not go to necessities. Health care is a perfect example.

The blog post by Lakoff is worth reading. I don't agree with everything, but there is much in his post that is well worth taking the time to consider.

I especially like this bit of advice for Obama:

If there is a teachable communication moment for President Obama, this is it. Bring back “empathy” — “the most important thing my mother taught me.” Speak of “empathy” for “people who are hurting.” Say again how empathy is basis of democracy (“caring for your fellow citizens”), how we have a responsibility to act on that empathy: social as well as personal responsibility. Bring the central role of empathy in democracy to the media. And make it clear that personal responsibility alone is anti-patriotic, the opposite of what America is fundamentally about. That is the first step in telling our most important untellable truths. And it is a necessary step in loosening the conservative grip on public discourse.

Language and Our Construction of Reality, Whorf Revisited

Here is a nice conversataion between Lera Boroditsky a psychologist from Stanford and Joshua Knobe a philosopher from Yale.



This is a wonderful dialog looking at many of the curious bits about our mental world. For example, Knobe questions the power of language to shape our view of the world because language is such a tiny part of our mental processing. Boroditsky agrees and talks about mental imagery as a font of insight that language captures only bits and pieces of. What I find curious is that neither mentions that conscious life itself is but a tiny bit of the mental engine that our churning mind is. We do so much processing at unconscious, non-linguistic levels. But in the end, neither is willing to deny that language shapes our perceptions and actions in the world.

At 11:42 Boroditsky begins to explain her research results showing than language shapes our understanding of the world. There is a lot of fascinating material covered here. The bit about testing Russian speakers' ability to do colour discrimination (they have 2 words for blue so therefore discriminate faster than English speakers) can be disrupted by having the test done while the testee is doing a verbal interference task is very telling. Fascinating stuff. And this discussion exposes you to the subtleties of scientific testing. You can appreciate the real "work" that goes into doing science and validating a theory.

Another nice bit in this dialog is the demonstration that "philosophy" is not a completely useless intellectual pursuit. Knobe shows philosophy as an intellectual pursuit that probes at the edges of science asking questions that scientists can find useful.

Previous posts on Lera Boroditsky can be found here and here.

The Whorf Hypothesis Updated

There is an excellent article by Guy Deutscher in the NY Times on current thinking in how language shapes our view of the world. Here are some key bits:

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

...

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

Read the whole article to get the exciting details of how research has teased out a new understanding of how language shapes our thinking. It doesn't constrict us in the way Whorf proposed, but its isn't irrelevant as the anti-Whorf backlash presumed. Reality is far more subtle and far more interesting!

Addendum: If you look here, you can read about the Stanford researcher Lera Boroditsky whose research forms the basis of a lot of the Guy Deutscher article.

Language and Thought

I've always enjoyed thinking about the Whorfian thesis that language shapes culture, culture shapes language, and what you see, feel, taste is language-mediated. Here's a conversation about the book Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows that discusses interesting bits about Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew language and culture that feed my fascination:



If you find this fascinating, there is more here from research by Lera Boroditsky, a psychologist at Stanford University. And, in this Wall Street Journal article, Boroditsky introduces the language/reality interaction issues for a general audience:

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

...

The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.

...

For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don't use terms like "left" and "right." Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, "Where are you going?", and an appropriate response might be, "A long way to the south-southwest. How about you?" If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't get past hello.

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

Differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

...

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak.

Fascinating stuff.

The Logic of Language

I've always been bugged by grammarians. They want to impose "rules" on language. But language is organic. It is conventional. And here's an excellent example of grammarians gone wild...



If an overwhelming majority of this generation of kids decide that the plural of octopus is "octopalooza" than within a generation that will be the correct plural despite what the grammarians say.

The nice thing about English is that grammarians have mostly been kept at bay. The language is omnivorous and continues to swallow up words and invite speakers from around the world.

You are Your Bacteria

You have 30,000 genes but you have 3 million bacterial genes! You have 1 trillion human cells inside you but 10 trillion bacterial cells inside you. The bacteria keep you alive, they protect you, they help digest your food.

Bottom line: You are 1% human!

Here is a talk by Bonnie Bassler at a TED Conference where she talks about the ability of bacteria to communicate with each other. She works on the so-called quorum sensing that lets free floating bacteria act cooperatively. Yes... bacteria have "group behaviours"! Bacteria virulence is in fact a group behaviour!

What is a Neo-Whorfian Cognitive Scientist

Here are some bits from an article in the Stanford Magazine about the researcher Lera Boroditsky:

But Boroditsky, PhD '01, is not a linguist. She is a cognitive scientist—specifically, an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems... She is "one of the first to show truly convincing effects of language on cognitive processes," including mental imagery, reasoning, perception and problem solving, says Daniel Slobin, a professor emeritus of psychology and linguistics at UC-Berkeley. Slobin coined the term "thinking for speaking" to describe how the language-specific ways different cultures talk about space and time shape how they think about space and time. He adds that Boroditsky "has taken on some of the major dimensions of abstract thought."

Slobin, like Boroditsky, is often called a "neo-Whorfian" cognitive scientist. The connection between language and thought has long captivated poets, philosophers, linguists and thinkers of many sorts, but the modern debate has its roots in the work of the early 20th-century American linguist Benjamin Whorf and his Yale mentor, Edward Sapir. They thought that the structure of language was integral to both thought and cultural evolution, a notion sometimes called linguistic relativity.

Here's the opposite camp:

However, others—most notably MIT linguist Noam Chomsky—later argued that all languages share the same deep structure of thought and that thought has a universal quality separate from language. (Babies think before they learn to speak, so thought is not dependent on language.) Those scientists believe that languages express thinking and perception in different ways but do not shape the thinking and perception.

Here's the key experiment to disprove the Chomsky assertion:

She [Boroditsky] has shown that speakers of languages that use "non-agentive" verb forms—those that don't indicate an animate actor—are less likely to remember who was involved in an incident. In one experiment, native Spanish speakers are shown videos of several kinds of acts that can be classified as either accidental or intentional, such as an egg breaking or paper tearing. In one, for example, a man sitting at a table clearly and deliberately sticks a pin into the balloon. In another variation, the same man moves his hand toward the balloon and appears surprised when it pops. The Spanish speakers tend to remember the person who deliberately punctured the balloon, but they do not as easily recall the person who witnesses the pop but did not deliberately cause it. English speakers tend to remember the individual in both the videos equally; they don't pay more or less attention based on the intention of the person in the video.

And here's an example of a linguistic difference:

Boroditsky focuses on linguistic features that may inform more fundamental differences in how cultures convey their relationship to concepts such as space, time or gender. "What I'm really interested in are the ingredients of meaning. I don't believe we can explain how we construct meaning without understanding patterns in metaphor and language."

Consider space. About a third of the world's languages do not rely on words for right and left. Instead, their speakers use what are called absolute directions—north, south, east and west. For everything. In Australia, for example, if Tara VanDerveer were giving a basketball clinic to the aboriginal Thaayorre in their native language, she'd have to order her players to dribble up the south side of the court, fake east, go west, then make a layup on the west side of the basket.

This orientation to the compass points affects all sorts of tasks. When speakers of these languages are asked to arrange photographs showing a time sequence, they line them up east to west. English speakers tend to view time-sequence photographs as going from left to right, while Hebrew speakers line them up right to left. The upshot of the need to constantly stay oriented in order to communicate the simplest concept, says Boroditsky, is that in communities of these speakers, even small children can perform phenomenal feats of navigation, and everyone is constantly mentally synchronizing their spatial relationships.

It is a little hard for me to picture "lining up photos east-to-west" because that is a bizarre concept. That means if I'm sitting on the south side of the table I do it from right-to-left, if I'm on the north I do it left-to-right, and if I'm at the east end of the table I do it from bottom-to-top, and if I'm not orthogonal, that means I would organize the pictures along some diagonal. I find that hard to believe. I would need to actually see this to believe this "research result". I'm willing to conceive it is possible and find it fascinating, but I have a hard time believing people would organize photos differently depending on where they sat!

Here's another claim from her research:

Is color perception linked to what we call colors? In another experiment, Boroditsky compared the ability of English speakers and Russian speakers to distinguish between shades of blue. She picked those languages because Russian does not have a single word for blue that covers all shades of what English speakers would call blue; rather, it has classifications for lighter blues and darker blues as different as the English words yellow and orange. Her hypothesis was that Russians thus pay closer attention to shades of blue than English speakers, who lump many more shades under one name and use more vague distinctions. The experiment confirmed her hypothesis. Russian speakers could distinguish between hues of blue faster if they were called by different names in Russian. English speakers showed no increased sensitivity for the same colors. This suggests, says Boroditsky, that Russian speakers have a "psychologically active perceptual boundary where English speakers do not."

This I can understand and find credible even though I haven't experienced it.

And here's one more research result:

Boroditsky also is fascinated with how cultures perceive and communicate ideas about time. Some languages require their speakers to include temporal information in every utterance. In the Yagua language of Peru, there are five distinct grammatical forms of the past tense, for example, to describe when an event occurred: a few hours prior; the day before; roughly one week to a month ago; roughly two months to two years ago; and the distant or legendary past. English is not that precise, but it is true that every time you use a verb in English, you are conveying information about time. Depending on whether something has happened already (I made dinner), is happening now (I am making dinner), or will happen in the future (I will make dinner), the speaker must pick different verb forms. Without the temporal information, the utterance would feel incomplete, ungrammatical. You couldn't just say I make dinner in all three cases.

Not so in Indonesian. Unlike English, Indonesian verbs never change to express time: Make is always just make. Although Indonesian speakers can add words like already or soon, this is optional. It doesn't feel incomplete or ungrammatical to just say, I make dinner.

This led to another fascinating experimental result—and to Boroditsky's opening up a laboratory in Indonesia. A student from Indonesia assured Boroditsky, who was still skeptical, that most Indonesians simply do not bother to mark time when they speak. So she challenged the student to set up an experiment where Indonesian speakers would be shown photographs of the same act in a time progression: a man about to kick a soccer ball, a man kicking a soccer ball, a man who has kicked the ball, which is flying away. Boroditsky and the student made a bet. Is it possible that Indonesian speakers wouldn't mark time progression? If they did not care about time, what would they pay attention to?

The student's hypothesis was proven right. Indonesian speakers, after looking at the three photographs, tended to not only use the same descriptions for each photograph with no time markers—the man kick the ball—but many also said later there was no difference between the photos. Realize that to English speakers, these were not subtle differences—each photograph of the man and the ball was distinctly different.

Moreover, when the researchers mixed in photographs of different individuals kicking the ball, the Indonesian participants were more likely to describe two photographs as similar when the person doing the kicking was the same, regardless of which of the three different actions was being performed. English speakers were more likely to say photographs were similar when the actors in the photos were doing the same action in time.

... Boroditsky's argument is that Indonesians' language structure cues their attention. If you need to figure something out to put it into words, then you pay attention to those details; but if you don't, you don't.

And here is an experimental result which I find to be compelling. This, for me, shows that language makes a difference:

One implication of Boroditsky's research is its relationship to what psychologists call "framing." In a paper due to be published this year, she and her team used the infamous 2004 Super Bowl halftime show in which singer Justin Timberlake seemed to pull off the front of Janet Jackson's costume, revealing her breast. Timberlake later described the incident as a "wardrobe malfunction" (conceptually not unlike that teacup breaking itself). Even when test subjects saw the same video of the event, and even when they had read and heard about the incident prior to the study, Boroditsky reports that when the researchers described the event then asked the subjects to assess a financial liability to Justin Timberlake, their responses were divided. The group that heard an "agentive" description, in which "Timberlake ripped the costume," recommended a much higher fine than the group that was told "the costume ripped." According to Boroditsky, "Linguistic framing affected people's judgments of blame and financial liability in all conditions; language mattered whether it was presented before, after or without video evidence."

Here's my bottom line: Language is a tool and tools affect how we see the world. The joke that "to a man with a hammer, all problems look like nails" captures the same insight. Our tools shape our interaction and understanding of the world. If you have an algorithm for long division, you are willing to consider questions like "I've got 98 pieces of candy and 7 friends, how should I share it?" as a division problem. If you don't have that skill, you might use an algorithm of passing out a piece at a time going round the circle and be surprised, or not, if the sharing is not equal. It isn't all that clear how "metaphysical" we should get about differences in behaviour before and after we learn long division. Sure our tools affect us, but do they put us in contact with a "different reality"? Probably not.

You can get a "feel" for Lera Boroditsky by visiting her research web site. Go ahead, click on it, you will be pleasantly surprised. Especially if you explore a bit and click on this link.

Update 2010aug19: More material here.

Update 2010aug30: A very thoughtful NY Times article by Guy Deutscher (pulled from a chapter of his soon to be published book) goes into far more detail about the subtleties of the neo-whorfian understanding of language.

Update 2011jun16: I have found a delightful book that explains when and how the Sapir-Whorf arose, how it was rejected, and how it is making a comeback in a very modified form. Read my review of Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass

Expanding the Queen's English

Here's the new word-for-the-day, invented by Scott Adams, the Dilbert Cartoonist:

Definition of Withdumb: A quality you possess if you hold a popular and unfounded point of view.

Withdumb is different from herd instinct. A person who possesses withdumb could achieve the condition with no help from the group whatsoever. For example, if you were the only person in Mongolia who believed in astrology, you would have withdumb, but it wouldn't be because your herd influenced you.

It's easier to cling to an irrational opinion if you know that somewhere in the world there are lots of people who think the same way, especially if those other people seem smart or authoritative.

This neologism may be an insult to those with a lisp, but I like it because it can be literally translated into what it means: "I'm with the dumb folks who espouse views for which they have no factual base or reasonable justification."

Unlike most academics, Scott Adams is prepared to use his new invention, and use it without mercy on himself:

As an adult, I'm a bit more tuned to recognize withdumb, especially in myself. I see withdumb most often in the field of investing. Most investment choices are based on nothing more than the knowledge that other people do similar things. Lately I have started to wonder if the science of investing is any better than the science of astrology or the science of not eating a sandwich before swimming. I have a degree in economics and an MBA from a top university and I haven't seen any convincing evidence that investing is more than a collection of elaborate scams. Am I exaggerating? No.

I do draw a line. I won't follow Scott Adams and support this claim:

I'll even go so far as to say that the BP oil leak looks suspicious to me. I think we all agree that the most likely cause of the incident is shoddy (cheap) engineering. But the second best explanation is sabotage with a profit motive. My withdumb tells me the oil spill was just an accident. But my experience and common sense tell me I don't live in a world where the alternative can be ruled out.

I think the inventor of the term has just turned into the first person to misuse his own invented word! It isn't "withdumb" to think the Gulf oil spill was sabotage, that's conspiracy theory paranoia, and it is a minority view which is no where near "popular". So Adams has misused his own word. That must be a record in creation and corruption... all within one blog entry. Congrats!

Interview of Steven Pinker

Here is an excellent dialog between Robert Wright and Steven Pinker that covers a lot of ground. This is one of the best discussions I've seen. It gets at the topics that Pinker covers in his books while including some interesting side trips into topics of interest to Wright. This is well worth taking the time to watch. This is an interview conducted by Robert Wright on bloggingheads.tv:

Monkey Brains

The following is an interview with a brain researcher Ricardo Gil da Costa as the Salk Institute discussing language and brains.



I find the bit at 11:00 minutes into the video to be an interesting discussion of animal rights and terrorism.

The real discussion of language and brains begins 14:00 minutes into the video.

At 22:00 minutes they talk about fMRI images and what can be done today. Specifically, you currently can't use an fMRI as a lie detector.

At 55:00 minutes into the video they talk about the Terry Schaivo case.

Linguistic Theory

I was aware of the Greenberg theory of a unification of languages. But I was surprised in reading an interview with physicist Murray Gell-Mann to find his interest in linguistics and the Borean theory of language descent.

Here's the details of Gell-Mann's viewpoint on this theory in an interview he gave with ScienceNews:

“The thing I’m most excited about is in linguistics. For some reason in this country and in Western Europe, most tenured professors of historical and comparative linguistics hate the idea of distant relationships among human languages, or at least the idea that those can be demonstrated. And they set up extraordinary barriers to doing so, by making anyone who thinks that languages are related, what they call ‘genetically related’ in linguistics — it has nothing to do with biological genetics — in other words, one language descended from another and so on, so you get a sort of tree. They put a tremendous burden of proof on anyone who wants to say that languages are related in this way, by this common descent. And in that way I believe they are throwing away a huge body of very interesting and convincing evidence. And sometimes they come up with pseudomathematical arguments for throwing away these relationships. It’s all a matter of putting a huge burden of proof on anyone who wants to say the two things are related. If you can, find some ‘squeeze’ out of it by some kind of far-fetched explanation involving chance or the borrowing of words or the borrowing of grammatical particles, so-called morphemes. If you can find some outlandish explanation involving chance and borrowing, then you throw out the idea of genetic relationship and so on.…

But the evidence is actually pretty convincing for quite distant relationships. And in this collaboration between our group at the Santa Fe Institute and the group in Moscow, both consisting mostly of Russian linguists — because in Russia these ideas are not considered crazy — in that collaboration we seem to be finding more and more evidence that might point ultimately to the following rather interesting proposition: that a very large fraction of the world’s languages, although probably not all, are descended from one spoken quite recently…, something like 15 to 20,000 years ago. Now it’s very hard to believe that the first human language, modern human language, goes back only that far. For example, 45,000 years ago we can already see cave paintings in Western Europe and engravings and statues and dance steps in the clay of the caves in Western Europe, and we can see some quite interesting advanced developments in southern Africa that are even earlier, like 70 or 75,000 years ago or something like that. It’s very difficult for some of us to believe that human language doesn’t go back at least that far. So I don’t think that we’re talking about the origin of human language — I would guess that that’s much older. But what we’re talking about is what you can call a bottleneck effect, very familiar in linguistics….

And we see that with Indo-European, which spread widely over such a tremendous area; we see it with Bantu, which spread over a big fraction of the southern two-thirds of Africa. We see it with the spread of Australian. The Australian languages seem to be related to one another. Although there were people in Australia 45,000 years ago, it doesn’t look as if the ancestral language of the Australian languages could go back more than 10 or 12,000 years, maybe even considerably less. So there was a huge spread also. I personally suspect that it was some group from a certain area in New Guinea that we can point to that gave the language ancestral to the Australian languages. Communication between Australia and New Guinea was easier then.

Anyway, since these things are so common in history, in the history of language, why not believe that a big fraction of the world’s languages all go back to a single one, relatively recently? Anyway, we’re accumulating more and more and more evidence. Eventually I think everybody will be convinced that these relationships really exist.