meaning
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Replicated Typo
I went to a good talk almost a year ago at the Interfaces III conference at the University of Kent, and I said I’d write about it, but I never got around to it. The slides have been on my desktop ever since. Now that I have a couple hours to kill on the train coming back from the MPI in Nijmegen, here’s that promise fulfilled. I’m going mostly from the slides, so nicely sent to me, and any errors in the transcription from those are my own. The talk was based on work done at both Chulalongkorm and the MPI for Evo. Anthr. in Leipzig, as well as on (then unpublished, although it might be now) Pothipath’s PhD thesis.
A Thinking Machine: On metaphors for mind | Child's Play
“ The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man .”–B. F. Skinner. The study of mind begins with a metaphor.
In a comment on this post on Language Log , Spell Me Jeff wrote: I've been doing some admittedly shallow searching on topics like Grice and cooperative principle, and all I'm finding focuses on the role of the speaker. Surely there is work describing a "cooperative listener"?
Meaning and Thinking
Today’s New York Times has a wonderful feature article on how language shapes our perception of the world. The infamous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claimed that our understanding was limited by language and has long been used as an example of a ‘dead theory’ but new evidence is suggesting that certain aspects of a language can indeed influence how we think The NYT piece is a wonderfully engaging look at the studies which have shown how our perceptions are biased by language and is written by linguist Guy Deutscher . Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”
