[Linganth] Why count words, or anything else?

[Alexander King]

Thanks to Tim and Kerim for the links. One the
face of it, it is an interesting question, but
Peter Gordon seems to have taken a typcially SAE
bludgeon to a problem needing more rapier wit
(those who really have read Whorf will get the
reference).

The Guardian article by Butterworth is not so
bad. An earlier one by the BBC
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3582794.stm)
and other posts related to the Amazon
non-counters sent me to the library to xerox
Gordon's brief article on his tests with Piraha
speakers. Below are some typed reading notes,
followed by my comments (surrounded by ***).
Although my library subscribes to _Science_ the
institutional subscription doesn't allow me to
access the online bits that Peter Gordon refers
to in his article. While it does seem that the
journalists have sensationalized his conclusions
and have overstated them a little (anyone
suprised here?), he _does_ compare Amazonian
Indians to rodent and brain-damaged people in
their cognitive abilities.

>496
>"At issue here is the strongest version of
>Benjamin Lee Whorf's hypothesis that language
>can determine the nature and content of thought."
>
>1) are langs incommensurate: Are there terms
>that exist in one lang that cannot be trans into
>another?
>2)does lack of trans preclude speakers of one
>lang from entertaining concepts encoded by the
>other language

***A more accurate description would be "At issue
is the strongest caricature of Whorf's ideas, the
nutty idea (never seriously entertained by B.L.
Whorf) that language is an independent variable
determining thought in a causal manner which can
be empirically tested."

Whorf's caveats about "calibration" of two
linguistic systems and all of his comments on
Hopi clearly indicate that languages are
commensurate. Although they carry a rapier
against our bludgeon, it is natives speakers of
SAE languages that developed theories of
relativity and quantum mechanics. How could Whorf
have figured all that neat stuff about Hopi if
languages were incommensurate?***

>
>ex. of "a culture without advanced scientific institutions."


***I quote this phrase in Gordon's introductory
section because it betrays an unconscious model
of Culture akin to Victorian evolutionists, where
everyone has a least a litle, but "we" have more
(with our advanced sciences) and "they"
(typically brown in skin tone) have less (working
with 'primitive' pidgins, see below). Now, I'm
sure that Peter is a nice guy. I like to assume
that people I don't know are nice guys. However,
he seems to have fallen to prey to the seduction
of the single greatest ideology of the Western
world to have taken over the planet, science.
Science as a "correct" way of understanding the
world is an ideology even stronger than
capitalism as an appropriate way to organize
one's economic and social relations. Thus, we
think it's _normal_ to have (or at least attempt)
scientific reasoning. Counting and mathematics
are at the base of this enterprise.***

>
>"Words that indicate numerical quantities are
>clearly among the basic vocabulary of a language
>like English."


***Yeah. Whorf does point out that SAE languages
are good at counting stuff, very handy for an
accountant culture needing to quantify human
lives in all respects.***

>
>Pirahã are a culture with "one-two-many" counting system
>"is it possible for its members to perceive or
>conceptualize quantities beyond the limited sets
>picked out by the counting sequence, or to make
>what we consdier to be quite trivial
>distinctions such as that between four versus
>five objects?"

***This is interesting because Gordon admits that
telling the difference between four apples and
five apples is _trivial_. Indeed, it seems so
trivial to Piraha speakers, that _they just can't
be bothered._***


>nearly monolingual pop. <200 in small villages of 10-20
>limited xchg with outsiders using  "primitive pidgin systems"


***Note the use of the p-word, repeated two pages
later. This also betrays evolutionist,
hierarchical thinking on the author's part. Never
mind that pidgin systems are elegantly simple,
useful, and common across the planet. Since they
are "primitive" the people who use them must also
be "primitive". Thus, we needn't take them too
seriously when it comes to questions about
cutting down their forest, taking away their
children, or just killing them, even. At least
that is the way administrators of various ilk
have figured it in the past.***

>
>497
>hói (one), hoí (two), and many
>one actually = small, roughly one, contrasts with ogii (big)
>"suggesting that the distinction between
>discrete and continuous quantification is quite
>fuzzy in the Pirahã language."

***Gordon is not an idiot. He has noticed that
Piraha speakers are lackadaisical about their
quantities, and one/few/small seems to be the
best 'translation' of their word he originally
characterizes as meaning "one". ***

>
>second trip used non-verbal numerical reasoning tests/tasks
>
>(details of methods are on Science online)
>9 tasks summarized in Fig. 1, ordered in terms of increasing cognitive demand
>
>used AA batteries as 'counting tokens


***I would like to note how science (and Science)
is a big business making profits these days.
While honest scholars continue to give away
information and ideas in an open exchange (it's
our reputation that we are trying build and trade
in for a good salary, anyway), the magazine
Science requires that one buy an individual
subscription (sorry University libraries, you
don't count) in order to access information
important to a full evaluation of the solidity of
experiments and the production of scientific
knowledge.***

>
>498
>matching - "participants repsonded with
>relatively good accuracy with up to 2 or 3
>items, but performance deteriorated considerably
>beyond up to 8 or 10 items."
>
>"One exception was taks D with unevenly spaced
>objects. Althought this was designed to be a
>difficult taks, participants showed an anomalous
>superiority for large numerosities over small."

***Here we can see another example of Gordon's
culturally-shaped assumptions peeking out from
his scientistic language. He _assumes_ that
certain tasks require more 'cognitive effort'
than others for Piraha because he thinks of
certain things as requiring more thought than
others. Turns out he was wrong in one case!
Difficulty is not a universal.***

>"primitive numerical abilities are of two kinds:"
>1) ability to enumerate small qs accurately
>"Without overt counting, humans and other
>animals possess an analog procedure whereby
>numerical quantities can be estimated with a
>limited degree of accuracy"

Here's that primitive language again. Here,
Piraha are indirectly equated with animals. It
gets worse below.


>although poor, performance was not random
>"... Pirahã participants were trying hard to get
>the answers correct, and they clearly understood
>the tasks."
>
>"This value for the coefficient of variation is
>abot the same as one finds in college students
>engaged in numerical estimations tasks."
>
>"The results of these studeies show that the
>Pirahã's impoverished counting system limites
>their ability to enumerate exact quantitites wen
>set sizes exceed two or three items."

***In this last sentence we see how Gordon
assumes our counting system as normal, and a
system lacking traits found in ours is
"impoverished". More of those Victorians in the
closet.***


>
>"This split between exact enumeration ability
>for set sizes smaller than three and analog
>estimation for larger set sizes parallels
>findings from laboratory experiments with adults
>who are prevented from explicity counting;
>studies of numerical abilities in prelinguistic
>infants, monkeys, birds, and rodents' and in
>recent studies using brain-imaging techniques
>(11, 23-30).

***Here is where Gordon makes the infamous
comparison with rats that the Guardian and other
newspapers have picked up. The period marks the
end of a paragraph, and the quote below
immediately follows. Any ethical scholar would
have inserted the appropriate qualification
distancing the analogy of these people with rats
and birds. While Gordon may not be an idiot, I
think we may want to accuse him of being (in
highly technical language) an asshole.***

>
>"The analog estimation abilities exhinited by
>the Piraha are a kind of numerical competence
>that appears to be immune to numerical language
>deprivation. But because lower animals also
>exhibit such abilities, robustness in the
>absence of language is already established. The
>present experiments allow us to ask whether
>humans who are not exposed to a number system
>can represent exact quantities for medium-sized
>sets of four or five. The answer appears to be
>negative. The Piraha inherit just the abilities
>to exactly enumerate small sets of less than
>three items if processing factors are not unduly
>taxing."
>
>Piraha is incommensuaret with languages that
>have ocunting systems that enable exact
>enumeration
>no privileged name for the singular quanitty
>
>conclusion: evidence for strong linguistic determinism

***Gordon seems not to consider the point
(entertained by Daniel Everett, for example) that
Piraha speakers DON'T CARE about counting. They
don't need to, don't want to count stuff. If they
found a pressing need to count, probably through
an unavoidable confrontation with a state
structure, then you can be sure that they would
figure it out, or at least get a few trusted
individuals to figure this counting stuff out
that the blancos are so obsessed with. This point
is not even Sapir or Whorf. Boas makes that point
in his introduction to the Handbook of American
Languages (somewhere about p21, I think).

Piraha speakers, on the other hand, are
conservative in their explicit avoidance of
contact with state structures.

It seems to me that Peter Gordon's work on
numbers in the Amazon assumes that "normal"
people count, and that languages without numbers
like ours produce "deficient" counters. . Dan
Everett's work seems more balanced (and thus less
newsworthy--
(http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/DEHome.html
)).

The point that I take from this is that indeed
Whorf was correct in postulating an intimate
intertwining of language, culture and thought.
You can't isolate one from the other in terms of
dependent and independent variables. Doing so is
a caricature of Whorf's writings. The idea of the
"strong version" (linguistic determinism) is also
a stupid caricature of Whorf, and I have little
patience (let alone respect) for linguistics and
psychologists who seriously entertain (only to
reject in their conclusion) such a
"hypothesis".***

very sincerely,
Alex King

--
_________________________
University of Aberdeen  http://www.abdn.ac.uk/anthropology
             Koryak Net  http://www.koryaks.net
                  Soyuz  http://www.abdn.ac.uk/soyuz
tel:+44(1224)27 2732
fax:+44(1224)27 2552