Date: Sat, 18 Jan 1997 13:39:35 -0500 From: rjpensal@MIT.EDU (Rob Pensalfini) Subject: capacity and language Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu X-Sender: rjpensal@po10.mit.edu To: linganth@cc.rochester.edu MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk Kerim said:
>Speakers of BE who belong to street gangs are just as able of logical reasoning as those who speak standard english.

Jesse asked:
>Has this been empirically proven? If so, by whom, and where can the proof be found?

Steven Pinker (in 'The Language Instinct' pp66ff) gives an example which I think is relevant:

Alfred Bloom, now the president of Swarthmore College, believed that he had found the evidence that shows language determines patterns of thought, rather than the opposite. In his 1981 book 'The linguistic shaping of thought: a study of the impact of language on thinking in China and the West', he argues that because Mandarin lacks a way of doing counter-factuals (eg: "If it had rained, I would have missed the show", meaning that it actually didn't rain, so both the conditional and main clauses depict situations that did not happen), native speakers of Mandarin would not be able to conceive of counter-factual situations and hypothetical situations, and he did experiments to show this. He presented Chinese students, all literate and intelligent human beings, with little stories in Chinese and in English, all containing conditionals and situations contingent on other situations. then he posed questions along the lines of "Did X occur or not occur." Apparently the English students got it right 90% of the time and the Chinese students got it wrong 90% of the time. Proof of the Whorfian hypothesis that our language constrains the way we think!

Well, these stories have since been scrutinised and it has been shown that a number of them were ambiguous, all of them were written in very poor Chinese, and when those errors were corrected for, even though the language lacks the (logically) very simple counterfactual construction that we have in English, the Chinese students did no worse at answering questions about counter-factuals. There is no way that this should be possible if language determines thought patterns.

I also wonder whether Jesse's proposal that "speakers of Black English would be capable of a logic
consistent with that language and the speakers of Standard English would be capable of a logic consistent with that language" means that no-one is capable is higher order predicate logic because no one is a native speaker of higher order predicate logic. Or do we become capable of higher order predicate logic only once we learn the language of predicate logic? Can I therefore, as a speaker of seven languages, claim a greater cognitive capacity than a monolingual person? I think not.

I am yet to meet a language incapable of expressing logic of any complexity imaginable.

Rob

Date: Sat, 18 Jan 1997 14:04:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Margaret Ronkin
Subject: Re: capacity and language
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re: Bloom's claim:

For good evidence that differences in counterfactual response patterns are
attributable to culture-specific values rather than to the presence or
absence of a linguistic counterfactual construction, see:

Lardiere, Donna. 1992. "On the Linguistic Shaping of Thought: Another
Response to Alfred Bloom". _Language in Society_ 21, 2, June, 231-251.

Maggie

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Maggie Ronkin / Georgetown University / ronkinm@gusun.acc.georgetown.edu
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