That's right, any abuse of government power, however outrageous, can be justified on the grounds that it might (or might not) make it ever so slightly less likely that you'll die in a terrorist attack. You should be far more worried about dying in a car crash than dying in a terrorist attack.
Oh, tell me you kidding. Yes, I really do mean kidding. You don't really believe all we have to do is play nice with terrorists and they'll leave us alone, do you? Seriously?
He meant that the US ought to play nice with the rest of the world, not with terrorists, you idiot.
Chomsky has in recent federal elections siphoned off votes that might have helped elect a Democratic President.
How has he done that? He's never stood as a candidate, and in the last election he suggested that people who didn't live in states with a large Democrat majority voted for Kerry and not for Nader.
Except that, erm, Chomsky has never suggested that words and choice of language "dictate" thoughts. And indeed denies any link between his linguistics and political work.
I have seen (multiple times) my 4-year-old explain to my toddler new words and how to say others words and seen the toddler immediately listen, imitate and use with understanding, and not forget later.
That's vocabulary learning, where it is indeed true that children will sometimes ask "what does X mean?" and pay attention to the answer. However, I was talking about learning facts of grammar, where this never happens. It is the aquisition of grammar which is particularly hard to explain. In any case, it's also extremely difficult to explain how children aquire vocabulary, since they have very limited evidence concerning the meaning of words. Even when you "explain" the meaning of a word to a child, you will actually be leaving out most of its meaning, which is somehow intuitively grasped by any human. For example, your toddler doesn't need anyone to explain to her that book names can be used both referentially and non-referentially (respectively: "Tolstoy wrote War and Peace"; "Don't throw War and Peace across the room!"), or indeed that a single instance of a book name can have both meanings at once ("Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, so don't throw it across the room!"). These are not obvious or necessary properties of language -- one can easily imagine a language where names for books are strictly referential -- but babies somehow grasp it anyway.
You can certainly teach primates to make short sign sequences, though it doesn't seem that they have the same complex recursive structure as natural language sentences (7 signs is about the longest ape sentence that has been observed, and it's not clear that long strings of signs in ape signing have very much structure). My point was that you don't need to teach babies their native language. They learn incredibly complex syntactic, semantic and phonological facts about their native language without any instruction whatsoever (and in fact while ignoring any explicit instruction given by adults). Consider the following fact of English. You can say either "I picked up the book" or "I picked the book up", but while you can say "I picked it up", you can't say "I picked up it". That is the sort of complex syntactic fact which babies master without any instruction whatsoever -- unless you're a syntactician, you probably never even noticed that particular fact of English syntax.
You also have to be beware of the extent to which signs can be overinterpreted. We don't know that Koko was saying that she wanted a baby. She may have been saying something far simpler.
It's implausible to assert that primates in the wild don't "need" complex communication. If that is the case, why did humans evolve it? We were, after all, primates living in a very similar environment to the one in which chimpanzees and other apes live. It is clearly useful to have complex communication in virtually any social environment, but it is apparently beyond the cognitive abilities of apes unless they are specially trained (and even then their communication is not especially complex).
If you examine other highly social animals, you see that the social group is more important to the individual animals than anything else (including food.)
On the contrary, social groups frequently break down when there is competition for limited resources. Ultimately, people put their own need for food and shelter beyond that of others (except perhaps family members). I just don't see that babies are more interested in social contact than food. They're certainly interested in social contact, but you should hear them when they haven't been fed for a few hours!
Humans have a *need* to communicate with each other, and that need is just as real as the need for food. Social rewards are just as important as ones that are more tangible (and often moreso.)
As I said before, the amount of social attention babies get for talking has very little to do with the complexity or correctness of what they say. Babies get just as much attention when they're babbling as when they're producing two word utterances. And more importantly, the feedback babies get isn't very useful for actually learning language (Mum is going to smile at you whether or not you conjugate the perfect tense correctly). So yes, perhaps babies talk because they want attention (though they frequently babble when no-one else is around). But you can't explain their incredible ability to aquire language as a simple case of conditioning. Even if a baby really really wants to learn English, it doesn't follow that he will learn English unless he has the necessary (innate) cognitive abilities.
If you don't do that, they will not start talking for many months. I know of a toddler that started talking at almost 2yo (as opposed to 8-18 months) because everytime the said "ah" and pointed to something, his parents gave it to him.
You say "because", but you have no evidence of any cause/effect relationship. It's not particularly unusual for a baby not to start talking until 2yo; they don't all develop at the same rate.
When a baby is starting to speak, you should ignore it most of the time it cries, and give him reward in attention when he speaks; that way, it'll develop speech faster.
Actually, there is no evidence that giving babies attention when they speak leads to faster linguistic development. Conceivably it might speed up the very early stages, but it certainly doesn't lead to any long-term gain in linguistic ability.
but you missed one of the essential factors of this phenomenon. Before babies overapply these rules, they actually get them right.
I'm not sure if that really weakens my point. The fact that babies go from rote learning of irregular forms -> overregularization -> correct speech, just goes to show that babies follow their own schedule, and don't just gradually absorb more and more information about language. There is no good reason why a baby should start overapplying rules when it already knows that certain forms are irregular -- this seems to be an idiosyncratic fact of language aquisition which can't be explained by anything in the baby's environment. It has to be explained by some characteristic of baby pyschology (not necessarily a universal grammar/aquisition procedure, but it has to be something which is innately specified).
Although I'm not terribly familiar with the aquisition literature, my own guess would be that babies start to overregularize once they have developed a knowledge of language which includes inflection. Initially, perhaps, they have a concept of "verb", but not a concept of "verb + agreement + tense", so they are unable to do anything other than learn lexical entries for verbs by rote.
For sure, babies pay a lot of attention to adult speech, and this is how they learn language (in combination with their innate knowledge of language). Whether or not this means that the adults are "teaching" them is essentially a terminological question, but I think in normal usage "teach" implies something stronger.
Babies are HEAPED with attention for their first nonsense syllables - and it's definitely not the same kind of attention they get by crying. It's eye-contact, smiles, laughs, high-pitched repetitive dialog. When the parent suspects that a sound is being used meaningfully, the attention is heaped even higher.
Surely babies do often get eye contact if they cry? Anyway, the point is that the kind of attention that babies get from saying single words (before there language ability is fully developed) is not really any more useful than the attention they can get from crying (which will frequently get them milk, a diaper change, etc.) More importantly, the attention babies get for speaking is rarely any use for learning language. Parents tend to give more attention to interesting sentences with grammatical errors than uninteresting sentences with perfect grammar. If babies really just spoke to get eye contact or whatever, they'd have little incentive to improve their language beyond the two word utterance level. In fact, however, babies babble away quite happily even if they get very little attention or reward in return (which they sometimes don't, depending on the particular family/culture).
There are plenty of humans that aren't capable of learning grammar without instruction.
Erm, no. What we're talking about here is the notion of "grammar" in linguistics. This is the knowledge that people have which allows them to construct sentences, not the sort of prescriptive rules you're taught in school (don't split inifinitives, etc.) Only a small number of people with specific mental disabilities are unable to aquire the grammar of their native language.
For almost every question and "debunking" of ape speach, it hinges on a question that can't be answered for humans.
It does? Human babies learn languages very easily, eventually aquiring an enormous vocabulary and a mastery of sophisticated grammatical rules, often without much in the way of explicit instruction or training. Apes don't, even if you try to set up ideal conditions for them to do so.
Well I certainly remember babies getting quite a bit of attention (and I'm pretty sure treats) when they were being taught how to speak (and I do remember having them taught how to speak).
There's a lot of evidence that how ever much people may try to teach babies to speak, babies ignore them. The best evidence for this is that babies will persist in making systematic errors (e.g. "sheeps") even if explicitly corrected by an adult. Of course, whenever you speak to a baby, what you say is potentially available to the baby as linguistic data, but that doesn't mean that there's any teaching going on.
But regardless, apes have learnt sign language without being actively taught (just go to the links I provided).
A quick look at the links you've provided shows no such thing. The closest I found was that apes were observed signing to each other without trainers present, which of course just goes to show that they had at some point been trained. "Loulis", according to this article managed to aquire 50 signs without instruction, but (leaving aside the fact that this is a miniscule achievement compared to the vocabulary a baby learns in similar circumstances) we don't know whether she showed any significant ability to produce structured sentences using these signs. The chimps at the CHCI (allegedly) show some limited ability in this regard, but they were trained.
Some of the scholarship in the articles you link to is a little shoddy. For example, this article describes Chomsky's (supposed) views on the subject, but only cites a secondary source as justification (Booth). Chomsky would in fact probably agree that apes have many of the cognitive mechanisms necessary for language (see the recent work by Chomsky, Hauser & Fitch), though he still denies that chimps have a fully formed language faculty. These days, he would say that the crucial ability they lack is recursion.
To be honest, is it possible to prove that human children don't speak for the same reasons? I don't think so. Think about it, when a baby is learning to speak, we heap attention and treats on them.
Not really. Babies don't usually get any tangible reward simply for saying a word or two. They may get some attention, but they could get that far more effectively just by crying. Language is only really useful to a baby once it's developed to a significant extent. There are some cultures where babies are more or less ignored until they're able to keep up a decent conversation, but those babies still learn their native language just fine (despite not being rewarded for speaking to any significant extent).
Exactly what it is possible to teach bonobos is an open question -- just as it is an open question what it is possible to teach humans. The point is that human language isn't taught. You don't need to devise elaborate reward schemata to get a human baby to learn a natural language.
Which means that what is evidently true of all human conversation must, absent evidence of some weird systematic bias, be true of the conversation I've observed personally.
The bias is that you tend to remember the times when communication fails rather than when it works, and you're also obllivious to most forms of ambiguity unless you think hard about what you're saying/hearing.
That is, you're free to assert that most of the conversation you've heard is just about as efficient and short as it could be. Do you? (snicker)
Yes, to a large extent. Generally people seem to strike a pretty good balance between clarity and concision. If you made language 100% unambiguous it would take us several years to say "I'm going to the shops tomorrow".
from the way I say this you might deduce I take the Dennettist position that mocks the entire idea of the Cartesian observer in his gallery, appreciating the "meaning" of it all. You'd be right. If pressed I would say that I think the evidence that human beings use classical Aristotelian deductive logic at all is scanty, at best. They seem to use it almost exclusively to rationalize conclusions already reached by some other method.
Why use Descartes as your whipping boy, though? He thought that certain knowledge could only be arrived at by deduction from self-evident first principles, but I'm not so sure he though that cognition was in general logical deduction (this was more Leibniz's bag). A consistent theme with the rationalists is the need to guard against the natural human tendency to be illogical and irrational, giving undue priority to experience and "common sense", etc.
Every other species on the planet gets along fine without abstract complex information exchange. That seems weird if it's so all-fired useful.
It isn't really, since it may be that it's only useful if you've already got a certain level of intelligence and social organisation. In any case, if abstract complex information exchange is at all useful, even like 0.001% useful, people who have better mechanisms for doing it will have a selectional advantage. I do agree that the evolution of language in a narrow sense might have been partially an accident, but I think that we have pretty good mechanisms for optimising communication within the limits of the kind of language that we have (i.e. there are problems with language, there's no single word in English for "stumbling around drunkenly", for example, but we get around these limitations in a fairly optimal manner).
"Pattern recognition" isn't a vague term, it's just a general term. After all, you understood something by it well enough to take umbrage at the idea that this is largely how we think. So while you thought what I asserted about pattern recognition was nonsense, you certainly seemd to find it well-defined nonsense!
Oh, come off it. It's perfectly cogent to object to the statement "X is Y" on the grounds that Y is so vague as to have essentially no meaning. I guess the well-defined aspect of it that I take umbridge at is that there is only one kind of cognitive process that does every kind of cognition (i.e. it's anti-modular).
Our natural "clock speed" is so low, at best a few kHz, that there's no way we could perform the cognitive tasks we do in the time we do except through massively parallel algorithms.
First off, that depends on exactly what can happen within a clock cycle. There's far more going on in the brain than signals being sent between neurons. Second, there's no incompatibility between logical deduction and massively parallel computation (just take a look at pure functional programming languages, for example).
This does not sound like a faithful detailed image of the system is coming in front of a central observer (that Cartesian homonculus) who is "appreciating" the scene. If this is so in visual processing, why not in general? Why would the brain evolve one way of solving vis
(1) No it's not, because your listener frequently doesn't know what you mean by "that one," so the conversations are actually more like this:
That's false. In the majority of cases deictic or ambiguous elements in discourse are resolved without difficulty. If they always caused problems, people wouldn't use them. (Note that you didn't have any trouble resolving "that", or either of the two instances of "they", you probably had a pretty good idea of what I meant by "the majority of cases", you resolved the enormously vague verb "use" to get the correct meaning, etc. etc.). Natural language is chock full of ambiguity, 90% of which doesn't cause any problems.
But, alas, far too many conversations in my experience look like the second one above for me to really buy it.
If you look at linguistic corpora rather than relying on intuitions from your personal experience, you'll see that this generally isn't the case.
I think we talk like that way because speech for abstract information conveyance is an evolutionary accident
Evidence? Did hunter gatherers not make use of abstract information and convey it to each other? People seem to assume that the only words they would have had any use for are "ug" and "fuck", neglecting to consider the enormous amounts of knowledge about the world and other people that hunter gatherers have to keep track of. To take just one example of an abstract conept that's useful whatever your lifestyle, consider probability. "You are more likely to find berries over there than around here", etc.
Argh! The Cartesian deductive logic scam. Any decision or insight can be rationalized post facto as following from a chain of orderly deductive logic. But is that actually how we figured it out? Or is the deductive stuff just how we tell ourselves we did, or how we explain the correctness of the conclusion to others?
I'm not suggesting that all our mental capacities are based on deductive logic (but I suspect that a fair few are, though not on a truth-preserving logic). The point is that "pattern recognition" is a vacuous term: saying that the mind uses pattern recognition is about as informative as saying that the mind thinks. People who refer to pattern recognition often seem to have a lot of faith in "neural networks" (a term used to describe various kinds of finite state automaton in order to make them sound cool) to do the job of "pattern recognition". Well, neural nets are good for finding statistical regularities in some domains, but since we haven't got a definition of pattern recognition, we can't really say whether or not neural nets are any good at it. On the face of it, it seems that what they are good at (statistical analysis) simply isn't anywhere near sufficient to account for the things that minds can do.
I'd say the thought that this is how we actually think, that we actually have brain tissue that makes deductions from abstract principles, is getting more doubtful with every discovery of how our brains actually work.
Why? What do we know about how our brains work that makes this implausible? Brains seem to be computational devices, and computational devices are pretty damn good at logic. Perhaps you're referring to psychological evidence pertaining to the nature of the mind rather than evidence pertaining to nature of the brain? (Our current knowledge of the brain is consistent with a million and one theories of the mind.)
Basically, we convey information terribly and waste phenomental amounts of bandwidth. We speak very imprecisely and even inaccurately as a rule.
Actually, imprecision is a great way of avoiding bandwidth waste. It's much quicker to say simply "yes" or "that one" than "i would like a coffee" or "the book on the second shelf 3rd from the right". The systems which allow us to understand imprecise utterances are phenomenally complex. It's not an imperfection that language is vague, it's an engineering marvel.
It may be we use deductive reasoning mostly only after we have arrived at the answer by some other means (pattern recognition, for example, or intuitive guess followed by verification), and us it mostly to rationalize, organize, and conveniently store for future use what we have figured out by other means.
Argh! The "pattern recognition" scam. Any problem can be considered as a pattern recognition problem at some level of abstraction. If there really is such a thing as a general "pattern recognition device", it would (given a sufficient number of neurons or whatever) have to be able to solve any problem in existence, which seems pretty unlikely. Deductive reasoning is in fact pattern recognition par excellence. Rules of logical inference apply to logical sentences which match certain patterns.
Ironically, the fact that my parent post eventually got modded down to flamebait from +5 Insightful while the post I was replying to remains at +3 Insightful just proves my point -- Slashdot is far less tolerant of left wing views than right wing views. Any criticism of the US whatsoever is found to be intolerable, yet at the same time the convervatives on Slashdot whine about it being biased towards the left. Incredible!
Exhibit A: Socialist economics. Any dewy-eyed college freshman can believe in socialism, as easily as any dimwitted kid can believe in Santa Claus, and for the same reason.
This article has nothing to do with the US and yet there are a good amount of US criticizing going on.
Erm, and there is a good amount of criticism of France and the UN in articles which have nothing to do with them. Slashdot discussions tend to go off topic. Are you new here or something?
The only reason your modded as insightful is because you take a shot at 'whining American conservatives' and that plays well to the Slashdot crowd.
But the comment I was replying to also got modded insightful by the "Slashdot crowd".
Erm, calm down. I never said that you did hold simplistic views, I just said that such views are "found on the American right" (which they are). Really, since the post I was responding to didn't make any arguments of its own but only tried to disparage a fictional clique of looney left Slashdot posters, it was hard to respond with cold, impersonal rational argument. I merely pointed out that the OP was seeing the situation backwards.
How is it ad hominem? Criticising people for holding simplistic views is not an ad hominem attack in a political discussion where one of the topics at issue is simplisitc views of good/evil.
Sadly, regular slashdot readers get the impression that the US is the heart of all that is evil and the UN/EU is a bastion of justice and peace.
Nope, I just see lots of whining American conservatives who think that foreign countries and institutions exist purely for their amusement, but who treat their own blitheringly stupid and obnoxious administration with totalitarian degrees of reverence. Objectively, America gets criticised on Slashdot far less than the EU and the UN, who get bashed every single time they're mentioned. It's just that people like you get hysterical when there's any criticism of America. No-one is suggesting that the US is the source of "all evil". That's the sort of dumb simplistic view you find on the American right, but inverted ("everyone who isn't the US is the source of all evil").
Slashdot Mirror
That's right, any abuse of government power, however outrageous, can be justified on the grounds that it might (or might not) make it ever so slightly less likely that you'll die in a terrorist attack. You should be far more worried about dying in a car crash than dying in a terrorist attack.
Oh, tell me you kidding. Yes, I really do mean kidding. You don't really believe all we have to do is play nice with terrorists and they'll leave us alone, do you? Seriously?
He meant that the US ought to play nice with the rest of the world, not with terrorists, you idiot.
Chomsky has in recent federal elections siphoned off votes that might have helped elect a Democratic President.
How has he done that? He's never stood as a candidate, and in the last election he suggested that people who didn't live in states with a large Democrat majority voted for Kerry and not for Nader.
Except that, erm, Chomsky has never suggested that words and choice of language "dictate" thoughts. And indeed denies any link between his linguistics and political work.
It's warballs, actually.
I have seen (multiple times) my 4-year-old explain to my toddler new words and how to say others words and seen the toddler immediately listen, imitate and use with understanding, and not forget later.
That's vocabulary learning, where it is indeed true that children will sometimes ask "what does X mean?" and pay attention to the answer. However, I was talking about learning facts of grammar, where this never happens. It is the aquisition of grammar which is particularly hard to explain. In any case, it's also extremely difficult to explain how children aquire vocabulary, since they have very limited evidence concerning the meaning of words. Even when you "explain" the meaning of a word to a child, you will actually be leaving out most of its meaning, which is somehow intuitively grasped by any human. For example, your toddler doesn't need anyone to explain to her that book names can be used both referentially and non-referentially (respectively: "Tolstoy wrote War and Peace"; "Don't throw War and Peace across the room!"), or indeed that a single instance of a book name can have both meanings at once ("Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, so don't throw it across the room!"). These are not obvious or necessary properties of language -- one can easily imagine a language where names for books are strictly referential -- but babies somehow grasp it anyway.
You can certainly teach primates to make short sign sequences, though it doesn't seem that they have the same complex recursive structure as natural language sentences (7 signs is about the longest ape sentence that has been observed, and it's not clear that long strings of signs in ape signing have very much structure). My point was that you don't need to teach babies their native language. They learn incredibly complex syntactic, semantic and phonological facts about their native language without any instruction whatsoever (and in fact while ignoring any explicit instruction given by adults). Consider the following fact of English. You can say either "I picked up the book" or "I picked the book up", but while you can say "I picked it up", you can't say "I picked up it". That is the sort of complex syntactic fact which babies master without any instruction whatsoever -- unless you're a syntactician, you probably never even noticed that particular fact of English syntax.
You also have to be beware of the extent to which signs can be overinterpreted. We don't know that Koko was saying that she wanted a baby. She may have been saying something far simpler.
It's implausible to assert that primates in the wild don't "need" complex communication. If that is the case, why did humans evolve it? We were, after all, primates living in a very similar environment to the one in which chimpanzees and other apes live. It is clearly useful to have complex communication in virtually any social environment, but it is apparently beyond the cognitive abilities of apes unless they are specially trained (and even then their communication is not especially complex).
If you examine other highly social animals, you see that the social group is more important to the individual animals than anything else (including food.)
On the contrary, social groups frequently break down when there is competition for limited resources. Ultimately, people put their own need for food and shelter beyond that of others (except perhaps family members). I just don't see that babies are more interested in social contact than food. They're certainly interested in social contact, but you should hear them when they haven't been fed for a few hours!
Humans have a *need* to communicate with each other, and that need is just as real as the need for food. Social rewards are just as important as ones that are more tangible (and often moreso.)
As I said before, the amount of social attention babies get for talking has very little to do with the complexity or correctness of what they say. Babies get just as much attention when they're babbling as when they're producing two word utterances. And more importantly, the feedback babies get isn't very useful for actually learning language (Mum is going to smile at you whether or not you conjugate the perfect tense correctly). So yes, perhaps babies talk because they want attention (though they frequently babble when no-one else is around). But you can't explain their incredible ability to aquire language as a simple case of conditioning. Even if a baby really really wants to learn English, it doesn't follow that he will learn English unless he has the necessary (innate) cognitive abilities.
If you don't do that, they will not start talking for many months. I know of a toddler that started talking at almost 2yo (as opposed to 8-18 months) because everytime the said "ah" and pointed to something, his parents gave it to him.
You say "because", but you have no evidence of any cause/effect relationship. It's not particularly unusual for a baby not to start talking until 2yo; they don't all develop at the same rate.
When a baby is starting to speak, you should ignore it most of the time it cries, and give him reward in attention when he speaks; that way, it'll develop speech faster.
Actually, there is no evidence that giving babies attention when they speak leads to faster linguistic development. Conceivably it might speed up the very early stages, but it certainly doesn't lead to any long-term gain in linguistic ability.
but you missed one of the essential factors of this phenomenon. Before babies overapply these rules, they actually get them right.
I'm not sure if that really weakens my point. The fact that babies go from rote learning of irregular forms -> overregularization -> correct speech, just goes to show that babies follow their own schedule, and don't just gradually absorb more and more information about language. There is no good reason why a baby should start overapplying rules when it already knows that certain forms are irregular -- this seems to be an idiosyncratic fact of language aquisition which can't be explained by anything in the baby's environment. It has to be explained by some characteristic of baby pyschology (not necessarily a universal grammar/aquisition procedure, but it has to be something which is innately specified).
Although I'm not terribly familiar with the aquisition literature, my own guess would be that babies start to overregularize once they have developed a knowledge of language which includes inflection. Initially, perhaps, they have a concept of "verb", but not a concept of "verb + agreement + tense", so they are unable to do anything other than learn lexical entries for verbs by rote.
For sure, babies pay a lot of attention to adult speech, and this is how they learn language (in combination with their innate knowledge of language). Whether or not this means that the adults are "teaching" them is essentially a terminological question, but I think in normal usage "teach" implies something stronger.
Babies are HEAPED with attention for their first nonsense syllables - and it's definitely not the same kind of attention they get by crying. It's eye-contact, smiles, laughs, high-pitched repetitive dialog. When the parent suspects that a sound is being used meaningfully, the attention is heaped even higher.
Surely babies do often get eye contact if they cry? Anyway, the point is that the kind of attention that babies get from saying single words (before there language ability is fully developed) is not really any more useful than the attention they can get from crying (which will frequently get them milk, a diaper change, etc.) More importantly, the attention babies get for speaking is rarely any use for learning language. Parents tend to give more attention to interesting sentences with grammatical errors than uninteresting sentences with perfect grammar. If babies really just spoke to get eye contact or whatever, they'd have little incentive to improve their language beyond the two word utterance level. In fact, however, babies babble away quite happily even if they get very little attention or reward in return (which they sometimes don't, depending on the particular family/culture).
There are plenty of humans that aren't capable of learning grammar without instruction.
Erm, no. What we're talking about here is the notion of "grammar" in linguistics. This is the knowledge that people have which allows them to construct sentences, not the sort of prescriptive rules you're taught in school (don't split inifinitives, etc.) Only a small number of people with specific mental disabilities are unable to aquire the grammar of their native language.
For almost every question and "debunking" of ape speach, it hinges on a question that can't be answered for humans.
It does? Human babies learn languages very easily, eventually aquiring an enormous vocabulary and a mastery of sophisticated grammatical rules, often without much in the way of explicit instruction or training. Apes don't, even if you try to set up ideal conditions for them to do so.
Well I certainly remember babies getting quite a bit of attention (and I'm pretty sure treats) when they were being taught how to speak (and I do remember having them taught how to speak).
There's a lot of evidence that how ever much people may try to teach babies to speak, babies ignore them. The best evidence for this is that babies will persist in making systematic errors (e.g. "sheeps") even if explicitly corrected by an adult. Of course, whenever you speak to a baby, what you say is potentially available to the baby as linguistic data, but that doesn't mean that there's any teaching going on.
But regardless, apes have learnt sign language without being actively taught (just go to the links I provided).
A quick look at the links you've provided shows no such thing. The closest I found was that apes were observed signing to each other without trainers present, which of course just goes to show that they had at some point been trained. "Loulis", according to this article managed to aquire 50 signs without instruction, but (leaving aside the fact that this is a miniscule achievement compared to the vocabulary a baby learns in similar circumstances) we don't know whether she showed any significant ability to produce structured sentences using these signs. The chimps at the CHCI (allegedly) show some limited ability in this regard, but they were trained.
Some of the scholarship in the articles you link to is a little shoddy. For example, this article describes Chomsky's (supposed) views on the subject, but only cites a secondary source as justification (Booth). Chomsky would in fact probably agree that apes have many of the cognitive mechanisms necessary for language (see the recent work by Chomsky, Hauser & Fitch), though he still denies that chimps have a fully formed language faculty. These days, he would say that the crucial ability they lack is recursion.
To be honest, is it possible to prove that human children don't speak for the same reasons? I don't think so. Think about it, when a baby is learning to speak, we heap attention and treats on them.
Not really. Babies don't usually get any tangible reward simply for saying a word or two. They may get some attention, but they could get that far more effectively just by crying. Language is only really useful to a baby once it's developed to a significant extent. There are some cultures where babies are more or less ignored until they're able to keep up a decent conversation, but those babies still learn their native language just fine (despite not being rewarded for speaking to any significant extent).
Exactly what it is possible to teach bonobos is an open question -- just as it is an open question what it is possible to teach humans. The point is that human language isn't taught. You don't need to devise elaborate reward schemata to get a human baby to learn a natural language.
Which means that what is evidently true of all human conversation must, absent evidence of some weird systematic bias, be true of the conversation I've observed personally.
The bias is that you tend to remember the times when communication fails rather than when it works, and you're also obllivious to most forms of ambiguity unless you think hard about what you're saying/hearing.
That is, you're free to assert that most of the conversation you've heard is just about as efficient and short as it could be. Do you? (snicker)
Yes, to a large extent. Generally people seem to strike a pretty good balance between clarity and concision. If you made language 100% unambiguous it would take us several years to say "I'm going to the shops tomorrow".
from the way I say this you might deduce I take the Dennettist position that mocks the entire idea of the Cartesian observer in his gallery, appreciating the "meaning" of it all. You'd be right. If pressed I would say that I think the evidence that human beings use classical Aristotelian deductive logic at all is scanty, at best. They seem to use it almost exclusively to rationalize conclusions already reached by some other method.
Why use Descartes as your whipping boy, though? He thought that certain knowledge could only be arrived at by deduction from self-evident first principles, but I'm not so sure he though that cognition was in general logical deduction (this was more Leibniz's bag). A consistent theme with the rationalists is the need to guard against the natural human tendency to be illogical and irrational, giving undue priority to experience and "common sense", etc.
Every other species on the planet gets along fine without abstract complex information exchange. That seems weird if it's so all-fired useful.
It isn't really, since it may be that it's only useful if you've already got a certain level of intelligence and social organisation. In any case, if abstract complex information exchange is at all useful, even like 0.001% useful, people who have better mechanisms for doing it will have a selectional advantage. I do agree that the evolution of language in a narrow sense might have been partially an accident, but I think that we have pretty good mechanisms for optimising communication within the limits of the kind of language that we have (i.e. there are problems with language, there's no single word in English for "stumbling around drunkenly", for example, but we get around these limitations in a fairly optimal manner).
"Pattern recognition" isn't a vague term, it's just a general term. After all, you understood something by it well enough to take umbrage at the idea that this is largely how we think. So while you thought what I asserted about pattern recognition was nonsense, you certainly seemd to find it well-defined nonsense!
Oh, come off it. It's perfectly cogent to object to the statement "X is Y" on the grounds that Y is so vague as to have essentially no meaning. I guess the well-defined aspect of it that I take umbridge at is that there is only one kind of cognitive process that does every kind of cognition (i.e. it's anti-modular).
Our natural "clock speed" is so low, at best a few kHz, that there's no way we could perform the cognitive tasks we do in the time we do except through massively parallel algorithms.
First off, that depends on exactly what can happen within a clock cycle. There's far more going on in the brain than signals being sent between neurons. Second, there's no incompatibility between logical deduction and massively parallel computation (just take a look at pure functional programming languages, for example).
This does not sound like a faithful detailed image of the system is coming in front of a central observer (that Cartesian homonculus) who is "appreciating" the scene. If this is so in visual processing, why not in general? Why would the brain evolve one way of solving vis
(1) No it's not, because your listener frequently doesn't know what you mean by "that one," so the conversations are actually more like this:
That's false. In the majority of cases deictic or ambiguous elements in discourse are resolved without difficulty. If they always caused problems, people wouldn't use them. (Note that you didn't have any trouble resolving "that", or either of the two instances of "they", you probably had a pretty good idea of what I meant by "the majority of cases", you resolved the enormously vague verb "use" to get the correct meaning, etc. etc.). Natural language is chock full of ambiguity, 90% of which doesn't cause any problems.
But, alas, far too many conversations in my experience look like the second one above for me to really buy it.
If you look at linguistic corpora rather than relying on intuitions from your personal experience, you'll see that this generally isn't the case.
I think we talk like that way because speech for abstract information conveyance is an evolutionary accident
Evidence? Did hunter gatherers not make use of abstract information and convey it to each other? People seem to assume that the only words they would have had any use for are "ug" and "fuck", neglecting to consider the enormous amounts of knowledge about the world and other people that hunter gatherers have to keep track of. To take just one example of an abstract conept that's useful whatever your lifestyle, consider probability. "You are more likely to find berries over there than around here", etc.
Argh! The Cartesian deductive logic scam. Any decision or insight can be rationalized post facto as following from a chain of orderly deductive logic. But is that actually how we figured it out? Or is the deductive stuff just how we tell ourselves we did, or how we explain the correctness of the conclusion to others?
I'm not suggesting that all our mental capacities are based on deductive logic (but I suspect that a fair few are, though not on a truth-preserving logic). The point is that "pattern recognition" is a vacuous term: saying that the mind uses pattern recognition is about as informative as saying that the mind thinks. People who refer to pattern recognition often seem to have a lot of faith in "neural networks" (a term used to describe various kinds of finite state automaton in order to make them sound cool) to do the job of "pattern recognition". Well, neural nets are good for finding statistical regularities in some domains, but since we haven't got a definition of pattern recognition, we can't really say whether or not neural nets are any good at it. On the face of it, it seems that what they are good at (statistical analysis) simply isn't anywhere near sufficient to account for the things that minds can do.
I'd say the thought that this is how we actually think, that we actually have brain tissue that makes deductions from abstract principles, is getting more doubtful with every discovery of how our brains actually work.
Why? What do we know about how our brains work that makes this implausible? Brains seem to be computational devices, and computational devices are pretty damn good at logic. Perhaps you're referring to psychological evidence pertaining to the nature of the mind rather than evidence pertaining to nature of the brain? (Our current knowledge of the brain is consistent with a million and one theories of the mind.)
Basically, we convey information terribly and waste phenomental amounts of bandwidth. We speak very imprecisely and even inaccurately as a rule.
Actually, imprecision is a great way of avoiding bandwidth waste. It's much quicker to say simply "yes" or "that one" than "i would like a coffee" or "the book on the second shelf 3rd from the right". The systems which allow us to understand imprecise utterances are phenomenally complex. It's not an imperfection that language is vague, it's an engineering marvel.
It may be we use deductive reasoning mostly only after we have arrived at the answer by some other means (pattern recognition, for example, or intuitive guess followed by verification), and us it mostly to rationalize, organize, and conveniently store for future use what we have figured out by other means.
Argh! The "pattern recognition" scam. Any problem can be considered as a pattern recognition problem at some level of abstraction. If there really is such a thing as a general "pattern recognition device", it would (given a sufficient number of neurons or whatever) have to be able to solve any problem in existence, which seems pretty unlikely. Deductive reasoning is in fact pattern recognition par excellence. Rules of logical inference apply to logical sentences which match certain patterns.
Ironically, the fact that my parent post eventually got modded down to flamebait from +5 Insightful while the post I was replying to remains at +3 Insightful just proves my point -- Slashdot is far less tolerant of left wing views than right wing views. Any criticism of the US whatsoever is found to be intolerable, yet at the same time the convervatives on Slashdot whine about it being biased towards the left. Incredible!
Exhibit A: Socialist economics. Any dewy-eyed college freshman can believe in socialism, as easily as any dimwitted kid can believe in Santa Claus, and for the same reason.
Exhibit B: Capitalist economics.
Echibit C: Economics
This article has nothing to do with the US and yet there are a good amount of US criticizing going on.
Erm, and there is a good amount of criticism of France and the UN in articles which have nothing to do with them. Slashdot discussions tend to go off topic. Are you new here or something?
The only reason your modded as insightful is because you take a shot at 'whining American conservatives' and that plays well to the Slashdot crowd.
But the comment I was replying to also got modded insightful by the "Slashdot crowd".
Erm, calm down. I never said that you did hold simplistic views, I just said that such views are "found on the American right" (which they are). Really, since the post I was responding to didn't make any arguments of its own but only tried to disparage a fictional clique of looney left Slashdot posters, it was hard to respond with cold, impersonal rational argument. I merely pointed out that the OP was seeing the situation backwards.
How is it ad hominem? Criticising people for holding simplistic views is not an ad hominem attack in a political discussion where one of the topics at issue is simplisitc views of good/evil.
Sadly, regular slashdot readers get the impression that the US is the heart of all that is evil and the UN/EU is a bastion of justice and peace.
Nope, I just see lots of whining American conservatives who think that foreign countries and institutions exist purely for their amusement, but who treat their own blitheringly stupid and obnoxious administration with totalitarian degrees of reverence. Objectively, America gets criticised on Slashdot far less than the EU and the UN, who get bashed every single time they're mentioned. It's just that people like you get hysterical when there's any criticism of America. No-one is suggesting that the US is the source of "all evil". That's the sort of dumb simplistic view you find on the American right, but inverted ("everyone who isn't the US is the source of all evil").
Awww, c'mon. Can't we just skip the foreplay and go straight to the felatio?