| Bryn Mawr
College
To facilitate the broad conversations,
involving both scientists and non-scientists, which are
essential to continuing explorations of - the natural
world and humanity's place in it,
- the nature of education,
- the generation, synthesis, and evaluation of information,
- technology and its potentials,
- the relationships
between forms of understanding.
| |
Language: A
Conversation
Meeting Notes
29 April 2002
Participants:
Doug Blank (Computer Science), Anne Dalke (English), Ruth Guyer (General
Studies, journalist), Eric Raimy (Linguistics), Kathryn Rowe (English), George Weaver (Philosophy)
One Summary View (prepared by Eric Raimy; views by
other participants encouraged and can be sent either by email
or posted using our working group forum
area):
The last meeting of the Language Working Group for the Spring
2002 semester discussed the article "Turning the Tables:
language and spatial reasoning" by Peggy Li and Lila
Gleitman. Anne began the discussion by asking whether this
article was a 'test case' for the claims made by George Lakoff in the
previous week's readings (Philosophy in the Flesh).
Although this article was billed by Eric as a 'test case' it is not
one for Lakoff's views. If Lakoff is right then the only way to
test whether our knowledge is limited by our 'embodied' minds would
be to create a different type of 'mind' (possibly through computer
modelling as suggested in the previous summary) and see what type of
knowledge comes from it. This point raised the question of how
can we tell the limits of thought? Doug suggested that we could
do this by tracing knowledge/ideas through time. Doug suggsted
that 'information' in its present usage (in computer science) is a
new idea. Kathryn pointed out that the meaning of 'information'
derives from its usage in the 16th century where it meant knowledge
that could be bought or transferred. 'Information' in this
usage became important at this time because of its relevance to
politics and espionage. The group agreed that we can see the
derivation of the present usage from this historical example and had
a difficult time of coming up with an example of a truly 'new'
idea...
Although the present reading is not a test case for Lakoff it is
a test case for the Whorf-Sapir linguistic relativity
hypothesis. The particular instantiation of the W/S Hypothesis
that Li and Gleitman were testing was whether the frequency of use of
a construction in language affects the way a person thinks. The
particular test case here is spatial reasoning. The background
facts are that there is a continuum of spatial language terms that
languages fall on with the two poles being 'allocentric' and
'egocentric'. A purely 'allocentric' language only uses spatial
terms that make reference to a landmark (like the use of
'uphill/downhill' and 'across the hill' used in Tzeltal or
'uptown/downtown' and 'across town' in Manhattanite English) and a
purely 'egocentric' language only uses terms like 'in front of me',
'behind me', 'to the left of me', etc. It should be noted that
there are no 'absolute' allocentric or egocentric languages and that
all languages have both types of spatial terms. This is the
main reason why Li and Gleitman are investigating whether the
frequency of usage affects thought.
The bulk of the discussion of the article was an exchange
between Eric and Kathy about how to interpret the results of the
experiments. The main issue was the social aspect of the
experimental task in Li and Gleitman's experiments. Kathy was
explaining the importance and relevance of the fact that many of the
English subjects in the experiments asked for guidance. The
nature of the experiment created an ambiguous task that could be done
either in an 'allocentric' or 'egocentric' spatial system. The
fact that the subjects recognized this and asked for clarification
was very important to Kathy. She proposed that this behavior
indicated that there was a third type of 'socially created' (?)
spatial system that was distinct from the 'allocentric' and
'egocentric' systems that Li and Gleitman posited. Eric was
confused and did not understand this position and asked continuously
for clarification. [Note: Since I'm writing this summary I'm
probably misrepresenting what Kathy's point was because I'm still not
sure I understand her position. I encourage Kathy to post to
the Forum area to correct and clarify any misrepresentation of her
position. I'm sure there are inaccuracies here but they are the
result of my lack of understanding and not purposeful.]
Relating to the exchange between Eric and Kathy, the question of
what the ordering between thought and language was was raised.
Eric staked out the position that thought always preceded language
but no one else in the group fully accepted it. The alternative
was to have thought and language in some sort of parallel existence
with neither of them being primary to the other. Eric thought
the whole point of the article was to show that thought was the
underlying basis for language. By showing that English speakers
can be manipulated to use either 'allocentric' or 'egocentric'
spatial language depending on the environment/situation they are put
in, Eric accepts that this provides strong evidence that the thought
system delimits what can be expressed in language. Since
thought delimits the expressions available to language, it must then
'precede' or be more basic than language.
The discussion at this point became much more free flowing and
random. The group considered how unexplainable phenomena like
ESP affect our scientific models with no real consensus or
conclusions drawn. The meeting drew to a close with Anne
dropping the big questions on the group. "What does it
mean to think?" "What is thought?" These
are mysteries right now and the question before us is whether our
present understanding of the world is limited and that is why these
are mysteries or whether Lakoff is right and that these questions
will always be mysteries because of the limits on what we can
think...