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Can a new language lead to better thinking?

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DavidV

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What CAN and SHOULD be optimized in all languages are definitions.

I agree. I also have a question about this. Most dictionaries have a lot of poor definitions and illegitimate concepts. Does anyone know if there has ever been an Objectivist attempt to create a dictionary that defines words in terms of their essentials (including the omission or note of "invalid concepts")?

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Does anyone know if there has ever been an Objectivist attempt to create a dictionary that defines words in terms of their essentials (including the omission or note of "invalid concepts")?

You might be interested in the Glossary of Objectivist Definitions available from AynRandBookstore.com.

http://www.aynrandbookstore2.com/store/pro...sp?number=CK58E

Here's the description:

Glossary of Objectivist Definitions (Booklet) by Ayn Rand

Additional entries by Leonard Peikoff and Harry Binswanger

(Edited by Allison T. Kunze and Jean F. Moroney)

Have you ever wanted quickly to find Ayn Rand's definition of say, "axiom" or "racism" or the "crow epistemology"? This glossary now enables you to do so.

Offering formal definitions of concepts as well as succinct statements of philosophic principles, this reference guide provides the meanings of over 250 key terms in Objectivism. The entries are meticulously compiled from Ayn Rand's entire written corpus, and from Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand and selected lecture courses by him. (Some entries also come from material by Harry Binswanger.)

The editors have produced a wonderfully convenient handbook for anyone interested in Objectivism. You will find yourself turning to its pages again and again.

(Booklet; 60 pages)

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My copy of the book is unfortunately in a different coutry at the moment, so I won't be getting to it for a while :D

However, I'm sure you could track down the specific page in the book easily by using the Amazon.com book search tool.

Regarding the ability to remember more numbers with shorter words: why is this so surprising? just try to remember a string of short words vs a string of long ones - wouldn't you expect to be able to remember more words if they are shorter?

words for numbers are just placeholders for concepts - perceptual level references. If the percept is a complicated one, it is more difficult to remember, of course.

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Regarding the ability to remember more numbers with shorter words: why is this so surprising?

Because there is no known correlation between ability to remember the expression of a concept or the stringing together of concepts, and the average amount of time needed to pronounce such a sequence in a language. I'm not sure if this particular issue about the length of Chinese numbers vs. English numbers has been experimentally tested before, but I'd be willing to bet that the length of the digits from 1-10 in Chinese is actually longer, in time, than it is in English. I do know that Dehaene's duration estimates of English monosyllables vs. Chinese monosyllables are just wrong, and in fact Chinese monosyllables (like "4" [si]) are typically much longer than English monosyllables ("4"). Unfortunately, Dehaene does not give any support at all for his assertion about these durational claims, other than to make the claim. No experimental articles supporting this result, for example, are cited. A note, in case you're thinking of performing an experiment -- you need to control for the effect of tradition Chinese education and the well-known practice of emphasizing memorization, vs. the effect of speaking Chinese.

just try to remember a string of short words vs a string of long ones - wouldn't you expect to be able to remember more words if they are shorter?

I do not expect to be able to remember more words constructed as something meaningful, if the length of words (however you decide to measure it) is shorter. The length of words has no known effect on the ability to learn language units (such as sentences and phrases). If you know of scientific evidence to the contrary, please let me know.

Your claim about length and memorisability would be correct for random and meaningless sequences of sounds, as long as there were no structure to the sequence -- for example, time yourself in memorizing the sequence "Plartle feezban squiltaquileria whonkamertzi flapquaddlebezort" versus "Ting ting pong pong moody moody dacka dacka yadda yadda bippy bippy poodle doddle doof". The latter is easier to memorize (teach it to your kids!), yet actually longer -- go ahead and record yourself saying both utterances. But language is not the use of random unstructed, meaningless sounds.

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However, I'm sure you could track down the specific page in the book easily by using the Amazon.com book search tool.

If it is so easy to do I am surprised you did not just supply the reference when I first asked for it. I just tried the search and was unable to find any reference to it in the book. If you can do this so easily, please do, as that will save me actually hunting through the book when I actually get it in my hands.

As to your question: I will deal with the issue when I see the reference material. As I mentioned in my prior post, I acknowledge that Dehaene is generally considered an authoritative reference in this field, but I most strongly disagree with his basic approach to neuroscience. I acknowledge that there is great concrete value to a lot of experimental data, but the interpretation of that data is what I object to in much of the fields related to cognition.

If you search and find the reference, please let me know. Otherwise, I will locate it myself, in a while.

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As to your question: I will deal with the issue when I see the reference material.

I just closed it (we have it online, but authentication is a major PITA, and I need to shut my eyes), but it's between p. 130-135, I think on 131 or so. Still, I just don't believe it. I'd be curious to see whether you believe his claim, especially whether you think it is backed up by solid experimental evidence. I don't find any concrete evidence, though I'm dealing with a wretched ebook version.

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I just closed it (we have it online, but authentication is a major PITA, and I need to shut my eyes), but it's between p. 130-135, I think on 131 or so. Still, I just don't believe it. I'd be curious to see whether you believe his claim, especially whether you think it is backed up by solid experimental evidence. I don't find any concrete evidence, though I'm dealing with a wretched ebook version.

Thanks. I'll try to pick it up tomorrow.

As you must know, since you seem to have read some of Dehaene, debunking these nativists always turns out to be much more effort than they are worth. Dehaene is so busy locating his mythical "biologically determined, domain-specific" little number module in the brain, shared between animals and humans alike, that it makes you wonder even about the data and statistics which are so graciously provided.

His papers are so replete with the most absurd generalizations, on a Chomsky-like level, that you really have to look at things with a fine tooth comb to extract the (often) valuable information. To have such equipment and such funding at the disposal of people who have no real grasp of a conceptual consciousness is a really sad thing. And, in my opinion, Dehaene is one of the better ones of the lot! :D

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Your claim about length and memorisability would be correct for random and meaningless sequences of sounds, as long as there were no structure to the sequence ...

Isn't that what we are talking about here? arbitrary strings of numbers?

In any case, I found the place in the book where Dehaene describes the findings, and it was on page 102 -103, under the chapter "The Cost of Speaking English". I didn't see any references provided - he simply asserts it.

I asked a simple hypothetical question in my first post on this topic, which was how difficult would thinking become if words averaged 50 characters? could you seriously claim that it wouldn't have any effect? if not, then clearly the efficiency of language has at least some impact on the efficiency of thinking.

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Isn't that what we are talking about here? arbitrary strings of numbers?

Not exactly: the topic is about "better language", suggesting among other things more efficient. There is no realistic hope of correlating memorizability of arbitrary number strings with the length of the words (however you measure it). Memorization ability for N digits depends on N, and not the linguistic length of the sequence. My point which you quoted is that in addition, if there is structure, then questions of length are much less relevant (i.e. are overridden by the "compression" that comes from structure).

I asked a simple hypothetical question in my first post on this topic, which was how difficult would thinking become if words averaged 50 characters? could you seriously claim that it wouldn't have any effect? if not, then clearly the efficiency of language has at least some impact on the efficiency of thinking.

Okay, I will seriously claim that it would not make a difference if average word length were 50 characters. No language has an average word length approaching 50 (Inuit, which has rather long words, clocks in at around 16 and Finnish is as I recall something on the order of 10-12, vs. English which is about 4), so your claim is safe in the sense that it cannot be tested. If there were a way to test this idea then that’s what we should do. If you had a sufficiently detailed and justified model of cognition that you could plug in the numbers and put substance into the idea, maybe the claim would have credability. But from my POV, the idea that increasing average word length to 50 would impede thought is arbitrary. No offense intended, but you're making a scientific claim, so I want to see the science. If you can set up the experiment, I’ll make you a handsome money wager.

You're trying to compute efficiency the wrong way, based on words. In languages with really long words, single words have much more conceptual content. "Word" is a rather crude unit for determing efficiency. In English, we need a lot of words to express a particular proposition, but Inuit for example can express complex propositions in one (long) word. A better metric of efficiency would be "propositional content" per time unit, but the problem is that we have no way to measure "propositional content".

Another point about the relation between word size and thought is that when you're thinking out an argument, for example, you don't mentally replay the acoustics of each word in normal time -- the mental representations are compressed and may leave things out. The full representation is needed for speech, but not for personal thought. Furthermore, speed is not everything. Accuracy matters more than high-speed slap-dash processing, IMO.

But your question about 50-letter words and thought is really more germane to the question “Can we make a language worse for thinking”. If you’d like the verbose version I can give it to you, but the short version is that if you try to pack any more information in per second, the perceptual system will probably not be able to handle it and comprehension will be seriously affected (making the language worse).

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Okay. I have now gone through Dehaene's book, a somewhat painful process I might add. This book is a popularization, not a scholarly text, and it is overflowing with assertions that cry out for rational justification.

As Axiom mentions in another post, the relevant discussion of this number issue is found on pp. 102-103 of the book. Dehaene provides no specific reference for the Chinese-English claim, but he does include a list of references for each chapter. I have read several of the references provided, and among the others there is only one reference which might be appropiate to the claim. Unfortunately, it is an older book from the Advances in Psychology series, and my library does not have it. I do not think I will pursue that reference any further.

I do want to point out, however, that Dehaene contradicts himself, or, at least, fails to integrate two statements which result in contradictory effects. Dehaene at first claims that the effect is due to the Chinese number words being smaller, but then later also claims a difficulty in memorizing words that are similar, such as "seven" and "eleven." What he fails to integrate is that the Chinese numbers "yi," "si," "qi," and "shi," (1, 4, 7, 10) are remarkably similar, more so than "seven" and "eleven," as are "liu" and "jiu," (6, 9).

Anyway, in regard to Axiom's statements:

Regarding the ability to remember more numbers with shorter words: why is this so surprising? just try to remember a string of short words vs a string of long ones - wouldn't you expect to be able to remember more words if they are shorter?

words  for numbers are just placeholders for concepts - perceptual level references. If the percept is a complicated one, it is more difficult to remember, of course.

This is known as the word length effect, discovered almost three decades ago by Alan Baddeley et al. It is predicated on a working memory model for which one component is a phonological loop consisting of a storage and a rehearsal process. Since the storage process supposedly decays at some constant rate, the assumption is that the more words that can be rehearsed quickly, the more that can be maintained. The word length effect, then, assets that long words take longer to recall than short words, and consequently more short words can be retained.

The problem is, the word length effect is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and one can think of many alternatives to the standard explanations of the effect, and therefore have different expectations in regard to the conclusions. For instance, in these experiments the length of time to which the subject is exposed to the words is a constant value. The shorter words could then be perceived and repeated more often than the longer words, giving rise to a much more intense memory trace for the shorter words. In fact, there is one study that I know of in which the presentation time of words was adjusted according to word length, and indeed the word length effect was substantially reduced.

So, a string of short words may, in fact, be no more difficult to recall than a string a long words, if their respective memory trace times are comparable. In addition, and I do not want to spend the time now detailing this as an issue, but the images we retain in memory, those associated with words, whether or not they are number words, is something that has never really been considered in these sort of experiments and analyses. Consider the effect of an image associated with, say a chicken. One might expect the image to be quite similar, whether one is Chinese or English. But, what about the respective images for numbers. The visual number construction in Chinese, above 3, is much more radically different than in English. The effect of these on memory retention and recall should be investigated, but, typically, they are not.

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This discussion has raised enough doubt about my original position for me to put it into my "probably false, interesting ideas" pile. I'm by no means married to the view - it just seamed reasonable to me.

But back to the original topic:

For those of you who have access to HBL (Harry Binswanger List www.hblist.com), there was a discussion on a while back about Aristotle's book Categories. The consensus seemed to be that the whole book was an attempt to clear up a misconception that arose out of the structure of ancient Greek. I may be misremembering here, so perhaps someone who has access to the archives would be kind enough to look it up - I'd love to re-read it.

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But back to the original topic:

For those of you who have access to HBL (Harry Binswanger List www.hblist.com), there was a discussion on a while back about Aristotle's book Categories. The consensus seemed to be that the whole book was an attempt to clear up a misconception that arose out of the structure of ancient Greek. I may be misremembering here, so perhaps someone who has access to the archives would be kind enough to look it up - I'd love to re-read it.

It was a truly wonderful post by HB, with an intellectual debt owed to Allan Gotthelf for having made some essential identifications decades earlier. The post was triggered by a comment made by Ayn Rand in For the New Intellectual, p. 23: "even the structure of our language—is the result of Aristotle's influence."

HBL policy forbids posting the content here, but if you really want the post I can send it to Harry's wife, Jean, and ask that she forward it you. Just identify yourself, along with your email address, in private email to me at the address in my signature line below.

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  • 1 month later...

Is it really possible to 'make a language more effiecent' without sacrificing some of it's quality? Think of some synomyms(I can never spell that. :P ), perferably a few '100 dollar words' and think of the way each word carries with it a subtle difference in feeling, meaning and effect.

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Is it really possible to 'make a language more effiecent' without sacrificing some of it's quality? Think of some synomyms(I can never spell that. :P ), perferably a few '100 dollar words' and think of the way each word carries with it a subtle difference in feeling, meaning and effect.

I suppose if it was used alongside natural languages (as an auxilliary language) it could evolve some of those subtlties. It can always parasitically borrow new words from other languages in an effort to "catch up". So far I've been thinking of a language that contians minimal grammar and the capability to combine words with ease, to create a vast array of useful words (and those all-too-important subtlties). German is big on compounds too, I hear.

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