Re: Harnad1 Word Origins

From: Csak Laszlo (csak@mars.arts.u-szeged.hu)
Date: Wed Dec 08 1999 - 08:31:49 GMT


>
> Harnad, S. (1996) The Origin of Words: A Psychophysical Hypothesis In
> Velichkovsky B & Rumbaugh, D. (Eds.) " Communicating Meaning:
> Evolution and Development of Language. NJ: Erlbaum: pp 27-44.
> _________________________________________________________________
> Skywriter: Csak, L.; University of Szeged

> THE ORIGIN OF WORDS: A PSYCHOPHYSICAL HYPOTHESIS
>
> > I would like to take a
> third road and consider language to be only that form of human
> activity that is intertranslatable with English (or any other
> language), plus whatever mental capacity one must have in order to
> produce and understand it. The intertranslatability criterion,
> however, though rather powerful, is still too vague and general. So
> let me add that one of the principal features of language is that it
> allows us to categorize the world and its parts in what appear to be
> an infinity of different ways, among them possibly a way that comes
> close to the way the world really is.

Yesterday some of us questioned whether dance is a language or
not. I think we should refer to our debate here. In my view, the principle
feature of all languages is that they can express what we mean, e.g. our
thoughts. It is for this reason that we have to mention thinking here.
One`s thoughts can easily be divided into groups, for example, judgements,
sentiments, emotions, excitations, etc.(All right, this is an
old-fashioned categorisation.) These are the thoughts one can will to
express precisely. But we all know that there are different ways to
express one`s thoughts. For example: the dance.
>From this point of view one can see some difficulties concerning our
definition about language, because this latter is based on
intertranslatability. We can easily find some words (elements of language)
that cannot be transalted with a single word. In that case one can
translate it with a sentence. But what obstructs me translating the
elements of dnace with a sentence? In my view: nothing. We saw that ways
of expression that differ from language (arts!) have their inner
structure, nearly parallel to the grammar (Laban theory, theory of
colours, etc.) The difference between language and dance (arts?) comes
from nothing but from the difference between their objects.(When we want
to express our philosophical thoughts, we will use language; when we want
to express our love for example, we will chose dance (arts?).)

I think it also worths mentioning, and will be useful, to refer to L.
Wittgenstein`s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 3.343.

> 1. Translation and
>
> How then is one to defend the "glossable-classificatory" view of
> language being proposed here in the face of such prominent criticism?
> Well, there is always a point of retreat that one can safely repair to
> as long as one is willing to abandon realism about word meaning: There
> may be no way of settling on the fact about what people mean when they
> say "Look, that is an X," but we can certainly describe the
> regularities in the external conditions under which they tend to do
> so, and the requisite internal conditions that would make it possible
> for them to do so under those external conditions. This position is
> not behaviorism, for it is very much concerned with what is going on
> inside the head.

I do not know what remedy can be found to treat (mistreat?) our definition
of language. First, maybe we have to take attempt to answer the question:
What is language?, instead of saying: English is a language.
Well, I do not know what language is...

> It is also a rather vague conjecture that a language as a whole is
> open to multiple interpretations -- say, English as it is, versus
> "Fenglish," in which the meanings of "true" and "false" are swapped
> and all other meanings are suitably adjusted so that everything
> remains coherent: If one said "`That is a rabbit' is true" in
> Fenglish, "true" would mean what false means in English, but only
> because Fenglish "is" means what English "isn't" means, "rabbit" means
> "non-rabbit," and so on. Yet in order to have English and Fenglish
> speakers continue to discourse with one another coherently, in the
> same world of objects and events, without ever suspecting that their
> words don't mean the same thing, so many adjustments seem to be needed
> that to conjecture that the deception is even possible may be
> equivalent to assuming that formal "duals" of meaning exist (like the
> duals of logic and mathematics, where it can be proved that certain
> formal operations can be systematically swapped under a transformation
> in such a way as to yield coherent dual interpretations)[2]. Such a
> strong conjecture calls for a proof, and as far as I know, no one has
> offered a proof of the existence of semantic duals in language.

Perhaps, there is no proof of semantic duals, but not all multiple
interpretation is semantic dual. For example, when I use the word
`category`, I have in mind Kant`s concept; I suppose every
other interpretation of this word will be more or less different from mine,
even Kant`s interpretation.

> Apart from the absence of a formal proof, another reason for
> suspecting that coherent dual interpretations of languages may not be
> possible is that the systematic adjustments would have to go beyond
> linguistic meaning. They would have to encompass perception too, and
> would thereby inherit the problems of the "inverted spectrum"
> conjectures (e.g., Cole 1990): Could you and I be walking around the
> same world speaking and behaving identically, even though I see the
> sky as blue and the earth as green, whereas you see the sky as green
> and the earth as blue? Again, if our classifications are always
> approximate, it may be a long time before we discover the
> difference[3]. But if there is ever a difference, it will disambiguate
> us forever. And until then there's no difference between identity and
> approximate identity -- or at least no difference that makes a
> difference -- no uncertainty on which any actual outcome depends.

Just a short note. All muslims and christians have the same god: Allah/God
(gavagi/rabbit!). Maybe these differences make no linguistic difference,
but in reality...

> 2. The Problem of Grounding Word Meanings in Perceptual Categories
>
> The connection between language and perception is at the heart of the
> "Whorf Hypothesis" in linguistics and anthropology, a conjecture that
> has had a chequered history. The hypothesis is that language
> influences (or perhaps even determines) our view of reality. To state
> it less vaguely: the way things look to us (and what things we believe
> really exist) depends on how we name and describe them in our
> language. Whorf's original example concerned the Hopi language, which
> apparently lacks a future tense.

On the ground of this theory there is no future tense in Hungarian. But we
know there is.
The point here is that one can have the `idea` of future even if in there
is no future tense in the language. Language is a way of expressing our
thoughts. We can express nearly all of them; so, we are able to define
some grammatical structure in order to make our language to be capable of
expressing our thoughts.
    
> Having adopted the intertranslatability constraint we might already
> have suspected that something was amiss in Whorf's inferences, because
> English ought to be fully intertranslatable with Hopi. Hence, whatever
> concepts an Englishman might have, a Hopi should likewise be eligible
> to have. The Hopi language might lack, for example, the vocabulary for
> discussing quantum mechanics or general relativity, but this lexical
> deficit is trivial, and should be remediable by providing the
> requisite information and instruction in Hopi

I fully agree.

> Reality influences language

Of course, we have the word `sun` in our language because we have seen the
sun itself. At this level reality influences language. But at higher level
activities, such as philosophy, we see clear examples of how language
influences the way of speaking of reality.

     3.Categorical Percepction
> Let us recall, at this midpoint of our discussion, the informal
> criteria we adopted for language at the outset: A language is an
> approximately intertranslatable system for approximately categorizing
> the world. We have spoken a little about categorization and
> approximation. What about intertranslatability? Names of perceptual
> categories are trivially intertranslatable. All one need do is coin a
> gloss: "rabbit" = "gavagai."

In my view it works only if both languages `know` rabbit/gavagi. One can
even describe a rabbit to another person, but it seems a bit doubtful that
the latter will `see` (understand totally and properly) what a rabbit is.
Just try to describe a colour to one who have never seen that.

> 4. Naming and Describing
> 5. Symbolic Representations
> Learning to categorize all X's will require three kinds of internal
> representation. The first, "iconic representations," are analogs of
> the physical patterns that concrete objects project onto the surfaces
> of our sensory receptors. These representations are used primarily to
> discriminate stimuli that occur simultaneously or in rapid succession.
> They allow judgments to be made about whether two sensory projections
> or traces are the same or different, and if different, about the
> degree of difference between them.
>
> The second kinds of representation, "categorical representations," do
> not preserve the analog shape of the sensory projections; they
> preserve and encode only the invariant sensory properties shared by
> all the members of a concrete perceptual category. These invariant
> properties are learned by sampling positive and negative instances of
> the category in question (i.e., members of the category and its
> complement: the set of alternatives with which the members could be
> confused [8] and finding the features that will correctly sort that
> particular sample as well as future samples. Such features are
> converged on by a learning algorithm [9] that generates successful
> categorization. The invariant features are always provisional,
> however, and the categorization always approximate, as the context of
> confusable alternatives could always be widened.[10]
>
> The names for the categories that have iconic and categorical
> representations then go on to furnish the primitives for the third
> kind of representation: "symbolic representations." These include the
> primitive category names (including names of invariant features) and
> combinations of names in the form of propositions about category
> membership. Most of the names correspond to the lexicon of a natural
> language; their combinations take the form of sentences
> (descriptions).
>
> This three-level representational system is grounded bottom-up in
> psychophysical categories. "Top-down" influences occur through CP:
> Similarity judgments are not mediated purely by iconic representations
> (or perhaps iconic representations are not pure): Belonging to the
> same category -- i.e., having the same name -- makes things look more
> similar, and belonging to a different category (different name) makes
> them look more distinct. Most of the symbolic component consists of
> internal translation: "An X is a Y," "A Y is a Z," etc. It is the
> primitive symbols, which are grounded in nonsymbolic representations
> -- iconic and categorical ones -- that prevent this symbolic circle
> from being vicious. [11] Two different systems of grounded symbolic
> representation are in principle intertranslatable and their respective
> groundings can be tested against ostensive experience in the real
> world.
>

I agree with these statements. Nevertheless, I have to ask whether all
representation is in this close connection to language/speaking, or not.
While thinking, everybody have representations that can be expressed
sometimes by words and sentences, but there are some that we do not want
to express, or even that cannot be expressed by using our finite language.
Maybe there are categories of thinking behind our three-level system.
   
> 6. The Origin of Words
>
> So my hypothesis about the origin of words is really a hypothesis
> about the origin of symbolic categories: They originate in sensory
> categories, and are grounded in the iconic and categorical
> representations that make it possible for you to pick out those
> sensory categories.

Our reasoning seems to be culminated at a speculative, purely theoretical
hypothesis about the origin of words. In this sense it describes (only)
theoretically the genese of words. And if we add that behind the quoted
representations one can also find representations (indipendents of
speaking), one shall say that we must go further and analyse the
connections between our three-level system and other representational
system(s?) of our thinking, in order to show how these latter one(s) make
our first system possible.
What about the origin of thinking?



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