"Chomsky on Linguistics": Stony Brook Interview #2 with Mark Aronoff

Рет қаралды 21,434

Gary Mar

Күн бұрын

Пікірлер: 48

@atheoma 9 ай бұрын

thanks for sharing! I love prof. chomsky, one of the greatest minds alive.

@HeavyProfessor 2 жыл бұрын

He describes the workings of modern science so many times in this series of lectures.

@JacobWillsonPhoenix 4 жыл бұрын

"infants and other organisms" I don't know why that makes me giggle

@emiliogonzalez1412 6 жыл бұрын

My professor's face when I bring up Chomsky's ideas 29:31

@MontyCantsin5 6 жыл бұрын

Ha! I wonder if that was just a bad edit or if Aronoff was genuinely perplexed by Chomsky's example in relation to the meaning of words.

@michaeldebellis4202 5 жыл бұрын

It just amazes me how hostile many academics are to Chomsky's ideas (I'm talking philosophy and science not politics which is a whole other question). I could give so many examples and in my experience at least 90% of the time I can tell that the people who hate him don't really understand what he's saying. I've had this experience countless times in various philosophy and linguistics classes. The odd thing is that the one field where people usually understand him in my experience is computer science where his early theoretical work is essential for things like compiler theory.

@HeavyProfessor 2 жыл бұрын

@@michaeldebellis4202 he doesn't just argue about other people's theories. He has his own theory. That puts most of the professors on the defensive.

@michaeldebellis4202 2 жыл бұрын

@@HeavyProfessor I agree, although I think they are somewhat right to be defensive because although he is too polite to put it this way what he does is show that a lot of people, especially philosophers and psychologists, are incoherent in many of their major ideas.

@timestimesx7535 8 ай бұрын

@@michaeldebellis4202 They probably failed syntax or they know someone who did.

@luisathought 3 жыл бұрын

Thank You

@michaeldebellis4202 5 жыл бұрын

Regarding sign language (around minute 36) one interesting question I've never heard addressed is how SEE (Signing Exact English) contrasts at a theoretical level with ASL. My understanding is that SEE is essentially a direct translation of English syntax to sign. Also, that it's mostly loathed within the deaf community and tends to be harder for deaf children to learn but at one time (I think it's mostly in decline now) many hearing people advocated it over ASL thinking it would be easier for deaf people to learn to vocalize English if they learned SEE. There still is syntax there since it's the syntax of English but I wonder why it seems to be so much more difficult to learn.

@paulfriedrich1686 3 жыл бұрын

I do not know any signed languages, but four spoken ones. When struggling with a new language one approach often taken is to try to translate word for word. That's a nightmare. Let's take: "Qu'est-ce que c'est ce que je vois ?" -> "What is this that this is that which I see?" "Do you like coffee?" -> "Fais-tu aimer du café ?" "Ich habe gestern das Buch gelesen, dass du mir gegeben hast." -> "I have yesterday the book read, that you me given have." "Tienes una sonrisa muy bonita." -> "Have one smile very nice."

@michaeldebellis4202 2 жыл бұрын

@@paulfriedrich1686 Good point. I think something similar may be going on with SEE vs. ASL. ASL was designed AS a sign language so the syntax is more natural, whereas SEE was designed to be a sign version of a spoken language which probably makes it easier for (hearing) people who already know the spoken language but much harder for the (deaf) people who need it most.

@michaeldebellis4202 5 жыл бұрын

Regarding the discussion about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language determines thought: First, there is very strong evidence that the strong form of this hypothesis is clearly false. The evidence from color and language is very strong that even though many languages don't have words for various colors people can still perceive those colors and they can relatively easily learn words to distinguish say blue from green even though some languages just have one word that stands for both. Although there is *some* evidence that the language you speak has some influence on how you perceive the world (e.g., someone without the words blue and green will tend to notice those distinctions less than someone whose language has different words) it's fairly minimal.

@paulfriedrich1686 3 жыл бұрын

I do not understand: The thing about colours makes sense: Even though the ancient Greeks had no word for blue the sky must have been that colour and they could surely see it. But that's not what Orwell was talking about, Orwell thought that if you have never heard of "being a dissenter" you don't have a concept of a dissenter as opposed to someone who just complains a lot. At some level that must clearly be true (I think): Until I have learnt about hyperbolic functions and exponential functions I will not understand that they are not the same even though you can drag one so that they look similar over a certain domain. Another example from my first language: "bescheiden" (modest, moderate, humble). The word has another meaning: taking only what you require and not as much as you can, without having a concrete idea who or what could benefit from you leaving the rest. I was three or four and in kindergarten when the teacher explained the concept (being bescheiden is not much of an issue for toddlers). I felt that without the word the concept would have no persistence in my head and just dissolve like a lump of sugar in hot water.

@michaeldebellis4202 3 жыл бұрын

@@paulfriedrich1686 That is a good point. No one including Chomsky or myself denies that the language you speak INFLUENCES the way you think. But the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is much stronger than that. SW is that the language that you speak DETERMINES the way you think. So for example, certain hunter gatherer tribes have no concepts for counting beyond one, two, many. So SW would imply that it would be very difficult if not impossible to teach them about the natural numbers, addition, and subtraction. But it isn't. In fact they can be taught the ideas fairly rapidly. Or to use your example, if a language has no word for dissent SW would imply that people who spoke that language would never be able to understand the concept of dissent. Based on the evidence I cited above and other examples about languages that describe things like color, direction, and grasping of objects in different ways the evidence against that hypothesis is very strong. BTW, on a side point: Chomsky is a great admirer of Orwell and in his political writing references him frequently. Also, one of the empirical "facts" often claimed to support SW is that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. That is an urban myth that has amazingly worked its way into academia and persists in text books even to this day. When I audited a Linguistics class at Berkeley we read a fascinating and funny little paper that talked about the history of this myth and the fact that it is still taught in many text books even now. Anthropologists have found that in reality Eskimos have more or less as many words for snow as we do (slush, powder, etc.). Also, I think your example about the hyperbolic function is more about knowledge than language. E.g., you can have the words velocity and speed but until you take an intro physics course you don't understand that the way those words are used in Physics are different than the way they are used in everyday speech (velocity is a vector, it always includes a direction whereas speed is a scalar). Physics could just as easily call these terms Dspeed and Aspeed (e.g., directional speed and absolute speed as in absolute value). The words don't matter what matters is understanding how the words fit into a larger theoretical framework.

@megakeenbeen 2 жыл бұрын

Languages (in the shared, social sense) don't shape our thoughts, as if having many words for ice would make you a better judge of ice somehow. But language (in Chomskyan sense, i-language), in a deeper way, does shape our thoughts, as in their finite characterization gives rise to an infinite set of thoughts. In this sense, language is thought itself. Without a syntax I'm not sure if we would've had the capacity to think complex thoughts, to be able to reason, etc.

@michaeldebellis4202 2 жыл бұрын

@@megakeenbeen You bring up a bunch of interesting points (of course we totally agree on Sapir-Whorf). One question is: are language and thought just the same thing? Another way to ask this is: Is there such a thing as what Fodor calls a Language of Thought? I think the answers are no and yes. Language and thought are closely related but not the same thing and there is probably such a thing as a Language of Thought. I know Chomsky agrees with me on the first question but disagrees with me on the second (because I asked him when I took a class from him). On the first question, one simple example that Chomsky used is that we all have the experience of having some name or event "on the tip of our tongue" but can't remember it. Clearly there must be something going on where thought isn't completely tied to language since I can have an idea of a concept or person without being able to access the word(s) for it. I think he put the example in a more compelling way, the way I described it sounds trivial. For me another example (which of course is totally anecdotal) is as a programmer I often have a point where I can "see" the best solution to a problem without being able to completely describe it verbally, but I can sit down and program it and after I program it then I can describe it verbally. This doesn't happen often, only when I've been thinking about a hard problem for a long time, but honestly I love when it happens, it's such a Eureka! moment. One last thing: what Chomsky said is that he doesn't think there is a language of thought "except as the Logical Form in transformational grammar" Those weren't his exact words but I know he said Logical Form which is one of the forms we were studying in his theory (this was 2018 so pretty recent). I wanted to ask him "well isn't the logical form a language of thought?" but at that point I had already been hogging the microphone (his hearing is really bad, I'm pretty loud but I had to use a mic as did everyone) for more than one question already. It's something I always wanted to go back and ask him again but I try to limit my emails to him because he's still so busy in spite of his age.

@megakeenbeen 2 жыл бұрын

@@michaeldebellis4202 I think it is plausible to hypothesize that thoughts come in two forms, sentences and images. If you say there is a "Language of Thought", you have to also account for the language of mental images, which seems to me a hard question. The question essentially boils down to -- what's the syntax of mental imagery?

@tarnopol 4 жыл бұрын

Hey, does anyone know what piece that is at the beginning?

@Spike-hl2mw 4 жыл бұрын

Mendelssohn Octet

@emiliogonzalez1412 6 жыл бұрын

dank

@michaeldebellis4202 5 жыл бұрын

Regarding the discussion around 17 on the loss of languages: I honestly don't think this is such an awful thing and I think it's really inevitable as a result of technologies that enable travel and communication like the Internet. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who think everyone should speak English or that we should discourage bilingual education, I just think it's inevitable that as traditional boundaries of time and space are eliminated by technology the number of languages (dialects) is going to decrease and that's not really such a bad thing because it means more people will be able to communicate.

@MarvinMonroe 2 жыл бұрын

Yeah I regularly think about how fortunate it is that English is spoken so much in India. I'm very into Vendanta and Indian philosophy in general. I'm not saying the British colonialism and genocide of the Indian people was a good thing though. And it's also sad about languages dying. But there are definite advantages of all humans sharing a language. For starters, war might become less common. It's probably harder to start a war with a country full of people who can't understand us when we talk