More ideas

[pozorvlak]

While I'm here, I'll write down a few more IITESKAs that have been buzzing, half-formed, around my head, in some cases for months.

Junk Dilemmas no. 63: This is the name of a chapter in Trainspotting. Renton is lying on the floor of his flat, slowly coming down from heroin. It's cold - "unheated leaky flat in a Scottish winter" cold, and he's not exactly in great physical shape. There's a real possibility that he might freeze to death. He has a small electric fire at the other end of the room. He could drag himself to the heater and turn it on, but it probably wouldn't make any difference. Instead, he prefers to stay where he is, reasoning that the comfort he gains from knowing that he could turn the heater on if it got really bad is better than the comfort he'd get from actually doing it and making the room infinitesimally warmer.

But what he's really doing is rationalising his reluctance to move.

This was actually one of the ideas that suggested this series to me - once I was aware of this thought (anti?)pattern, I kept noticing it in other contexts. I bet you will too, now. Which brings us on to...

Whorfian mind-lock: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that the language(s) you speak constrain the thoughts you can think. I'm not enough of a linguist to have noticed this myself for human languages, but I've written code in enough computer languages to see that some algorithms really are much more elegant in some languages than others. Similarly (claim Sapir and Whorf^*), some sentences are more easily expressible in some human languages than in others. If something goes against the grain of the language you're trying to write it in, you're less likely even to think of it. This is the basis of both Orwell's Newspeak and Iain Banks' Marain, as well as the real-world conlang Lojban. The upside of this effect is that learning new languages (particularly more powerful languages) can give you new ways of thinking. This is what I say to people who tell me that category theory is "just a language"^** - fine, but it's a more powerful language than yours, so it allows me to think more powerful thoughts :-) The downside is Whorfian mind-lock, which occurs when your language is inadequate to describe the thoughts you need to think, so you don't think them.

In the case of programming languages, this is interesting, because there's a well-known theorem (the Church-Turing thesis) that every programming language more powerful than a certain (low) threshold is as powerful as every other. So every C/Python/Fortran/Lisp/TeX/ZX80 assembler/sendmail config file program could, in principle, be re-written in any of the other languages mentioned. And yet some languages are more powerful than others, in the sense that some languages allow you to write the same program in less space and with less effort than others. With that in mind, I'd like to propose a sort of dual or converse to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for human languages, by analogy with the Church-Turing thesis:

Conjecture: every human language is capable of expressing the same set of statements as every other.

This needs sharpening up - what exactly do we mean by a "human language"? For the sake of argument, let's restrict to any language spoken as a first language by more than 10,000 people. And we need to be more precise about the what we mean by the meaning of a sentence, as the emotional overtones of a sentence might well be peculiar to a language community. Could we define the meaning of a statement as the state of affairs in the physical world that it describes? Then what about mathematical or philosophical statements?

Note that I'm not claiming that the translation process is going to be easy; some languages have words that are extremely difficult to translate into other languages. I'm merely conjecturing that it can be done (possibly by turning words in the source language into entire books in the target language, but hey).

Whew. A couple of lighter ones:

Paving cowpaths: another antipattern. You have some process that you're trying to update using shiny modern technology. But, rather than take a step back and look at what the technology could actually do for you, you simply whizzify every stage of your existing process. It's as if you had a twisty, windy cowpath through the hills which you wanted to upgrade to a proper road, but you then build a narrow, windy paved road along the path of the original cowpath, when you could have built a perfectly straight motorway that goes through a cutting or a tunnel. My favourite example: the company I used to work for won a contract for $big_government_department to provide a computer-based solution to their document-processing needs. They handled huge numbers of documents, warehouses full of them in fact, and were finding it increasingly difficult and expensive to keep track of them and get them to where they needed to be on time. When they initially announced the tender, the client wanted an RFID system to keep track of paper documents in their warehouses...

And finally, another one with a great name:

Yak shaving: to take the Jargon File's admirably clear definition, "[MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.] Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on." There's a useful military/NATO saying for when you find yourself in this situation: "Maintain the Aim". In other words, look to see if there's an easier way of solving the actual problem which bypasses the yak-shaving you're stuck on.

* No relation to the Klingon.
** It's not - we have actual theorems and everything. It's just that the naysayers aren't comfortable enough with the language to understand their statements :-)

Comments

[michiexile]

One of the thing you get to know very early in a Stockholm linguistics education (as in even I have been taught this!) is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is kinda the FLT of linguistics. It's immensely popular outside linguistics, all layman believe it with fervor, and it's an efficient way to annihilate your own standing as a linguist.

It very much seems as if Sapir-Whorf not only is not true, but is actually damaging to the way you think about languages to the extent that (at least some) linguists take almost excessive care to eradicate the meme as early as possible.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! I'd always assumed that the strong form as espoused by Orwell (that thoughts not expressible in the language are unthinkable) was obviously false (else how would new concepts be invented, and how would languages change?), but that some appropriately weak form must be true (as evidenced by my experience with programming languages). I wonder how widespread the anti-SWH stance you describe is outside Stockholm? I see that Wikipedia largely agrees with me, but that article is listed as disputed and lacks many citations. It also raises the point that the causal relationship is not clear even in cases where features of the language seem to correlate with abilities of the people.

The sci.linguistics FAQ says the following:

According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language determines the categories and much of the content of thought. "We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages... We cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the [speech community] decrees," said Whorf, in Language, Thought, and Reality (1956). "The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group," said Sapir.

Both were students of Amerindian languages, and were drawn to this conclusion by analysis of the grammatical categories and semantic distinctions found in these languages, fascinatingly different from those found in European ones. (Neither linguist used the term 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis', however; Whorf referred to the 'linguistic relativity principle'. Moreover, the principle was almost entirely elaborated by Whorf alone.)

The idea enjoyed a certain vogue midcentury, not only among linguists but among anthropologists, psychologists, and science fiction writers.

However, the strong form of the hypothesis is not now widely believed. The conceptual systems of one language, after all, can be explained and understood by speakers of another. And grammatical categories do not really explain cultural systems very well. Indo-European languages make gender a grammatical category, and their speakers may be sexist-- but speakers of Turkish or Chinese, languages without grammatical gender, are not notably less sexist.

Whorf's analysis of what he called "Standard Average European" languages is also questionable. E.g. he claims that "the three-tense system of SAE verbs colors all our thinking about time." Only English doesn't have three tenses; it has two, past and present; future events are expressed by the present ("I see him tomorrow"), or by a modal expression, merely one of a large class of such synthetic expressions. And for that matter, English distinguishes more like six than three times ("I had gone, I went, I just arrived, I'm going, I'm about to go, I'll go").

To prove his point, Whorf collected stories of confusions brought about by language. For instance, a man threw a spent match into what looked like a pool of water; only there was decomposing waste in the water, and escaping gas was ignited by the spark-- boom! But it's not clear that any linguistic act is involved here. The man could think the pool looked like water without thinking of the word 'water'; and he could fail to notice the flammable vapors without doing any thinking at all.

A weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis-- that language influences without determining our categories of thought-- still seems reasonable, and is even backed up by some psychological experiments-- e.g. Kay & Kempton's finding that, in distinguishing color triads, a pair distinguished by color names can seem more distinct than a pair with the 'same' name which are actually more divergent optically (American Anthropologist, March 1984).

It should be emphasized that, in their willingness to consider the idea that non-Western people have languages and worldviews that match the European's in precision and elegance, Sapir and Whorf were far ahead of their time.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

s/sci.linguistics/sci.lang/

[totherme.livejournal.com]

Hm :)

Well, I don't know anything about human linguistics, but I wanted to comment on a possible link between sapir-whorf and the particular junk dilemma mentioned.

It seems to me that the dilemma only exists because of a confusion of physical comfort and psychological comfort. I can imagine that it could be argued that the confusion wouldn't exist, if only the language made the distinction between the two clear.

I can also imagine the argument that the connection between physical and psychological comfort is ingrained, and not a product of the language, so even if by some freak of nature, the language turned out to clearly distinguish the two, then the confusion would still exist. In fact, it might come to the surface in creative use of the language, in the same way as a book reviewer might describe "delicious flowing prose", while making no pretence to actually refer to the sensation we experience via our taste buds.

Of course the book reviewer is deliberately using the language creatively, and so presumably couldn't seriously consider the possibility that the words actually tasted of something... But then, perhaps that is the same as Renton - maybe there's no genuine confusion at all, just a creative exercise to take his mind off the pain.

[mi-guida.livejournal.com]

From my personal experience - even if I know the words perfectly, and the grammar, some things are jsut easier to say in French, and some in English. Not just expressing concepts either (and don't get me started on my attempts to explain "pantomime" as they aren't relevant here) but actually saying things - maybe it is just a question of elegance, but I do find I reason differently when Ithink in French, because the sentence sturcture leads me to things a different way round.

Having said all that in non-coherent English, I will return to my French Constitutionnal LAw essay and stop procrastinating!

[totherme.livejournal.com]

I do find I reason differently when Ithink in French, because the sentence sturcture leads me to things a different way round.

Yeah, this and things like the experimentally verified necessity of high level programming languages and mathematical notation (ever tried doing arithmetic with roman numerals?) convince me that there's something sapir-whorfish going on somewhere. I'm presuming therefore that the argument against sapir-whorf takes a form similar to "we create language, and are not created by it" - asserting that where we want to reason in a way that our current language doesn't support, we'll just extend our language or invent a new one. So the correlation is there, but the causal relationship is reversed...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Interviewer: Do you think this music causes you to do what you do?
Marilyn Manson: No, I think we cause the music to do what it does.