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Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

(www.scientificamerican.com)
549 points orcul | 2 comments | 17 Oct 24 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.407s | source
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psychoslave ◴[19 Oct 24 19:04 UTC] No.41889857[source]▶
>You can ask whether people who have these severe language impairments can perform tasks that require thinking. You can ask them to solve some math problems or to perform a social reasoning test, and all of the instructions, of course, have to be nonverbal because they can’t understand linguistic information anymore. Scientists have a lot of experience working with populations that don’t have language—studying preverbal infants or studying nonhuman animal species. So it’s definitely possible to convey instructions in a way that’s nonverbal. And the key finding from this line of work is that there are people with severe language impairments who nonetheless seem totally fine on all cognitive tasks that we’ve tested them on so far.

They should start with what is their definition of language. To me it's any mean you can use to communicate some information to someone else and they generally get a correct inference of what kind of representations and responses are expected is the definition of a language. Whether it's uttered words, a series of gestures, subtle pheromones or a slap in your face, that's all languages.

For the same reason I find extremely odd that the hypothesis that animals don't have any form of language is even considered as a serious claim in introduction.

Anyone can prove anything and its contrary about language if the term is given whatever meaning is needed for premises to match with the conclusion.

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1. chongli ◴[20 Oct 24 13:35 UTC] No.41895280[source]▶
Language is infinitely productive. Using a finite number of sounds or symbols, humans can produce unlimited utterance chains to communicate novel and complex ideas.

Think about it: almost every nontrivial conversation you’ve had or comment/blog/article/book you’ve read constituted an entirely new (to you) utterance which you understood and which enabled you to acquire new ideas and information you had previously lacked. No non-human animals have demonstrated this ability. At best they are able to perform single-symbol utterances to communicate previously-understood concepts (hungry, sad, scared, tired) but are unable to combine them to produce a novel utterance, the way a child could tell you about her day:

“Today the teacher asked me to multiply 3 times 7 and I got the answer right away! Then Bobby farted and the whole class was laughing. At lunch I bit my apple and my tooth felt funny. I think it’s starting to wiggle! Sally asked me if I could go to her house for a sleepover but I said I had to ask mom and dad first.”

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2. psychoslave ◴[20 Oct 24 18:21 UTC] No.41897380[source]▶
> Language is infinitely productive. Using a finite number of sounds or symbols, humans can produce unlimited utterance chains to communicate novel and complex ideas.

We maybe disagree, in the sense that it seems to be mixing indefinitely bounded expressiveness with actual unlimited expression production that could potentially be in a bijective relationship with the an infinite set of expression.

We human are mortals and even at the whole humankind scale, we will produce a finite set of utterances.

The main thing bringing so much flexibility to languages, is our ability to reuse, fit and evolve them as we go through indefinitely many inedit experiences of the world. So something like context change tolerance. But if we want to be fair with crediting admirable unknowingly extensive creativeness, we should first consider the universe as a whole, with its permanent flow of novel context, which also include all interpretations of itself through mere mortals as ourself.