Re: [xmca] Measuring culture

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Robert,

The issue of whether language shapes thought, and the specifics regarding the preferred frame of reference in different languages, is hotly debated, as I am sure you know. The following is an interesting route into the debate:

<http://economist.com/debate/overview/190>

Martin

On Apr 19, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Robert Lake wrote:

> *Linguistic relativity Continued.......*
> *
> *
> From Lake, R. (2012). *Vygotsky on Education Primer.* (pp. 111-112).New
> York. Peter Lang.
> 
> Because each culture makes meaning in widely
> diverse ways, language forms and usage might have
> complex intricacies and shades of meaning on one
> concept alone. The standard example of this is how
> time is viewed differently by different cultures. (This
> does not include the popular myth that the Hopi
> tribe of Indians does not have a word for time—it is
> simply not true.) However there are plenty of examples
> from the present day that suggest ways that language
> can shape thought. Consider the Australian
> aboriginal language, Guugu Yimithirr, spoken in
> north Queensland, which has no words for right or
> left, in front of, or behind to describe location. Instead
> they use the points of the compass even when
> requesting that someone move over to make room.
> They will say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you
> where exactly they left something in your house,
> they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the
> western table.”
> (Deutscher, G. (2010, August 29) Does your language shape how you
> think? The New York Times Sunday Magazine, p. MM 42.)
> 
> The effect on the thinking of this group is phenomenal
> in orienting the speakers to their directional
> spatial environment to such that roughly 1
> out of every 10 words in conversational Guugu
> Yimithirr includes either north, south, east or west
> and is accompanied with precise hand gestures
> (ibid). Consequently in this culture, language acquisition
> involves constant awareness of spaces relative
> to the points of the compass. Deutscher relays a fascinating
> story about the ways that memory is stored
> for the speakers of this language. The story also
> serves as a clear example of Vygotsky’s notion of language
> as a mediating tool as a means of creating
> higher levels of consciousness through spatial kin -
> es thetic approaches to meaning creation.
> One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his
> friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in
> shark-infested waters. He and an older person were
> caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They
> both jumped into the water and managed to swim
> nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that
> the missionary for whom they worked was far more
> concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at
> their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic
> content, the remarkable thing about the story was
> that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions:
> the speaker jumped into the water on the
> western side of the boat, his companion to the east
> of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north
> and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just
> made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance,
> the same person was filmed some years later telling
> the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly
> in the two tellings. Even more remarkable
> were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied
> the story. For instance, the direction in which
> the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic
> orientation, regardless of the direction the
> speaker was facing in the two films (ibid).
> This story also serves as a reminder that linguistic
> differences should not be viewed as liabilities. Instead
> we should see them as assets to the entire family of
> humans that keep homogeneity at bay by creating
> spaces for multiple ways of thinking, communicating,
> problem solving and being in the world.
> 
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 9:26 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:
> 
>> Linguistics is stalked by a terrible succubus, the succubus of
>> structuralist reification. I guess the worst example of this is the
>> Chomskyan "revolution", a technical means of diagramming sentences which
>> people mistook for the way in which people actually formulated them.
>> 
>> When this was clearly disproved by psycholinguistic experiments in the
>> sixties and seventies, it was immediately replaced with exactly the
>> opposite idea: that potential language and real language are exactly the
>> same thing; that is, everything that can be said actually is being said or
>> has been said somewhere in the world. Ergo corpus linguistics, the
>> linguistics of ever-larger computer corpora, is the real thing. I think
>> that the "five million books" idea is just the latest instantiation of
>> this opposite idea, which is ultimately behavioristic.
>> 
>> As Andy says, real philosophy, and real science, is what starts where
>> the popular myth, the current Zeitgeist ends. The problem is that the
>> NEXT big thing, the NEXT popular myth, also starts where the current
>> Zeitgeist ends; behavioristic "realism" in linguistics started exactly
>> where the structuralist succubus expired (and, I might remark
>> parenthetically, it started up precisely because we did not listen to
>> Merleau-Ponty's remark to the effect that structuralism's main crime was
>> not valuing structure ENOUGH to link it firmly enough to value).
>> 
>> I'm afraid that's how I read the Owen Barfield quote Rob and Larry refer
>> to below (though I'm ALSO afraid I will not have time to track it down and
>> read it in context). It seems to me we are in danger of going back to the
>> structuralist succubus: we are in danger of reifying the language system
>> and attributing all of linguistic creativity to this great bag of God
>> sentences.
>> 
>> I don't believe language is an abstract system that is capable of
>> generating any and all sentences. I believe in language that is still warm
>> from the lips and breath of living breathing humans, and I believe that
>> there is no actual poetry without an actual poet (whether that poet is
>> wearing laurels or just wearing a baking cap and an apron). But I also
>> don't believe that language and all of its poetic moments are just the sum
>> total of everything that ever has been said, is being said, or even will be
>> being said by living breathing people.
>> 
>> If this seems like a contradiction, then it is only because we are not in
>> the habit of thinking of potential as truly infinite (mathematicians had a
>> similar problem explaining what it really means when we say something like
>> given an infinite number of opportunities, everything that can happen will
>> happen).
>> 
>> Every unit of language, from sounds to words to the most complex and
>> intricate of wordings, is both a car horn and a traffic light. That is,
>> there is always some element (what Volosinov calls 'theme" and Vygotsky
>> calls "sense") that is mutable and negotiable, where you have to look over
>> your shoulder and see if you know the guy who is honking.
>> 
>> In sounds, intonation and stress are like this. In words, the prefixes and
>> suffixes and particles and pronouns. In sentences, subgrammatical fragments
>> like "What about you?". But in language generally, this is the predominant
>> nature of spoken discourse, and that is why it is consistently missing from
>> the Google N-grams base (which would have you believe that swearing was
>> invented in the late twentieth century).
>> 
>> Then there is this other element (what Volosinov calls meaning proper and
>> what Vygotsky calls "signification") that is quite fixed and systematic.
>> Red always means stop and green always means go (although the precise
>> meaning of yellow depends on where you are with relation to the
>> intersection).
>> 
>> In sounds, vowels and consonants are like this. In words, the common nouns
>> and workaday verbs, the independent morphemes of all kinds. In sentences,
>> the independent clauses that make up the overwhelming majority of our
>> (non-novelistic and non-dialogic) written text. This is where we find all
>> of our dictionary meanings,  (and, alas, almost all of the meanings in the
>> N-gram system).
>> 
>> The infinite potential of language, which is what the poet exploits and
>> which is why language is not reducible to the sum total of everything that
>> has been, is, and will be said, is the product of the way these systems
>> interact. So there is no contradiction. But if there were, it would only be
>> a contra-diction; it would still be perfectly true.
>> 
>> David Kellogg
>> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>> 
>> 
>> --- On Thu, 4/19/12, Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> From: Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Measuring culture
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Thursday, April 19, 2012, 6:45 AM
>> 
>> 
>> Hi Larry,
>> I am intrigued with the passage from  Owen Barfield.
>> 
>> Which book is that found in?
>> 
>> RL
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 1:53 AM, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Andy,  thanks for this post which I find exploring experience and
>> culture.
>>> These insights of Dewey's seems to parallel  themes I've been reading in
>>> Gadamer's perspective on prejudice .
>>> 
>>> especially the section,
>>> 
>>> It [experience] is filled with interpretations, classifications, due to
>>> sophisticated thought,
>>> which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh, naive
>>> empirical material. It would take more wisdom than is possessed by
>>> the wisest historic scholar to track all of these absorbed
>>> borrowings to their original sources. If we may for the moment call
>>> these materials prejudices (even if they are true, as long as their
>>> source and authority is unknown), then /philosophy is a critique of
>>> prejudices/.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I would like to juxtapose, or put in play, these insights of Dewey's
>> with a
>>> quote from Owen Barfield,
>>> 
>>> More particularly, it (i.e. pleasure) can be aroused by a language which
>> is
>>> at an earlier stage of development than the one which is our own, because
>>> it is the nature of language to grow less figurative, less and less
>> couched
>>> in terms of imagery, as it grows older.  We notice, we relish figurative
>>> quality in older language, and we EXPERIENCE this figurative element in
>> the
>>> same way in which we experience those new metaphors which poets make for
>>> us. But it does not follow from this (and this is where most of the
>>> philologists of the 19th Century and the early twenties have really made
>>> their mistake) it does not follow from this that that figurative element,
>>> that presence of living memory, that we find in earlier language was
>> made,
>>> invented, created by the individual genius of a poet.  On the contrary,
>> it
>>> couldn't have been.  It was simply there in the language as such; it was
>> a
>>> 'given' kind of meaning, a 'given' kind of imagery.
>>> 
>>> I also want to bring in Emily's comment posted today,
>>> 
>>> I just wanted to call attention to play as in the way play ' plays '
>> us...
>>> Gadamer talks about this in Truth and Method, noting that  when we engage
>>> in in play, play can overtake and seem to become something more that the
>>> participants.
>>> 
>>> As I read Dewey's, Barfield's, and Gadamer's notions of experience I see
>> a
>>> theme of experience and expression as playful.
>>> 
>>> Larry
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> More parti
>>> On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 9:37 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Wagner, your post sent me into my book of the writings of John Dewey,
>>>> where I became happily lost for half an hour. I couldn't find the
>> maxim I
>>>> was looking for, but this one will do:
>>>> 
>>>>  "Experience is already overlaid and saturated with the products of
>>>>  the reflection  of past generations and by-gone ages. It is filled
>>>>  with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought,
>>>>  which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh, naive
>>>>  empirical material. It would take more wisdom than is possessed by
>>>>  the wisest historic scholar to track all of these absorbed
>>>>  borrowings to their original sources. If we may for the moment call
>>>>  these materials prejudices (even if they are true, as long as their
>>>>  source and authority is unknown), then /philosophy is a critique of
>>>>  prejudices/. These incorporated results of past reflection, welded
>>>>  into the genuine materials of first-hand experience, may become the
>>>>  organss of enrichment if they are detected and reflected upon. If
>>>>  they are not detected, they often obfuscate and distort.
>>>>  Clarification and emancipation follow when they are detected and
>>>>  cast out; and one great object of philosophy is to accomplish this
>>>>  task." (PJD 276)
>>>> 
>>>> The quote I was looking for and couldn't find made an allusion to
>> Hegel's
>>>> famous aphorism:
>>>> 
>>>>  "As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so
>>>>  philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as
>>>>  foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present
>>>>  world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over
>>>>  Rhodes." (Pref. Phil Rt.)
>>>> 
>>>> and went on to say that while no philosophy worthy of the name can
>> simply
>>>> reflect the prejudices of its own times, it is given by its own times
>> the
>>>> prejudices against which it must protest. Those who are blindly swept
>>> along
>>>> by the fashions of the times are quite incapable of doing this and are
>>> not
>>>> worthy of the name of philosophy or science.
>>>> 
>>>> Andy
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Wagner Luiz Schmit wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>> 
>>>>> I don't know if you already saw this... I am still thinking about it
>> and
>>>>> what to say about it...
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/**pt-br/what_we_learned_from_5_**
>>>>> million_books.html<
>>> 
>> http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/pt-br/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> A new tool or a new way to reduce human to numbers? In some places i
>>>>> already see scientists from fields like neuroscience, evolutionary
>>>>> psychology and etc pointing to me and saying "Marx? Vygotsky? Gosh you
>>> are
>>>>> obsolete and should be in a Museum". And they have funding...
>>>>> 
>>>>> Just trowing toughs...
>>>>> 
>>>>> Wagner Luiz Schmit
>>>>> ______________________________**____________
>>>>> _____
>>>>> xmca mailing list
>>>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/**listinfo/xmca<
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca>
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> ------------------------------**------------------------------**
>>>> ------------
>>>> *Andy Blunden*
>>>> Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/**toc/hmca20/18/1<
>>> http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1>
>>>> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
>>>> Book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/**product/1608461459/<
>>> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1608461459/>
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> ______________________________**____________
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>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> *Robert Lake  Ed.D.
>> *Assistant Professor
>> Social Foundations of Education
>> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
>> Georgia Southern University
>> P. O. Box 8144
>> Phone: (912) 478-5125
>> Fax: (912) 478-5382
>> Statesboro, GA  30460
>> 
>> *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
>> midwife.*
>> *-*John Dewey.
>> __________________________________________
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> *Robert Lake  Ed.D.
> *Assistant Professor
> Social Foundations of Education
> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
> Georgia Southern University
> P. O. Box 8144
> Phone: (912) 478-5125
> Fax: (912) 478-5382
> Statesboro, GA  30460
> 
> *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
> midwife.*
> *-*John Dewey.
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

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