Lecture 11 - Language and thought Flashcards
What is the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis?
- Linguistic relativism: linguistic differences mirrored by nonlinguistic differences e.g eskimos have 7 words for snow as snow is important in their language, so concept is represented heavily in the environment.
- Some languages have things that are very hard to translate because some cultures do not have that concept.
- Linguistic determinism: people think differently because of differences in language (perception of world is different)
What should linguistic relativity not be?
- Ethnocentric
- Assume the world is carved up in the way reflected by language
What is Linguistic determinism?
- We think in a particular way because of our language: unable to consider new ideas
- Whorf claim: language of the Hopi has no expressions for time e.g no tenses
How do look at linguistic determinism experimentally?
- Languages have a different numbers of colour terms e.g greek has no diff between blue/black, do colour names determine perception of colour
- Dani tribe have two colour terms: light/dark
- Gave recognition task for colour chips using non/focal colours (prototypical vs not)
Results:
- Dani perform better on focal colours
- Distinguish between colours within a colour category
- Colour perception NOT determined by colour terms in language
What did Kay & Kempton do?
- Asking if language influences how easy it is to distinguish colours (soft determinism)
- Presented ppts with 3 diff colour chips, asked which one was odd/which two are most similar
- Asked English and Tarahumara speakers (do not distinguish between blue/green)
What were the results (Key&Kempton)
- English speakers chose most extreme when triplets were single colour name
- More likely to pick the different colour when chips were across colour name boundaries
- Colour names influence their perceptual choice
- T pick most extreme for ALL types of triplet
- Absence of categories affected perception
- Supports soft determinism: language influences thoughts, colour names influenced colour perception
What is the Turing test?
- Thought experiment: if something is conscious/not
- A machine in one room that answers qs by an interrogator, human in another room answering qs by interrogator
- Third room where interrogator engages in teletyped convo with contestants with judges.
- If machine tricks judges that it is human, then it has passed the Turing test
How can you debate that computers can think?
- Computers are programmed, so are humans via DNA and evolution
- Computers are not creative, cannot surprise us. Computers can write poems and make music/art
- Computers cannot have emotions, are emotions necessary for thought? What are emotions and why can't computers have them?
- Computers cannot learn: they can be programmed to learn
- They do not have a brain
What is the Chinese Room argument?
- Passing Turing test does not mean thinking
- Using language does not mean being conscious
- As they do not understand
- Understanding = consciousness
