Book At last, a proper review of Fodor and Piatelli-Palmerini 3 Jul 2010 Peter Godfrey-Smith reviews What Darwin Got Wrong in the London Review of Books, and finally the review matches the book I am reading. PGS is usually right on everything, so read this one. It is critical, but doesn’t suppose that FAPP have made grade school level errors, like so many… Read More
Cognition How not to give a keynote 6 Jul 201222 Jun 2018 So we finally managed to get things going for the Poland keynote. It took over half an hour to get the sound working, after a fashion, and the connection was blocky at best. The hardest part was that I kept trying to hear what people were saying at the other… Read More
Language is a tool? (If the words weren’t there, there wouldn’t be a right one that wasn’t being recollected.)
Check out this recent blog post from the same site http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/blog/?b=321 Awesome!
@enigMan, that language is a tool for manipulating interest systems, others’ and one’s own, is the idea that got me my PhD, back when
Long before I had even heard of a Worf (the Klingon one without the ‘h’) I remember reading that there was no direct English equivalent for the French word epanouissement and being struck by the possibility that it might be possible to talk and think about things in one language but not in another and wonder how that might affect a culture. Would it be true, as Chancellor Gorkon comments in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, that “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” Is there any support for at least the weak version of the hypothesis?
Personally, I think that any alien language which resembles the gutteral utterances of odd-toed ungulates will tend to make a culture a bit beastly. I call it the Worf-Tapir Hypothesis