White horses and orphan colts
Thursday, June 21st, 2001 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerOn the recent discussion of radial categories (see replies to Oops, I did it again), what do the linguists/philosophers out there make of these statements attributed to Huizi (a leading member of the "School of Names"):
"A white horse is not a horse."
"An orphan colt has never had a mother."
Oops, that wasn't Huizi, it was Gong-sun Long (the other main person in that particular school). Huizi (also known as Hui Shi) was the guy who said things like "The heavens are as low as the earth; mountains are on the same level as marshes."
"A white horse is not a horse."
"An orphan colt has never had a mother."
Correction (28/6/01)
Oops, that wasn't Huizi, it was Gong-sun Long (the other main person in that particular school). Huizi (also known as Hui Shi) was the guy who said things like "The heavens are as low as the earth; mountains are on the same level as marshes."
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I'm hardly a linguist...
Date: 2001-06-21 04:45 am (UTC)Re: I'm hardly a linguist...
Date: 2001-06-21 11:57 pm (UTC)The origin of the first one is said to be that Huizi was about to ride his horse through a gate when a guard stopped him to say that horses were not allowed inside. "But this is a white horse, and a white horse is not a horse!" said Huizi, and rode on in.
I suspect it loses a little in the translation. What I imagine (with my meagre knowledge of Chinese) he said was "bai de ma fei ma". "Fei" is the negation of the equative verb "shi", so what he seems to be doing is saying is not "A member of the set of white horses is not a member of the set of horses" but either
The set of white horses is not coextensive with the set of horses.
or
The category WHITE HORSE is quite different from the category HORSE
or in other words there is more to the category XY than being a subset of the category Y, hence my mention of radial categories.
The other one seems simpler - an orphan colt has never had a mother because when it did, it was not an orphan. Huizi seems to be attacking the correspondence theory of meaning here.
Re: I'm hardly a linguist... ...or intelligent and thoughtful for that matter
Date: 2001-06-22 01:07 am (UTC)-Start-
The phrase "an orphan colt has never had a mother because when it did, it was not an orphan" is unsettling. As it probably is supposed to be. It seems as though there is given primacy (is that even a word) to "orphan" and "white" where infact it ought be given to "horse" or "colt".
This will probably show my ignorance more than anything but here goes;
I am considering a minor adjustment to the statement you made. I hope I am not playing on what may or may not have been a poorly scripted sentence. Silly arguments often coming from mis-interpretation and such...
I am trying to compare these two statements and there is something I feel is subtle but critical in difference.... I am just not sure what...
"an orphan colt has never had a mother because when it did, it was not an orphan"
"an orphan colt has never had a mother because when it did, it was not an orphan colt"
Perhaps it is this: We can use the word "white" or "orphan" over an entire range of categories (refering to people, flowers, planets etc). As such they are not categories in themselves because they are not so much "The Defined" as they are "Definers" (1)(footnote!).
When we are talking about the colt whether or not it is an orphan or not is besides the point, what DOES matter is the "Colt" - the catergory which is being discussed. The object "Colt" moves through time collecting attributes, definitions etc which are secondary to its "Colt" status. Why secondary? perhaps because they all occur after it recieves "colt" status?(2)(Footnote!)
So, when one says "an orphaned colt never has had a mother" there is an apparent paradox. Because the "orphaned" definer contradicts the "colt" catergory (or atleast part of it, that which says it is neccesary for all colts to be born from a monther). The paradox only occurs though, when you somehow expect the colt to magically transform and lose all history between its not being an orphan and its mother dying. The phrase "an orphaned colt" implies at least "a colt which at one time did have a mother, but no longer has one due to her demise at the hands of a band of insane vegetarians who mistook her for fruit". The emphasis (primacy!??!) here is more suitably placed on "colt" and not "orphan".
Stupid thing made me cut my post in two!
Date: 2001-06-22 01:08 am (UTC)(1)It seems to me that these two examples are playing on this? Correct? i.e He is saying "This is a thing that is "white" that is a horse, and not a "horse" that is white"? Just as we would lump together snow, sugar and paper as "white-as-a-catergory". Whatever I said seems to be easily refuted with "But can we not have a set of things-white that are others entirely different?". So perhaps the context of the word sets it as "Defined" or "Definer".
(2)This is made me think about butterflies and caterpillars. Surely it would be nonsense to say "A butterfly was never a caterpillar". And by what I said it would be perfectly normal to catergorise "butterfly" as "caterpillar" since "caterpillar" came first! BUT! we have to consider in this situation, a magical transformation DID take place.
-End-
I am sorry I can't make things very clear by using proper philosophical/linguistic terms which probably exist. I just don't know them! So I have to make it up. But you probably get my jist and even more probably have expected it and have an essay at hand ready to blow me away :)
Re: Stupid thing made me cut my post in two!
Date: 2001-06-22 03:45 am (UTC)Incidentally, you can miss the colt business out completely and just say "An orphan has never had a mother."
Re: Stupid thing made me cut my post in two!
Date: 2001-06-22 04:31 am (UTC)I still have this nagging feeling that there is something profound behind the examples. It still seems that fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with Huizi demanding entry to the town on his white horse. Even if it defies common sense - but since when has that been a bad way to enter enlightenment?
Re: Stupid thing made me cut my post in two!
Date: 2001-06-25 01:08 am (UTC)As for my own view on the "white horse" question, I'm really not sure. Common sense and semantics both tell me that categories have members, and that some categories are subordinates of others, so of course a member of WHITE HORSE is automatically a memebr of HORSE. On the other hand, cognitive science tells me that WHITE HORSE is not necessarily the intersection of the set of hirses and the set of white things (in this case it happens to be, but think of "small galaxy").
I have less of a problem with the "orphan colt" example, since there is a sense in which an orphan really never has had a mother. Huizi here seems to be reminding us that the idea of a universe consisting of permanent objects to which we give names is a fallacy - a bit like Heracleitus' thing about not being able to jump into the same river twice, perhaps.
Re: Stupid thing made me cut my post in two!
Date: 2001-06-26 11:05 pm (UTC)Yes. Or he could be reminding us of the many different definitions/conceptions of "mother." We had this hammered into our poor little brains in the aforementioned Cognitive Science 101. Radial categories. If "mother" means something like, for example, "nurturer," then an orphan very well might have never had a mother.
Re: Stupid thing made me cut my post in two!
Date: 2001-06-27 12:18 am (UTC)I used that exact phrase just a day ago in a philosophy exam. In an attempt to explain while nihilism is not a self-refuting philosophy (the whole "There are no truths" is a truth itself).Anyway.
Zen Koans are exactly what I thought of when I first considered the white horse/orphan colt phrases. They make perfect sense when I switch to my Taoist mode of thinking.
I don't know if they need to be "subordinate" catergories, just multifaceted.
oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-22 10:04 pm (UTC)ANYWAY.
It is interesting that you are saying that there are "definers" and "things defined" (or whatever your exact words were). And "definers" are not categories unto themselves. Reminds me of something my GSI for George Lakoff's class said last semester: "How can a 'fake gun' be a member of the category guns and the category things that are fake?" I guess your answer would be that there is NO category things that are fake.
It also reminds me of something I heard in a philosophy class long ago. I know hardly anything about Russian, so this might not even be true. But a guy in that class, who was Russian, said that in that language, they don't say "The sky is blue," they say "The sky is bluing." Blue is a verb, not an adjective. Even if this isn't an accurate statement about the Russian language, the point is that different languages divide up reality differently. "Fake" and "gun" could very well both be nouns in some language, in which case there could be categories fake and gun. And then we still have the problem of categorization.
Um, losing my train of thought. Stupid fallopian tubes! Before I lose it completely, I'll say that there are languages that use verbs where English speakers would use nouns. For instance, a Native American language (can't remember which one) says something like, "It rocks downward," where "rock" is a verb meaning "movement-of-a-rock-or-rock-like-object." This sentence expresses the same thing English speakers express with the sentence "The rock is falling."
I hope you can make sense of my babbling 'cos I really can't right now. I'm all fucked up on aspirin and a veritiable bonanza of herbal remedies. *
*By that I do not mean that I am stoned.
P.S. Read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226468046/qid=993272662/sr=1-1/ref=sc_b_1/103-6176870-6498202) by a one George Lakoff.
Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-22 10:21 pm (UTC)Ah! But I would say there is a category of things that are fake. Just as I said somewhere that there would be a category of "Things that are white" which would allow the horse-rider to pass the guard, if he were to use this category instead of the one "horse".
My real problem is that in the context of the speech/language the guard saying "No Horses allowed" or the "fake gun" GSI are implicitly making/marking "gun" and "horse" as primary catergories. Hrrm.. It makes it hard to talk about when I don't know the lingo. Essentially, "things" can quite legitimately belong to any number of catergories, but in thought/speech a person is making reference to one, two or ten in particular and in a particular order.
I am deeply suspicious about translation between culture. When one uses examples from another language, I assume the implication is "This is what they say, therefore this is how they THINK" which I think is hogwash!
Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-25 01:20 am (UTC)As for the Russian example, I don't speak Russian either, but I know that a similar thing applies in Chinese, e.g. "red" is a stative verb, not an adjective, so to express "The book is red" (no pun intended) you would just say
shu hong
If you put in the equivalent of "is" and say shu shi hong you're saying something like "The book is the same thing as the colour red" (though you can for emphasis say shu shi hong de - the book is the same as a red thing).
I assume the implication is "This is what they say, therefore this is how they THINK" which I think is hogwash!
How can what they say not be what they think? Do you think there is some kind of mental proto-language from which we translate into verbal language (like Pinker's idea of "mentalese")?
Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-26 10:58 pm (UTC)But then I took classes with George Lakoff who proceeded to brainwash me. Yay! JOIN US, KRISTIAN, JOIN US!
Can you say "Condescending"????
Date: 2001-06-27 12:14 am (UTC)Re: Can you say
Date: 2001-06-27 12:58 am (UTC)Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-27 12:12 am (UTC)Yes! I am so certain of it.
Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-26 11:11 pm (UTC)Why do you say it's hogwash? Maybe I've just been brainwashed by George Lakoff (a good possibility!), but language seems to reflect conceptual systems. E.g., different cultures with different conceptual metaphors may think about the same things differently. Also, I can't speak about this personally, but I know people who are bilingual/multilingual who say that they tend to think differently, depending on what language they're thinking in.
Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-27 12:25 am (UTC)Also, I can't speak about this personally, but I know people who are bilingual/multilingual who say that they tend to think differently, depending on what language they're thinking in.
That could show something, or it could just show that they adopt cultural values along with the language and thus play 'the part' more.
I say it is hogwash because I and I am sure many many other people are entirely capable of thought and thinking without thinking 'in' a language. This is not to say I think without language exclusively. Nor is does it suggest our thoughts are all the same because they are all influenced by any number of biological and environmental conditions. Culture can, to a certain extent, get inside you, language to a far lesser degree. If the mind is embodied then how can a language restrict how that physical construct can work?
I do not believe Newspeak would work.
Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-27 01:07 am (UTC)Um. Both?
I say it is hogwash because I and I am sure many many other people are entirely capable of thought and thinking without thinking 'in' a language.
But what about someone raised by the proverbial wolves? Or, to use a more realistic example, someone stuck in a closet her whole life? Someone who neither speaks nor comprehends any language at all. Can that person really have thoughts and ideas that are even SLIGHTLY as deep as those of a normally intelligent speaker of a language?
I don't think so! I would wager that they can only think about issues pertaining to survival and such ... but not deep philosophical theories or whatever. Like, they can notice correlations between injesting certain items and physical states that follow shortly thereafter (like, "Don't eat that, or you'll get sick"). But can they think about the angst and the ennui of the post-Industrial man? Ahaha.
If the mind is embodied then how can a language restrict how that physical construct can work?
It doesn't restrict it at all. It enhances it. And language is also embodied, in that it doesn't "exist" out there in abstract reality, or something.
Argh! I should REALLY be transcribing 100 minutes worth of taped interviews! Feel free to post some more. I need the distraction!
Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-27 04:09 am (UTC)Cog Sci 101 final
Analyse the implicit metaphors and/or image schemata of the following statement:
Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-28 01:46 am (UTC)cog sci is one of the reasons i -left- my first uni course.
Date: 2001-06-27 05:55 am (UTC)you impose limits on that which you do not know but assume you do.
Re: cog sci is one of the reasons i -left- my first uni course.
Date: 2001-06-27 05:02 pm (UTC)I like that, I really do! Despite being more-or-less part of the cognitive linguistics camp, I feel that cogling has got to the point which generative linguistics reached around 1970 - that moment where you take a theory which explains certain things pretty well, and inflate it into some kind of dogmatic theory of everything. A little humility is called for, I think.
Tibetan Buddhists have identified around five stages between the first germination of a potential thought and its eventual mental expression. It's not surprising that they don't take Western psychology terribly seriously.
Re: cog sci is one of the reasons i -left- my first uni course.
Date: 2001-06-27 07:07 pm (UTC)Re: cog sci is one of the reasons i -left- my first uni course.
Date: 2001-06-27 07:12 pm (UTC)Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-28 01:09 am (UTC)I really can't say what they would think. Or even how. Being stuck in a cupboard means you are without ANY sensory input, more or less. Which of course would be reflected in ones ability to think about "deep" things. But it is not the same as someone who lives in a world of sensory errr stuff.
Deep thinking is only confused by the language one uses! How many times have I used that expression? Many. How much more is understood to me when I think of a tree than when I say to someone "a tree".
Consider the profound insight and clarity one experiences in mediation and other such practices, when one intentionally removes language and stuff from the mind!
I hope I don't appear to be arguing that language is useless or anything like that!
mmm ... sleep deprivation
Date: 2001-06-28 01:43 am (UTC)I've never meditated, but I don't believe it when it's said that "ALL" things are removed from the mind. The mind cannot be totally blank. And yes, they have done brain scans on people in deep meditation. There is brain activity aplenty! Unless they're, like, DEAD!
However, I do appreciate what you're saying about language confusing one's thinking. I am greatly disturbed by the way language can lead people astray. Like the whole damn sexuality thing. I'd be rich if I had a nickel for every girl who was depressed and confused because she was a "lesbian" yet had a "crush" on a boy. If there was no language with which to describe sexuality, I bet there wouldn't be people with "issues" and "problems" about their sexuality!
Maybe someone with no language wouldn't NEED to think deep thoughts, because language wouldn't be there confusing/provoking her in the first place!!!
I think you ARE arguing that language is useless! I think the two of us should just shut up and take it outside! Kapow! Hah.
meditation
Date: 2001-06-28 01:53 am (UTC)The only nonlinguistic thought that I have some kind of an experience with is when I'm trying to express something in words but can't do it. You know, that frustrating feeling when you have something on the tip of your tongue, but can't articulate it. Usually my thoughts don't get CLEAR until I put them in language. Though there have been a few times when these nonlinguistic thoughts seemed incredibly clear, and I felt imbued with an enormous sense of understanding. It went away very quickly, though. Without language to trap it, this understanding was fleeting.
And don't bug me about the metaphors in the previous sentence. ;)
Re: meditation
Date: 2001-06-29 01:54 am (UTC)Maybe I am entirely ignorant, but doesn't language convey meanings/thoughts, even if that language as the medium produces noise/ misinterpretation in the message etc etc.
I wouldn't attempt to deny that linguistic structures influence meaning and how meaning is reproduce, but I consider that OUTSIDE of the 'thought'.
As for clarity of thought. I understand what you mean by thoughts not being 'clear' until put into language. The nonlinguistic thoughts I experience are as entirely "Clear" in that they convey a "sense" of knowing, more of a bodily feeling than a solid structured thought. But no less an understanding and knowledge. Perhaps it is a cultural bias to need to organise the thoughts into (often written) language.
Brain activity during mediation is entire expected. We are clearing out CONSCIOUS minds, not our entire minds, which are no less ours. I would hazard a guess however, that the activity noted is not that which one would expect during conscious manipulation/use of linguistics.
I apologise to both of you for my vague and poor replies! rushing+ignorance!
I'm confusing myself.
Date: 2001-06-29 02:20 am (UTC)But I think there ARE biases picked up from language -- my whole "sexuality" thing spoke directly to this issue. Even if someone managed to banish language from his head during deep meditation (which I'm not convinced is possible anyway), a contemporary speaker of English might still think of sexuality as being divided into three general categories -- homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual. This person still might conceive of himself as fitting into one of these categories, especially if one of them was a central part of his identity. So this person might still differentiate himself from other people based on these linguistic concepts.
Cultures that didn't distinguish sexuality in this way probably had no conceptions of these distinctions! Why should they? (And yeah, while this is speculation on my part, I WOULD love to research it. I guess I would begin by looking at pre-whitey Polynesian languages. [I understand those societies had virtually no sexual taboos.] How would I do that? Where do I look? Are they even recorded?)
I realize I may have something backwards. Bah. I will keep thinking about it. But why did English (and other languages) formulate these categories for sexuality in the first place? The words are probably some reflection of a thought process, but now these entrenched words influence the thought process. Where does it begin? What is the extent of it all?
I'm too tired and rushed right now to respond to the rest of your post for now, alas.
Re: I'm confusing myself.
Date: 2001-06-29 02:49 am (UTC)homosexuality, passive vs. active
Date: 2001-06-29 02:56 am (UTC)Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-27 04:02 am (UTC)OK, let's imagine we use a different language, in which language does not take the equivalent of the preopsition "in". In this language, we don't say
Person(x) expresses idea(y) IN language(z)
we say
Person(x) expresses language(z) TYPE-OF idea(y)
Wouldn't that affect the way we thought about the relationship between language and thought?
Personally, I don't think that there are thoughts that are expressed in language and thoughts that aren't (though Kristian is certainly correct in saying that some thought is non-verbal). I just think that language is a particular kind of thinking. In other words, the medium is the message, though not quite in the sense that McLuhan intended.
What's the problem with Newspeak, by the way?
newspeak
Date: 2001-06-28 01:58 am (UTC)Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.
Date: 2001-06-29 02:01 am (UTC)i.e by not having a language that could express "The Party is Bad" then the people would be unable to -think- "The Party is bad".
Which is pretty much at the crux of my argument here. I would say that even IF newspeak were perfected people would still be able (even though it would be difficult, though not because of linguistic restrictions, but from cultural ones) to have such revolutionary thoughts. How would they express them? well, the way we express new/revolutionary thoughts now - by creating new symbols for them.
(In a rush-Will reply to your imaginary example later, I think I know what is going on, but haven't the time to try and articulate it into the clunkiness of words!)
Newspeak
Date: 2001-06-29 06:22 am (UTC)A totalitarian govenrment could maybe restrict people's ability to criticise by restricting vocabulary in other ways - the overall effect would be not to make them agree with the official ideology as such, but to lessen the effectiveness of criticism. Functional illiteracy does the same trick.
Actually, I quite like some of the changes to English found in Newspeak, such as getting rid of adverbs and irregular verbs.
Actually,
get rid of irregular verbs?
Date: 2001-06-30 05:50 pm (UTC)Re: get rid of irregular verbs?
Date: 2001-07-01 06:04 am (UTC)Incidentally, I read somewhere that there are moves - how serious, I don't know - to establish a "European English" analogous to "British English", "American English" etc. This would be based on English as spoken in an EC context, and would include -ed as the universal past tense marker, and "isn't it" as the universal question tag (replacing "wasn't it", "aren't you" etc.).
functional illiteracy
Date: 2001-06-30 05:52 pm (UTC)Re: functional illiteracy
Date: 2001-07-01 05:44 am (UTC)Re: functional illiteracy
Date: 2001-07-01 06:16 pm (UTC)Re: functional illiteracy
Date: 2001-07-02 08:18 am (UTC)There again ILLITERATE is one of those weird categories that change according to context and communicative intent, so I may describe a student as "illiterate" because they hadn't read Plato. Then you've got all the radial categories like COMPUTER ILLITERATE. In the context of the discussion of my last post, I could be described as "phenomenologically illiterate", perhaps!
mofos
Date: 2001-06-30 05:53 pm (UTC)Re: mofos
Date: 2001-07-01 05:51 am (UTC)Actually, I have a couple of questions arising from Seinfeld.
1. Is "step off" the same as "back off"?
2. Does "I'm down" mean "I'm in"? And what kind of kooky image schema does that come from?
Re: mofos
Date: 2001-07-01 06:29 pm (UTC)I've never heard "That's absolutely tits"; nor would that make much sense to me if I heard it! I don't watch "South Park," though!
Yeah, "step off" is the same as "back off." Incidentally, if you "step to" someone, you're challenging him, like, trying to instigate a fight.
"I'm down" means something like "I'm in" or "I'm hip to that." Like, "I'm down with cognitive linguistics" means that you know something about it, that you're interested in it. Or as a friend of mine jokingly said to me, "I'm down with the 65 too!" meaning that she took the same bus I did. I would imagine "I'm down" is related to "get down."
no subject
Date: 2001-06-22 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2001-06-26 05:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2001-07-04 04:30 am (UTC)Nisbett, R.E. et al. (2001) Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Versus Analytic Cognition. Psychological Review 108:2 pp. 291-310