Lambda the Ultimate

Wonders if there is a corollary with natural languages that is parallel with Turing Complete? Carrying that further, would it be fair to say that some thoughts are easier to express and communicate in differing languages. (You can speak Latin in any language). In reading stuff on Sapir-Whorf in the past, it always seemed like they got too stuck on vocabulary (Snow, Colors, etc...). Perhaps it's because I grew up with English, but coming up with new words is as easy as Kwyjibo. Wonders if other languages ain't as fluid in their dictionary revisions.

Anyhow, successful bait. SW hypothesis will persist because it is such an easy sell. :-)

Wonders if there is a corollary with natural languages that is parallel with Turing Complete?

I'm sure I've proposed this before here, but can't find it via search, but something like "Anything that can be thought by a person can be expressed" in a language with this completeness property.

The equivalent of the Church-Turing Thesis would be "Any natural human language can express the same ideas as any other."

Carrying that further, would it be fair to say that some thoughts are easier to express and communicate in differing languages.

In a limited and temporary sense, yes. Some ideas will use fewer words in some languages than others, and things like poetry, puns, and culturally specific references are going to be harder to translate, but this rarely impairs core denotation.

Wonders if other languages ain't as fluid in their dictionary revisions.

Even if for some reason you can't add or borrow a word, you can always repurpose an existing one. Consider the sentence: "Sandy sent me a text". It doesn't use any English words that haven't been around for a long time, but it still can express a relatively new idea.

...add a touch of gilding to your lilly:

the Whorfian results tell us about the kind of thoughts and concepts we find easiest to hold, or are likeliest to formulate.

I suggest that it would be useful to add "to communicate" to your list.

I have many thoughts throughout the day, most of which are probably fleeting. But if I communicate a thought, e.g. to a co-worker, then that marginally increases the probability of that thought recurring, perhaps because at some point it is communicated back to me.

(Pause for massive scaling to occur, as thoughts are at least as lightweight as Erlang processes. ;-)

So I suggest that I'm somewhat more likely to spend time thinking thoughts that are easy to communicate in my immediate context. In most contexts that involve other people, that means thoughts that map easily to words.

I'm leaning towards the co-evolution of language and thought - sort of like language is a by product of the effort to communicate thoughts. Somehow, thought seems to be independent of language from one perspective - my 1.5 year old son who can't speak any language yet has a lot of structured things to say .. and this structure is something we've been negotiating continuously.

It is a bit clearer in the programming world than in the real world, but there is some contamination by the belief that programming languages live in the domain of mathematics and logic which results in languages being argued as "right" or "wrong" in the absolute sense.

I tend to see programming languages as forms of expression being negotiated among people (plural) and computers. That approach feels more fluid to me. The negotiation can result in different languages if, say, the computers in use weren't Von Neumann - for example if they were connection machines or quantum computers instead, the negotiated language will have very different characteristics.

Language primes thought.

Certainly there is this, and many linguists think that this is all there is to these effects. There may be more, though...

There may be more, though...

Such as...? ;-)

This is one of those things that I think is true, but I can't prove. When I have more time, I hope to put together a ref list to give an idea as to why I think there is more. But I can at least throw about a bit of jargon for the time being.

I think that simple features such as what cases a language has, and word order, constrain how focus markers can be used to indicate the topic focus (cf. Wikipedia's Topic-focus articulation article stub; one of the referenced authors, Barbara Partee, is not unknown to LtU [1]). It seems to me that this has effects on how language competence shapes what things we find easy to make sense of, and how we go about solving problems, in a way that scales up to have effects on monolingual culture.

It seems to me that this has effects on how language competence shapes what things we find easy to make sense of, and how we go about solving problems, in a way that scales up to have effects on monolingual culture.

I think it would be unsurprising to find evidence that unmarked word order and topicalization mechanisms in a given language have an effect similar to those reported by Boroditsky. It's unclear to me that these would be fundamentally different in effect from some kind of priming.

When we start to talk about culture, I think the waters get muddied. My observation based on a lifetime spent in multi-cultural environments is that the cultural biases swamp any structural effects of language.

I think a PL analog of this would be the (I think) uncontroversial statement that it would be easier for Scheme programmer to write the Y combinator than a C programmer. One can argue about whether there are structural features of these languages that make this so, and there may be some, but in the end the difference is cultural. The culture of the C programmer doesn't see the problem as a sensible one, whereas the culture of the Schemer privileges that kind of problem.

It's unclear to me that these would be fundamentally different in effect from some kind of priming.
It doesn't matter: if my second hypothesis is true, then you can't explain quasi-Whorfian effects purely through priming.

When we start to talk about culture, I think the waters get muddied.
No doubt. Still, sociolinguists do study these things.

cultural biases swamp any structural effects of language.
I'm particularly interested in the question of whether speakers of different languages have differences in which inferences they tend to regard as sound or unsound. This is a part of rhetoric that has some relevance to big culture questions such as: which lies can national leaders get away with?

It doesn't matter: if my second hypothesis is true, then you can't explain quasi-Whorfian effects purely through priming.

Well, I certainly agree that if your hypothesis is true, then your hypothesis is true. ;-)

I still don't have a clear idea of what kind of effects arising from which linguistic structures your hypothesis posits that are clearly distinct from priming.

Part of the barrier is definitional: making some task easy by "bringing some mental machinery ready to hand" is a reasonable definition of what priming is.

Still, sociolinguists do study these things.

The null hypothesis in any modern sociolinguistic literature I've seen is that language use encodes culture rather than the other way around.

I'm particularly interested in the question of whether speakers of different languages have differences in which inferences they tend to regard as sound or unsound.

I can think of one class of "reasoning" that fits this bill perfectly: what we normally call "sophistry". Sophistry usually exploits ambiguities of expression in language to "prove" points. Some linguistic ambiguities are going to be idiosyncratic to a given language, so I would have to grant this might be a class of arguments that match what you are suggesting.

This got me thinking about what sophistry would look like in a PL context. "Everything is an object, except when it's not" comes to mind. ;-)

Ignoring the historical bias against working class intellectuals... :-)

This got me thinking about what sophistry would look like in a PL context.

Most PL advocacy seems to employ sophistry.

Most PL advocacy seems to employ sophistry.

I can't disagree with that. ;-)

I saw another possible example that is a little more subtle with David Pollock talking about "Share nothing is fail".

In a nutshell, he seems to be saying that if you take a problem that either is or has traditionally been designed as a full-shared-state problem and try to use a "share nothing" solution you will have problems.

It's pretty hard to disagree with that.

The "sophistry" comes in when he concludes something more general about "share nothing" rather than questioning the scope of his application of the expression.

Priming is like memoisation: if the concepts involved in mental activity have been primed, it all goes faster, but it doesn't change what judgements are reached. Since my second hypothesis talks about reaching different judgements about such things as how best to go about solving problems and which inferences are valid, ergo ...

Priming is like memoisation: if the concepts involved in mental activity have been primed, it all goes faster, but it doesn't change what judgements are reached.

My definition doesn't agree with yours. There is a whole class of (at least what I would call) priming experiments where the whole point is that differential priming results in a different judgment. These are sometimes mixed with and sometimes separate from the latency studies.

My own take is that this is still a case of "ready to hand" data, which explains my phrasing in a previous post.

It's possible that we simply have a terminological disagreement, but I'm not sure.

The Priming (psychology) Wikipedia article has an unreferenced, indefensibly broad definition of priming: Priming in psychology is where an early stimulus influences response to a later stimulus — so priming encompasses all memory effects.

Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science, entry for subception: priming is where the occurrence of one stimulus may make it easier to perceive a later stimulus that is related to it in some way ... Typically priming is shown when one person responds more quickly to the related word than to the [unrelated] word. This only treats perceptual priming, but can easily be generalised to conceptual priming. Our point in question could put a lot of weight on how we interpret the phrase "easier to perceive".

My memoisation model of priming actually would allow for observable distortions of judgements reached through priming through race conditions.

And there MAY be little angels that push the planets in their orbits.

I have to pay attention which gender a given noun is assigned to; an issue which vanishes in English. Now noun gender is, as Brooks would say it, accidental and not essential complexity. (In most cases, getting the gender wrong does not obscure the meaning, though in a few, it can have humorous or salacious side effects). But still, it's worth noting, I guess...

English actually does have gender, but only in a very limited mostly semantic sense. Waiter/waitress, actor/actress, etc. And it's on nominals, not elsewhere. That said, paying attention to grammatical gender probably has no affect on thought at all, even in the attention/priming sense, because many noun classes/genders are incredibly arbitrary.

And it's on nominals, not elsewhere.

Which is to say there is no grammatical morphology associated with this limited pattern, which is why linguists say English has no gender.

Right, for the most part English has no real grammatical gender, and certainly nothing even as simple as what German has, nevermind the dozen or so genders/noun classes of Kujamaat Joola! But English does have what Whorf termed cryptotypes — morphologically invisible word properties that are relatively semantically vacuous, but which influence large scale acceptance of constructions.

Linguists actually like what Wittgenstein said about family resemblance concepts, but for the most part he is ignored because, like most philosophers of language, he wrote a lot about what language is without discovering what facts linguists had discovered about language.

Searle is a distinguished exception to this common trait.

Wittgenstein talked about this eighty years ago.

Wittgenstein talked about a lot of things. So have a lot of other people.

Talking about things and resolving them are not the same thing.

Oh, you are so much science-minded. But knowledge often comes before scientific investigation.

Oh, you are so much science-minded.

I really don't see how you got that from what I said.

But knowledge often comes before scientific investigation.

Wittgenstein had some intuitions, a whole lot of other philosophers had some intuitions, I have some intuitions. These are all a kind of knowledge.

But what do you do when the intuitions don't agree? And have consistently not agreed for decades?

One solution some people take is to choose one position as authoritative and argue from there, but argument from authority, though a venerable technique, has always struck me as unsatisfactory.

Other people try to figure these things out themselves to their own satisfaction. Having the time and absence of pressure that allowed me to do this is the thing I value most about my doctoral studies.

Other people try to figure these things out themselves to their own satisfaction.

I think we agree that this is the only sensible way to approach these problems.

It still doesn't help though when the person you are talking with has done the same but come to a significantly different conclusion. ;-)

I think we agree that this is the only sensible way to approach these problems.
Well, it's a luxury of the idle stipend-rich.

Well, it's a luxury of the idle stipend-rich.

I don't know. Some of us have had to find the time and energy without the stipend.

You just have to be demented in the right kind of way. ;-)