tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post799222687871720894..comments2024-03-09T09:06:35.288+00:00Comments on Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists: Language, thought and the ecological approach; A Purple PerilAndrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-31211668097319872742017-04-05T20:12:52.239+01:002017-04-05T20:12:52.239+01:00I actually totally agree with you that there are g...I actually totally agree with you that there are good reasons nothing like mental representations exists at any biological level (stored, activated, or whatever by the embodied brain). But as a linguist or even a psychologist, they are the only way I know how to think about the actual phenomena. I see the benefit of your programme in allowing me to stop myself looking for projections of these are 'lower' levels or even to think of this in terms of levels. But nothing I've seen of the ecological approach actually suggests direct usefulness at the, for lack of a better term, higher levels of description. <br /><br />Here's an analogy. I'm looking at a manga image on my screen. I want to say things about colours and shapes, meanings and intentions. But I could also talk about whether this is a vector or raster image. This is crucially (one could say 'generatively') important for the image's existence but I almost never care. I may care if I need to know how much space the image file is going to take or if I want to enlarge it. But I'm still going talk about areas of colour in a vector way, even though the image is actually just a collection of pixels on the screen. I may also not talk about brushstrokes, if I know the colouring was done in Illustrator rather than Photoshop, etc.<br /><br />That's how I see this discussion. It matters a lot of the time (e.g. when it comes to scalability, consideration of processing loads, etc.) but rarely to anything I consider to be substantive to the analytic 'task' at hand. Dominik Lukešhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03071876778771965740noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-74175409345482238272017-04-05T11:40:31.928+01:002017-04-05T11:40:31.928+01:00Thanks for all this; these details are all very re...Thanks for all this; these details are all very relevant (although a little over my 'language researcher' paygrade so I have no good answers just now :). At this point I was just articulating an idea; I'll think about how to apply it to a specific problem.<br /><br />Two quick things I can address;<br />I'm with you on the details of Lakoff; I'm not nailing myself here to anything specific, just the general idea. <br /><br />And while we do need to address the issues of 'language knowledge' effects (for lack of a better term) I will continue to argue that mental representations are the wrong analytic tool for many, many reasons. This argumwnt comes up a lot - "language is clearly more than perception and action, so there must be something intervening, and those must be mental representations", to which I answer, in order, "yes, it is; yes, there is; no, they don't have to be and there's reasons to think they aren't.". I know that's not a satisfying answer but it's the stance I'm taking right now :)Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-71209312734479768972017-03-29T00:20:17.838+01:002017-03-29T00:20:17.838+01:003. I think the ecological approach can tell an int...3. I think the ecological approach can tell an interesting story but I want to see something a practicing linguist or even psycholinguist can get out of it. Solve one of our real problems. For example, incredibly rich morphological paradigms (Russian, Finnish, Swahili) with hundreds of selections take no time to process (or acquire) when compared to languages with no morphology. Yet, relatively simple syntagmatic phenomena - like embedding - seem to take a processing toll - as if there was a processing module. I've argued that we need a model that's more like face recognition than chess - that is massively parallel as opposed to serial algorithm resolution.<br /><br />4. There's also the venerable problem of dual or multiple articulation in language. We seem to be solving a number of extremely complex tasks at once with some building on the others. We we have to articulate phonetically/phonologically, pick the right lexicon (words, socially appropriate expressions, genre conventions), pick the right grammar (morphology and word order), orient our body just to say something as simple as 'You dropped your glove'. But there's also convention. In Czech, you would say 'The glove dropped for you' (Spadla [Dropped{3sg, past, fem}] vám [you {polite, dative}] rukavice [glove{nom, sg}]. All of that just to alert your interlocutor to something a simple grunt and a finger point could do. Literally noone has a clue how this all actually happens all the time even with people with severe intellectual impairments. Often in multiple languages.<br /><br />5. Given the above. I'm not sure you can really get rid of mental representations as an analytical category. I'm perfectly prepared to admit that they don't actually exist in the brain, but we behave as if they did. For instance, presupposition. 'When did you stop cheating on your taxes?' How do I know that the addressee had been accused of cheating on their taxes? Or even more complex 'In France, Clinton would not have had a problem.' Or, how come 'Jewish holocaust' and 'German holocaust' mean exactly the same thing. But you probably have to Google it if I say 'Spanish holocaust'. Or I cannot say 'The Browns (Mr and Mrs) conquered England.' But I can say 'The Normans conquered England.' Or 'The Beatles conquered America'. What are the tasks involved, what is the information? I can imagine you could rephrase it in those terms, but I'd like to see it done in a way we could build on, rather than just translating it. You have to be able to somehow account for the 'knowledge of language'. At the moment, we have very poor models for doing that. We have the computational metaphor with processing and storage of information - dead in the water, we have the connectionist model which suffers from the isomorphism fallacy and still struggles with the legacy of functional localism. I see a glimmer of something in the ecological approach - but mostly a liberation from the old models - not necessarily an affirmative framework for thinking about all these things in a tractable manner. Here's something to try. I've written about is the phenomenon of 'call back' in comedy shows. It is a completely puzzling phenomenon - none of the information processing and memory storage models seem to have much to say about it. You can explain it in a connectionist manner but not very satisfactorily. Can an ecological approach make a dent here (while also taking into account the dual articulation issues described above)?<br /><br />PS: A tiny niggle: Lakoff does not actually claim that metaphors are rooted in action. Simply that they often rely on our bodily orientation to the world. But you can even have metaphors like 'Marriage is a contract' that does not draw on that. A much more fruitful concept of Lakoff's Idealized Cognitive Models (later 'frames').Dominik Lukešhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03071876778771965740noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-70012118333225295582017-03-29T00:19:58.671+01:002017-03-29T00:19:58.671+01:00I agree, there's a lot of promise in an ecolog...I agree, there's a lot of promise in an ecological approach to language. But I'm not sure that I see much of a research programme in your outline (or the places you linked to). <br /><br />1. I'm not even sure that the language-thought relationship is a good way to phrase what the field should be about. It's really only a question that comes up when the artificial distinction is being debated - but simply dissolving it would do just fine. I've outlined a way of doing it here: http://metaphorhacker.net/2013/08/sunsets-horizons-and-the-languagemindculture-distinction/<br /><br />2. You need a much richer image of what 'language' comprises. See here http://metaphorhacker.net/2014/11/what-language-looks-like-dictionary-and-grammar-are-to-language-what-standing-on-one-foot-is-to-running/ and here http://metaphorhacker.net/2012/09/the-complexities-of-simple-what-simple-language-proponents-should-know-about-linguistics. We need a model that can process the laughter at a comedy gig as much as giving instructions, small talk along side rhetorical flourishes, code switching, turn taking, conversation repair, bilingualism, idioms, syntax, dictionaries, ... I'd also include phenomena that are commonly included under culture such as linguistic identity, language change, etc. I'd suggest you start thinking about those rather than imagining that you can deal with simple interactions and scale those up. I'd look for inspiration in construction grammar, local grammar, corpus linguistics. There's just so much out there. The current psycholinguistic paradigm is completely moribund and just toying at the edges of language. Although, I think discursive psychology has a lot to recommend it.Dominik Lukešhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03071876778771965740noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-16078136709242096552017-03-26T20:37:41.457+01:002017-03-26T20:37:41.457+01:00This comment has been removed by the author.Romahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14289859845074097347noreply@blogger.com