6 ms·

Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)

45 points by vytis 12y ago

ubernostrum 12y ago
I keep seeing these types of articles. Then I keep seeing comments and links debunking them (example: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/language/v085/85.2.nevins.html http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/...) and saying that the claims about the Piraha tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting. At this point I don't believe anything I read about the Piraha.
- wittedhaddock 12y ago
  Thank you for such an insightful comment! I will absolutely check this out!
- aomurphy 12y ago
  Not knowing what to believe is probably the best thing right now. Everett (the linguist who made the claims) is quite insistent that this is the case, many other linguists are not. It's definitely a big controversy right now, particularly Everett's claim that Piraha does not allow recursion (many linguistic theories, notably Chomsky's, seem to make recursion a pretty fundamental feature of human language). A lot of the arguments are pretty technical, and they're all ham strung by the fact that the Piraha are so remote there isn't a whole lot of research on them besides Everett's, and even he has trouble going back now. This blog post has a nice set of links about the controversy, and Everett and one of his major critics both appear in the comments to argue, so definitely read those if you are interested: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857
  - WaxProlix 12y ago
    When you have one data source and only a handful of data points and that data is not reproducible, you're not doing science. Everett might have some interesting hypotheses, but what he's doing isn't what you could call peer-reviewable. Linguists who have aspirations towards hard science will, for that reason alone (not to mention the theoretically tenuous/unpopular nature of his claims) dismiss him pretty quickly.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - zorked 12y ago
      While it is far more likely that Everett is wrong, science has to start somewhere, and Pirahã people exist on this planet and other people could go check the story. You can absolutely prove him wrong. Coming up with crazy ideas based on some strange observations is a part of science too.
      - WaxProlix 12y ago
        And questioning that, pointing out flaws and questioning methodology, is all science, too. It's just convenient that Everett had the only 'in' with the community and so is the de facto expert. Once the data source is available, we'll know more.
  - meepmorp 12y ago
    Off topic, but it's pretty funny to watch Everett give a talk to a room full of generative-trained syntacticians, just to see how angry everyone gets during the Q/A section.
  - proveanegative 12y ago
    Why is Everett prohibited from going back?
- joe_the_user 12y ago
  It seems fairly simple. Extraordinary claims are often made and publicized widely today just because they get attention, grab eye-balls and so-forth. Most of these ordinary claims are at least unproven if not wholly fallacious for similar reasons. This is why "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Once a claim has made that rounds and gotten some pretty thorough debunking, it's reasonable to say that it's water under the bridge and move to the next claim.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  I regularly speak to people who do not seem capable of understanding fine distinctions. It's not difficult for me to believe that a people/tribe that has little use for numbers might not have the concept of large numbers at all, other than as a catchall word with no exact quantity. Just yesterday on reddit, I was arguing with someone who claimed to speak English as their first language who could not understand what I meant when I pointed out that the idea of "illegal content" was nonsense. I explained how it might be illegal to get content by certain methods, but that didn't make the content itself illegal and that the crime was in the action. He seemed to think that the computer file itself was illegal, even though he admitted that an identical file on another computer might not be illegal. A tribe that's never needed a scout to be able to tell a leader that it was 5 Roman legions and not 6 that were on the march... why would they have a word for 5 or 6? It's not as if they care about whether one has 5 or 6 bananas, the distinction is pointless on that level. Likewise, a person who has never needed to make a distinction between the exact circumstances that might get them in trouble with the authorities might never understand the difference between "illegal download" and "illegal file".
  - EC1 12y ago
    Wasting time arguing with the lowest common denominator, not knowing anything about them, their age, their credibility, is so utter useless. I've given up reading any comments about anything whatsoever besides HN.
  - hawkice 12y ago
    Sounds like that person was actually confused, but there is illegal content in America, in that possession and not transmission or receiving it is the crime (notably, child pornography), and substantially more content that is illegal in other countries (pornography and dissent leap to mind). Whether they can find the files is beside the point, in the same way that whether you can trace a download is beside the question of whether it is legal.
- vorg 12y ago
  > the claims [...] tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting This sort of thinking seems to be particularly rife in the field of Linguistics. From about 2 years ago, it became apparent the linguistics subreddit was taken over by people who have some agenda which seems to be promoting some school of thought in Linguistics.
state 12y ago
I love this story. This talk (by Everett) is a lot of fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo
- cheeseprocedure 12y ago
  His book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" is worth a read too (though a more ruthless editor may have helped even it out).
  - vsviridov 12y ago
    I straight up skipped all the explanations about the actual dialog, but, then again, I'm not a linguist.
kylebgorman 12y ago
The absence of recursion would not actually "refute Chomsky" (whatever the hell that means; it's not like Chomsky only has one angle). "Universal grammar" just means "whatever linguists think all human languages have in common", it would just mean that clausal recursion is not one of these things.
- WaxProlix 12y ago
  That's sort of the problem with UG, though - it's either so strong a claim as to be almost mystical claims about "the mind-brain" or some such nonsense - and therefore nigh-irrefutable - or so weak as to be basically a truism - "whatever languages all have in common, that's UG!"
  - meepmorp 12y ago
    Am I correct in assuming you've not actually read any of Chomsky's syntatic work?
    - WaxProlix 12y ago
      No, I've read quite a bit of it, though mostly pre-1990.
      - meepmorp 12y ago
        Ok, it just doesn't seem like you've got a good handle on what UG is.
        WaxProlix 12y ago
        UG is different to different people, and has been different in different ages. Someone into OT might conceive of universal constraints or rankings as being 'UG', whereas x bar era sybtacticians etc might have another view. Feel free to engage in a discussion if you feel like it, but if not thanks anyway - your criticism, such as it is, is noted. I'll try and make time to catch up on some more reading.
ExpiredLink 12y ago
> Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist? "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Wittgenstein
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  Some (most? all?) people have the capacity to think highly complex thoughts without using language. It's a common misconception that human thought "has a language", and I see many people ask the bilingual "what language do you think in". They never seem to understand that you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else, rehearsing a conversation or whatever. They're prone to a cognitive illusion... when they think about this, they try to "listen" to their thoughts, which invokes that conversation-rehearsal faculty. And lo and behold, they "hear" a language. But they don't think in this manner. Not all the time, not even most. So if you're not thinking in language, why would your thoughts be limited to your vocabulary?
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else Dealing with other people is probably the biggest part of most people's cognitive burden, though. And it's likely that the ability to make complex inferences when on one's own (solving a mathematical problem, writing a novel, or whatever) derives from the experience of communicating complex ideas through language. I have a pretty close relationship with my dog and he has a fairly elaborate mental world, but his capacity for abstraction is limited. I taught him to find a ball that I had hidden or that he had dropped and forgotten about, and he has particular toys (including particular balls) that he knows are 'his' and which he doesn't like other dogs to play with, or that they are only allowed to play with within certain strictures (eg not taking it out of my dog's sight). I normally bring two identical balls for him to play with, and it turned out to be a lot harder to get him to go find the ball if he already had one on the ground - he would keep trying to give me the ball he had, and seemed unable to conceptualize that he could have a ball and not have a ball at the same time. Eventually he got the hang of this, but I have doubts about his ability to consider more than 2 states at a time, ie if I take him out to play with 3 balls and I don't see him having a ternary model of their location, but rather something along the lines of 'ball(s) I already have' and 'ball(s) I need to find'. Likewise he has a notion of pack hierarchy involving myself, himself, and several neighbors' dogs who he plays with regularly, but I think that's a fairly one-dimensional affair. Right now he knows it's raining when I open the front door and doesn't feel like walking around in it, but he'll still want to investigate the back door in the hope that the weather there might be different. He knows the diference between inside and outside (verbally as well as physically) but I'm not sure he has an abstract representation of a unitary outside. EDIT: turns out playing with balls >> getting wet for the third time in 3 hours. Bang goes that theory.

45 points by vytis 12y ago

I keep seeing these types of articles. Then I keep seeing comments and links debunking them (example: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/language/v085/85.2.nevins.html http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/...) and saying that the claims about the Piraha tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting. At this point I don't believe anything I read about the Piraha.

wittedhaddock 12y ago
Thank you for such an insightful comment! I will absolutely check this out!
aomurphy 12y ago
Not knowing what to believe is probably the best thing right now. Everett (the linguist who made the claims) is quite insistent that this is the case, many other linguists are not. It's definitely a big controversy right now, particularly Everett's claim that Piraha does not allow recursion (many linguistic theories, notably Chomsky's, seem to make recursion a pretty fundamental feature of human language). A lot of the arguments are pretty technical, and they're all ham strung by the fact that the Piraha are so remote there isn't a whole lot of research on them besides Everett's, and even he has trouble going back now. This blog post has a nice set of links about the controversy, and Everett and one of his major critics both appear in the comments to argue, so definitely read those if you are interested: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857
- WaxProlix 12y ago
  When you have one data source and only a handful of data points and that data is not reproducible, you're not doing science. Everett might have some interesting hypotheses, but what he's doing isn't what you could call peer-reviewable. Linguists who have aspirations towards hard science will, for that reason alone (not to mention the theoretically tenuous/unpopular nature of his claims) dismiss him pretty quickly.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - zorked 12y ago
    While it is far more likely that Everett is wrong, science has to start somewhere, and Pirahã people exist on this planet and other people could go check the story. You can absolutely prove him wrong. Coming up with crazy ideas based on some strange observations is a part of science too.
    - WaxProlix 12y ago
      And questioning that, pointing out flaws and questioning methodology, is all science, too. It's just convenient that Everett had the only 'in' with the community and so is the de facto expert. Once the data source is available, we'll know more.
- meepmorp 12y ago
  Off topic, but it's pretty funny to watch Everett give a talk to a room full of generative-trained syntacticians, just to see how angry everyone gets during the Q/A section.
- proveanegative 12y ago
  Why is Everett prohibited from going back?
joe_the_user 12y ago
It seems fairly simple. Extraordinary claims are often made and publicized widely today just because they get attention, grab eye-balls and so-forth. Most of these ordinary claims are at least unproven if not wholly fallacious for similar reasons. This is why "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Once a claim has made that rounds and gotten some pretty thorough debunking, it's reasonable to say that it's water under the bridge and move to the next claim.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
I regularly speak to people who do not seem capable of understanding fine distinctions. It's not difficult for me to believe that a people/tribe that has little use for numbers might not have the concept of large numbers at all, other than as a catchall word with no exact quantity. Just yesterday on reddit, I was arguing with someone who claimed to speak English as their first language who could not understand what I meant when I pointed out that the idea of "illegal content" was nonsense. I explained how it might be illegal to get content by certain methods, but that didn't make the content itself illegal and that the crime was in the action. He seemed to think that the computer file itself was illegal, even though he admitted that an identical file on another computer might not be illegal. A tribe that's never needed a scout to be able to tell a leader that it was 5 Roman legions and not 6 that were on the march... why would they have a word for 5 or 6? It's not as if they care about whether one has 5 or 6 bananas, the distinction is pointless on that level. Likewise, a person who has never needed to make a distinction between the exact circumstances that might get them in trouble with the authorities might never understand the difference between "illegal download" and "illegal file".
- EC1 12y ago
  Wasting time arguing with the lowest common denominator, not knowing anything about them, their age, their credibility, is so utter useless. I've given up reading any comments about anything whatsoever besides HN.
- hawkice 12y ago
  Sounds like that person was actually confused, but there is illegal content in America, in that possession and not transmission or receiving it is the crime (notably, child pornography), and substantially more content that is illegal in other countries (pornography and dissent leap to mind). Whether they can find the files is beside the point, in the same way that whether you can trace a download is beside the question of whether it is legal.
vorg 12y ago
> the claims [...] tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting This sort of thinking seems to be particularly rife in the field of Linguistics. From about 2 years ago, it became apparent the linguistics subreddit was taken over by people who have some agenda which seems to be promoting some school of thought in Linguistics.

state 12y ago

I love this story. This talk (by Everett) is a lot of fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo

cheeseprocedure 12y ago
His book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" is worth a read too (though a more ruthless editor may have helped even it out).
- vsviridov 12y ago
  I straight up skipped all the explanations about the actual dialog, but, then again, I'm not a linguist.

kylebgorman 12y ago

The absence of recursion would not actually "refute Chomsky" (whatever the hell that means; it's not like Chomsky only has one angle). "Universal grammar" just means "whatever linguists think all human languages have in common", it would just mean that clausal recursion is not one of these things.

WaxProlix 12y ago
That's sort of the problem with UG, though - it's either so strong a claim as to be almost mystical claims about "the mind-brain" or some such nonsense - and therefore nigh-irrefutable - or so weak as to be basically a truism - "whatever languages all have in common, that's UG!"
- meepmorp 12y ago
  Am I correct in assuming you've not actually read any of Chomsky's syntatic work?
  - WaxProlix 12y ago
    No, I've read quite a bit of it, though mostly pre-1990.
    - meepmorp 12y ago
      Ok, it just doesn't seem like you've got a good handle on what UG is.
      - WaxProlix 12y ago
        UG is different to different people, and has been different in different ages. Someone into OT might conceive of universal constraints or rankings as being 'UG', whereas x bar era sybtacticians etc might have another view. Feel free to engage in a discussion if you feel like it, but if not thanks anyway - your criticism, such as it is, is noted. I'll try and make time to catch up on some more reading.

ExpiredLink 12y ago

> Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist? "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Wittgenstein

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
Some (most? all?) people have the capacity to think highly complex thoughts without using language. It's a common misconception that human thought "has a language", and I see many people ask the bilingual "what language do you think in". They never seem to understand that you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else, rehearsing a conversation or whatever. They're prone to a cognitive illusion... when they think about this, they try to "listen" to their thoughts, which invokes that conversation-rehearsal faculty. And lo and behold, they "hear" a language. But they don't think in this manner. Not all the time, not even most. So if you're not thinking in language, why would your thoughts be limited to your vocabulary?
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else Dealing with other people is probably the biggest part of most people's cognitive burden, though. And it's likely that the ability to make complex inferences when on one's own (solving a mathematical problem, writing a novel, or whatever) derives from the experience of communicating complex ideas through language. I have a pretty close relationship with my dog and he has a fairly elaborate mental world, but his capacity for abstraction is limited. I taught him to find a ball that I had hidden or that he had dropped and forgotten about, and he has particular toys (including particular balls) that he knows are 'his' and which he doesn't like other dogs to play with, or that they are only allowed to play with within certain strictures (eg not taking it out of my dog's sight). I normally bring two identical balls for him to play with, and it turned out to be a lot harder to get him to go find the ball if he already had one on the ground - he would keep trying to give me the ball he had, and seemed unable to conceptualize that he could have a ball and not have a ball at the same time. Eventually he got the hang of this, but I have doubts about his ability to consider more than 2 states at a time, ie if I take him out to play with 3 balls and I don't see him having a ternary model of their location, but rather something along the lines of 'ball(s) I already have' and 'ball(s) I need to find'. Likewise he has a notion of pack hierarchy involving myself, himself, and several neighbors' dogs who he plays with regularly, but I think that's a fairly one-dimensional affair. Right now he knows it's raining when I open the front door and doesn't feel like walking around in it, but he'll still want to investigate the back door in the hope that the weather there might be different. He knows the diference between inside and outside (verbally as well as physically) but I'm not sure he has an abstract representation of a unitary outside. EDIT: turns out playing with balls >> getting wet for the third time in 3 hours. Bang goes that theory.