Posts by linger
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So the question re Herald coverage in this respect would be: what is the message conveyed by this choice of description ("Palestinian") rather than other more neutral possible descriptions ("Kiwi/ New Zealand Palestinian/ New Zealand raised"). And of course, it is a frame chosen to maximise news value (in this case, by maximising assumed relevance to assumed links to an assumed terrorist group).
The more important objection would be the problematic nature of all of those assumptions:
(1) the Herald has little if any basis for assuming that someone part-Palestinian by descent is more likely to be connected to terrorism than any other NZer. This assumption arguably reflects prejudice of the readership, so maximising the news value of consonance ("stories have more impact if they are interpretible in terms of expected patterns") -- but that doesn't make it correct;(2) the Herald has no basis for assuming that this individual has connections to terrorism, given that no terrorism charges have been laid in this case;
and
(3) until charges have actually been proven in court, the Herald can't have sufficient basis for assuming that there is any terrorist intent among any of the accused, even if there were any evidence available of any shared intent between other accused and this individual (which, again, there isn't). -
"Language, as in the language ability, is most certainly biological"
Neil: yes. I phrased that badly. To clarify the distinction: the cognitive ability to process language is biological (and, I strongly suspect, based on the same mental building blocks we use for processing other kinds of information, such as the basic concepts of adjacency, inclusion, sequence, and causation). However, the form of the language is (mostly, though not entirely) culturally transmitted.
Similarly, details of scientific knowledge are culturally transmitted in the sense that people have to learn them from others. (More generally, it has been proposed that certain kinds of idea travel better in certain kinds of culture: e.g. that monotheism supported models that presupposed single, simple causes for events, speeding the development of scientific theory in European and Arabic civilisations. But I digress.)
Now to explain that qualification "mostly" (also present ["primarily"] in the post you're quoting).
It is interesting (though probably also futile!) to speculate about the roles of biology and culture in how language originally developed and evolved. The end point isn't in doubt: there are many ways in which current human languages seem extraordinarily well matched to human perceptual and cognitive abilities (e.g., across all languages, the most commonly used speech sounds are also those most easily perceived as distinct). That's probably not due to chance. But there are at least three distinct possible evolutionary mechanisms by which such a match may have been achieved.
(i) biological evolution in the classical sense of selective reproductive advantage within a tribe to those individuals best able to learn the language of that tribe (selecting for those individuals with cognitive skills best fitted to the language). Especially if language identified group members, this could well have conferred a significant advantage. However, if this mechanism were all that effective, then there soon would not be much biological variation left for it to work on; any further change by this mechanism would have to be, at best, very slow and incremental.
(ii) cultural evolution by selective competition between tribes and/or tribal languages, favouring those with more efficiently learned and communicatively effective languages (all else being equal; with the caveat that this competitive advantage would easily be outweighed by other physical, social or technological advantages. Witness the fact that today, if one language has a significant social advantage, then minority languages tend to be lost within 3 generations without constant effort to support maintenance. This doesn't imply that those languages are any less fit for communicative purposes!)
(iii) cultural evolution (influenced indirectly by biology) through intergenerational transfer. The basic idea here is that the process of children learning the grammar of a language will tend, over successive generations, to change it in the direction of being more easily learned, by creating a stronger match between (developing) linguistic and cognitive structures. A stronger (but, in its details, more controversial) version of this idea underlies Bickerton's "bioprogram hypothesis" (PDF file), which attempts to explain grammatical similarities between geographically and linguistically separate creole languages (i.e., newly developing languages that are being learned by children for the first time, in the absence of a single societally imposed 'standard' language), by inferring a special language processing centre common to all humans. The version I have described here is weaker (but more robust) because it does not assume that language processing is necessarily independent of other information processing.
All three mechanisms may have had some part to play at various points in human evolution, though my money would be on (iii) as the major contribution.
Anyway, that's why I said that the form of a language only "mostly" derives from cultural transfer; there is also a biological pressure exerted by the nature of that transfer to the next generation.
...gods, what a long post. and worse, I had to re-type it after getting that interesting error message about the Muse Lounge and Chant being relocated to a higher plane...
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I'm not sure why we're positing any necessary causal link from some possibly mythical single "invention of art", to evolution of cognitive skills, to "science".
Firstly, this presupposes a dichotomy between "art" and "science/ technology" that many of the more famous practitioners (da Vinci, Newton, Einstein) managed to do without. These areas may not consist of entirely separate skill sets; rather, they may employ them for different purposes. (For that reason, I don't think we can get away with simply redefining "art" as "imagination" [as Stephen Clover seems to do above]; imagination has many uses.)
Secondly, this separate or sequenced development isn't a pattern we generally see re-enacted in child learning (as we might expect if this were the result of some hierarchy of complexity). Children are naturally curious about the world, in terms of understanding it (which presumably is the main scientific drive), at the same time if not earlier than making pictorial or verbal representations of it (which presumably is the main artistic drive). Artistic and scientific skills seem to develop together, with both being informed by cognitive skills.
Thirdly, if you're making this an evolutionary argument: science and art -- and, indeed, language (though I'm not going to make any claims about the relative chronology of the development of language vs other transmitted cultural phenomena) -- are primarily cultural phenomena, not biological phenomena. The human brain hasn't changed structurally to any great extent in the past hundred thousand years. So it seems most likely that the brain first reached a level of complexity sufficient to allow abstract thought about entities removed in space and/or time from the thinker, thus enabling representations of real and unreal situations -- whether these ended up being used for pictorial representations on walls, or improved stone tool designs. (That is, art and science are ... almost certainly ... both symptoms of a pre-existing cognitive potential, rather than the cause of any development.)
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Having just waded through the last 5 pages (!) of discussion:
Bollocks to posturing, whether it be establishment, anti-establishment, Socratic, ballet, or modern dance.
In particular, bollocks to the waving of bollocks: that kind of posturing hardly constitutes a rational argument, and seems an especially odd rhetorical flourish to support the claim that "what matters is ideas".
Further to that: I would suggest that what matters even more is people having and sharing ideas, because
ideas by themselves can't accomplish much that is positive in the real world; ideas that ignore real behaviour of real people, especially so.
On the other hand, people without ideas... that doesn't seem much of a basis for society either.
So my vote would be for people with ideas that respond to people. -
... and sometimes a cock is just a gallic symbol ...
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rather like the last election, you mean?
Sure... just as soon as ballot papers can be submitted online. Until then, the effect of campaigning in online communities will be quite limited ('cos you won't get the samr kind of immediate response). I would also point out that the GW campaign here had more of a reasoned argument behind it than most party political communications. What worries me is that the Nats seem set to coast in using some of the same arguments (__Isn't it time the guys in the grey suits won for a change? Don't they talk pretty?__) unless more attention is directed to, you know, actual issues.
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(where "we/us" = fellow supporters of any team, and "strangers" = "people of other or unknown team affiliation"; this isn't limited to All Black supporters, or Kiwis)
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Danielle: the paradox may be resolved by noting we usually only voice our doubts among ourselves, not in public among strangers. So observers within NZ will see us angsting, while observers overseas are more likely to infer arrogance. Unless they've been following the PA threads.
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In passing, the voting period is still not long enough for some of us exiles. I received my voting papers here in Japan only on Oct 12, and yet was expected somehow to get my vote in the hands of the relevant official in Blenheim by Oct 13!? Of course, like most of you I couldn't really care less about any of the candidates; but as a matter of principle my non-vote should have had the potential to be my choice.
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Michael:
What, they want you to deliver the mail using a tank?
Effective, I grant you.
"Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night, nor inconvenient fences, nor annoying dogs, shall stay these messengers from their appointed rounds"