primitive image-schemas 3

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/10/04 6:32:26 AM, rjfreeman at email.com writes:
<< Steve: I think what you are saying I covered when I said all languages are
constrained to refer to the "same thing". >>

What you wrote was:
"It starts to sound like a confusion between "primitive" and "average".  Are
the primitives we see really primitives, or are they the average of a lot of
subjective conceptions of the same thing?"

The confusion may be caused by your assumption that "primitives" are in some
way opposite to an average of subjective perceptions.  They are apples and
oranges.

The word "primitives" in the original post appears to refer to this statement:
"Talmy's original discussion (in a talk at Berkeley, summer 1975) made the
observation that, although spatial relations terms seem to have quite different
meanings in the languages of the world,  those meanings can be decomposed into
primitive 'images' that recur across languages. Talmy surmised that there was
a set of such primitives that was universal."

Logically, if we are talking about reducing diverse spatial relations terms
to common "primitive images," we are no longer talking about language per se.
One can certainly perceive spatial facts as basic as depth -- in either a
visual scene or a "subjective" memory of that scene -- without having words to
describe that perception.  Infants and non-human animals certainly perceive a
3-dimensional world, even if they cannot describe it.  (And because these
non-language users will be fooled by optical illusions of depth, it appears that they
are responding to the same visual cues of depth that we humans do.  The
problem is, of course, without language we have no self-reports from these
subjects.)

As Tom pointed out -- "primitive" spatial perceptions might be expected to
have some standard variance.  But what makes these primitives "average" is that
they are primitive, i.e., fundamental, basic.  An organism that does not have
depth perception or a language that cannot express depth perception, for
example, represent a fundamentally different reality than we consistently
experience.

So there's no real point in asking whether these "subjective" perceptions are
really primitive or just averages.  Primitives in this sense must
overwhelmingly be the average, since not having them would promise severe operational
problems.

There's an important point here.  And it is that this has nothing to do with
whether these primitives are pre-wired or learned.  Such critical, basic
attributes of the world would shape either learning or pre-wiring in exactly the
same way.  For example, even if humans are plastic enough to perceive a
non-3-dimensional physical space, the environment we live in offers little room for
that amount of variance in our perceptions.

And that would be why it would show up in all languages, in any case.

Steve Long