Может ли язык описать реальность? Can language describe reality?| Nick Enfield

Очень хорошая и содержательная беседа. Ниже текст автоматических субтитров.

Can language describe reality? Nick Enfield

https://youtu.be/lWzE55QeVDc

Introduction

hi everyone welcome to reason with science. I'm your host jitendo this episode is with Nick Enfield he's a professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney next research on language culture cognition and social life is based on long-term field work in Mainland southeast Asia especially Laos

his books include natural causes of language distributed agency and how we

talk his latest book is «Language versus reality: why language is good for lawyers

and bad for scientists» in this conversation we talk about evolution of

language and how well it can describe reality can language nudge our thoughts maths as

a language evolution of human reason and rationality enjoy the conversation share

and subscribe support the podcast thank you for listening hi Nick welcome to the podcast

hi thank you very much for having me yeah so thinking about language which is such an important tool for Humanity

What is language?

let's get into the semantics of language itself so what is language how do we Define it

well that's a tough question language is hard to Define in a bunch of ways

because there are so many uses of the word you know people talk about different languages they mean you know

Japanese or Hindi or English and also people talk about you know

the language of bees or you know body language and they use all these terms

that that are not the same as as you know what it means to say that English is a language and and so

the normal use of the word mixes up something very specific that is the

system that humans use to communicate with some sort of general idea of of any communicative system but I think what

you're asking is what defines human language and

I think that there are what Charles Hockett once called unique design

features of language and they include things like the possibility to make

referenced the possibility to displace reference so that is to refer to things that are

at a different place in time so other animal communication systems can refer

to things right here right now but they don't they're not able to refer to what happened yesterday or what would

happen tomorrow so those are a couple of the example features that would help to understand what's unique about

language another unique feature of language is that language can be used to refer to itself

so you can use the communicative system to talk about the communicative system

and you can ask things like what did you mean or you know what did he say you can quote other people's speech and these

features really generate this incredible power to to language that um

animal communication systems don't have or at least if they have any trace of that it's very rudimentary so those

would be some of the features of language the problem then is to to look at human

language and ask what is not counted in that so you know if I'm using my hands

and doing gestures or if I have facial expressions that are part of my message

um there's an open question as to how I treat them with respect to language

so those actually are open questions some people argue that hand gestures are part of language but

exactly what that means is is is kind of an interesting question so that would be just a few elements of what I would

say in that City your question yeah but so one thing that you mentioned

When does a communication system becomes a language?

is this animal communication system so language is a communication system

and especially in biology when we are thinking about anything most of the times we are

thinking that phenomena in terms of evolution and when it comes to communication

 I mean of course communication we can find in other species even now like at the bacteria level so really at this

single cellular level we can find communication systems so the question is

 when does a communication system becomes a language foreign

yeah that's it's an important point I think that you're making that if you

talk about language you have to acknowledge that it is it is an animal communication system and it is 

founded on a kind of an infrastructure that comes with our with our biology and

and so I my view is in line with sort of a there's a famous

paper in in the biology of animal vocal communication by Krebs and Dawkins

from the early 80s and they talk about how any communication system in in animals

is a system for manipulating or influencing the behavior of another

agent and I think that that is sort of the most powerful underlying

 underlying kind of insight around what is biologically basic about language so it

is a device ultimately for influencing the the thought patterns influencing the

behavior of other individuals who we are associated with and the question then becomes well

what's the mechanism of that influence and what is the kind of goal of that influence and you can see in

animal communication systems that that the mechanism and the goal

to a large extent a pretty basic you know because you're often talking about things like Predator prey relations and

you're trying to manipulate you know you're trying to  

change the behavior of an organism based on Deception or maybe you are

manipulating behavior of another organism in a courtship context and so you know oftentimes there are these very

sort of easy to understand kind of biological motivations for influence between one agent and another and I

think what's really special about language is that it includes all of those basic

principles but it adds on top of it something very unique and that is that it's a very

very Cooperative kind of system much more Cooperative than than other systems

and that's because it's grounded in social norms and it requires a sort

of joint commitment to social norms around around how we use language so uh

maybe we'll get into this I'm not sure but the current thinking about the evolution of

language in in our species is paying a lot of attention to not just

our cognition around kind of manipulating information

 in complex ways but around social cognition at a high level so the

extent to which we can imagine other people's mental States the extent to

which we can might joint commitments to Norms that

are shared within that within a community so evolutionary speaking those things I

just mentioned that have to do with sort of higher order social cognition they're very new in language as a

biologically evolved capacity if you like this is very interesting so what you are

How language got started?

referring here is that once we narrow down human languages to a communication

system basically there are two effects that we see once is the

first one is that we can affect the other person or the other individual and

the second is the coordination part and it seems like these two are important phenomena which also you talk

a lot about in your book language versus reality and the second thing that you

mentioned is the the higher order phenomena that we see in especially in

the case of humans right so in that case let's talk about

the second part first how did then language got started do

we have any inclination there well um

it's famously something that many linguists have been warned not to talk about you know

it's very hard to speculate about the real evolution of the original events

that led to the evolution of language simply because you know those kinds of things don't fossilize easily but there

is brilliant research going on especially in the last 20 years or so in the field of of the evolution of

language and and you know you have this incredible kind of comparative research

 modeling experimental research or testing all sorts of hypotheses around

how language must have evolved I think

um one of the things you would need to emphasize is that language really is

a complex adaptive system that is not just this one kind of encapsulated type

of behavior so you know it's very much emergent from many different factors

so in order to understand how language evolves you have to think about a whole

range of different factors that that come into play to allow it to emerge so you have certain cognitive capacities

for processing information things like memory and speed of your you know

capacity to to process information of a certain kind and to combine bits

of information in certain kinds of ways so there's a whole lot of presupposition around psychological capacities there but on

top of that you have to also have very particular population Dynamics

so you have social network dynamics that allow language to circulate within a

community so one of the most important things to realize about language is that the actual surface properties of

language are specific to certain populations and to certain periods of time so it's not like

many animal species where you know that the actual signals are roughly you know

innate are they're roughly kind of program pre-programmed in some sense so there's a sort of a set inventory of you

know a few signals or maybe a few dozen signals or even 100 or more but with

language you know we have today some 7 000 different languages spoken on the

planet and in each of those you know you have tens of thousands of completely

different words and then you have hundreds or maybe thousands of of productive grammatical constructions

um so those things do not come from the brain those things come from historical

processes of evolution on the cultural level right so this is something very

crucial about understanding the evolution of language is that when we actually study language and we look at

the structures of of any individual language like Japanese or English or you

know or whatever the language might be you know you're studying a

historically developed structure you're not studying a biologically evolved

structure so that's that that sort of sets the coordinates a little bit for

thinking about the original evolution of language and that is that you had to have certain psychological but also certain

social conditions in place before language could

could emerge right so you had to have people for example sharing

attention people creating social realities through

arbitrary agreements people having Norms people are sort of policing those norms

certain social contexts and then within that context you then begin to get

conventions arbitrary conventions evolving and then you know the rest is history

as they say but it's important that that

any individual language that you might study today as a linguist you must remember that it's evolved you know on

the historical time frame and each little piece of it is

circulating in the community as a kind of meme if you like on on the cultural level

Do sapiens have an advantage which helped us to start a language?

yeah so I mean of course that history and the time is important at the cultural level but as a

species do we have certain Advantage I mean I remember certain

 anatomists talking about you know this evolution of vocal books or

the sound box Etc that we can kind of produce these

different sounds and that's how we manage to get language started Etc is

there any consensus on that well no no I wouldn't say there's any consensus there's a lot of disagreement

about whether for example

vocalization is the key some people might say vocally I think everyone would agree that vocalization

is very important in the history of our species and in relation to

language you know we do have this extraordinary vocal Anatomy we have this extraordinary capacity for vocal

imitation you know our our abilities are unbelievable in in imitating sounds

 through our vocal apparatus so there's something clearly very special about about the human vocal capacity

 and the question is you know historically can we tell the timeline and you know which Evol

where were the pressures to evolve you know so the argument might be well if you if you have language if you have

something like language that's culturally learned and you're beginning to diversify

 vocabularies that are quite large in size and you're beginning to innovate

systems where you you have a what's called double articulation which means

that you have a phonological level where you have sounds individual sounds an inventory of individual sounds and

then you can combine them into syllables and and build words out of those once you have a system a generative system

like that in place then that might that could be quite simple and then

that might in turn put you know selective pressure on vocal imitation so

there's clearly a story there to be told about about how the vocal the evolution of the human vocal apparatus is very

tightly connected to to language Evolution but

one of the most important things that to to always remember about language is that it's modality free so you know

 there are many people in the world who deaf who don't have hearing and

they are able to use sign languages which emerge when you have a

concentration of deaf people within a community sign languages will emerge

and they will be they won't use sound at all it's just purely visual medium

so it's now very well established that these languages are peacefully functioning generative

human languages in every sense except the modality that they use so that you don't use sound as the primary modality

they're visual of course the language we're using right now is

doesn't only involve sound you can see my body so it's sound and and vision

combined but that that point the reason why I'm referring to sign languages is to

say that you could have evolutionary pressure on

the vocal apparatus but at the same time you could have language as a as a

modality free functional system evolving you know essentially as a kind of

technology and then you can you know it's like a like a social

conceptual technology which you can then use any kind of Hardware in a sense

to to to implement yeah that's that's fascinating

Language is too blunt for scientists and good for lawyers

 so now going back to your book language versus reality where you uh

actually talk about the use of language in different different ways and and the and the major phrase is language

is too blunt for scientists but good for lawyers and why is that

well you know that's a kind of a and let the accessible way to kind of summarize

the basic idea of the of the book and

it's sort of grounded something that I mentioned in the preface to the book is that for a good number of years I worked

at the Max Planck Institute for psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and I worked with

a very diverse group of people so there were some who were kind of grounded in anthropology and some in

cognitive science and some in sociology and so we had a very diverse group of people looking at language and there

were some quite different research projects working in parallel and one of those projects was

looking at the semantics of language so really looking at what kinds of meanings get encoded in

words and what kinds of meanings can be expressed through through grammatical constructions and

 so looking at for example perceptual domains like color and and you know the structure

of the human body and how that's kind of labeled and and things like that

and the consensus that was coming out of that work was that you know the world

is very complex and language is you know

very very very much more simplified you know if you want to label or describe the way the world is you have to throw

out an enormous amount of information from what you experience right so if you're just going to evaluate uh

language on the basis of its capacity to describe or capture experience you would

have to say it's quite poor at that right so it's very low resolution shall

we say and low Fidelity as a means for recording things so you know a good

example would be something like describing colors or describing people's faces you know it's just very difficult to

actually just from the verbal description kind of grasp exactly what the speaker kind of saw so that was one

whole line of work was was acknowledging that our experience of reality is is

many orders richer than what we can capture in the semantics of language

 so that points to the idea that you know language is not a good tool for uh

capturing the facts of reality if you're interested in you know perceiving what's out there in the world

the other kind of Big Field of research that I was involved in in that same group was looking at

how language is used in social interaction so what we do with language and how we organize our interactions

using language as a as a as a device for that and in that domain you see that

you know language is very high functioning right so language has this kind of very it's very powerful for

 those functions that we were mentioning before in relation to animal communication for for influencing

people's attention for forging joint attention for getting

other people to commit to coordination in in whatever the activity might be

um you know in things like storytelling drawing people into your sort of

circle and capturing their imagination social bonding all of these kinds of functions language is very good at those

things obviously it's not perfect but

the key I think from thinking about those two sides of language was to see that as I

put it in the subtitle of the book language is is good for lawyers it's really designed for lawyers in the sense

that lawyers is a kind of cartoon caricature of the lawyer but the lawyer is somebody who

has a position that they wish to defend and

they will use whatever means they can to sort of

portray the situation in a way that is is how they want it in order to persuade or in order to influence the

understanding of the others and on the other hand the scientists

you know a good textbook scientist has no investment in in the answer they just

want to know what the answer is they want to know the truth and

 that's not a very you know language is not very reliable for that because

it's it's full of all of these biases it's full of all of this kind of you know cultural baggage it's very

 generally in its semantic structure so you know you you you can't rely very

well on on language to represent reality so therefore it's not great for scientists

 even even worse for scientists it's inherently biased as a system and so

 you know that those downsides for the cut for the cartoon scientists are upsides for the cartoon lawyer

 who's like yeah great this is a great system because I can choose words to you

know take the single situation and I can take different words and describe them to either make my client look

innocent or to make my client look guilty and you know you can trans plant that

metaphor into sort of any any any field you want yeah I think that's a good explanation

We simplify the complexity of the world

 especially about the pain of scientists that they always

go go through that so the so the thing that you

mentioned at least in the book they the fact that there is this two-layer

 decrement in the in the world's complexity or in reality so in so the

world or reality in general is too complex so first of first of all we reduce it through our perception and

the secondly we reduce it through our language right right right

yeah so that's kind of important because

I find a useful way to think about you know how we economize as kind of

agents in in the world so I mean any sort of perceptual system is is going to

be evolved and it's going to be evolved in such a way as to minimize costs and

maximize you know survival I suppose or you know to to be able to allow a uh

an organism to reproduce successfully it should be you know it should allow them

to avoid death within the niche that they're in but also above that level not to

create any further costs so the world is too complex for us to be able to process all of it

 we don't need to process all of it and so you know one of the things I just talk about in setting up

 early on in the book is pointing out that you know just in terms of what

we can perceive in the world the kind of electromagnetic radiation that surrounds us you know there's this massive the

Spectrum and we just can access this tiny little kind of part of it and uh

that that's our perception now I when we think about that we realize okay we're we're missing a lot of what's around us

we can invent tools that allow us to see that we can get you know infrared and different

kinds of sensors and so on that allow us to to to to hear things and see things that we normally can't hear or see

 but the reason why we see and hear what we do see in here is really about

our relationship as individual agents to our environment right so we are tuned to our environment

to a certain extent given what our bodies are like and given you know what our sort of evolutionary Niche is like

and so it's a very much kind of tuned to the to the organism as a as a kind

of an agent that has to move around within the world and then there's the second level

 where we go from our all of what we perceive so now we've

thrown away all the stuff we can't perceive and and as individuals we have you know this kind of much smaller

spectrum of what we can perceive but then within that then you get another very very compressed

 sort of step down into what we encode in language so that band just

take color the color spectrum you know you have this massive you know some estimates are like a

million or more just noticeable differences in in colors

 that gets reduced in most languages to you know a few terms or maybe a few dozen terms

 and the question is well why do we get this second sort of massive step

down in in capturing kind of distinctions in in in in in the world

the reason I argue is that what language delivers is no longer

about the relation between the agent and the world it's it's about the relation between

two agents so you're using the language as a a kind of a map or a pointer for

people to coordinate around so it's that that's the kind of key and oftentimes this gets collapsed when you

look at the cognitive science of language at least more traditionally we're thinking about

languages kind of mapping directly onto these kind of mental functions that you know you have mental you have semantic

categories because they help you think about your environment and I I want to argue that that's not

what's important about language language isn't important for how it makes you think about the environment or allows

you to think about the environment it it's important for how it allows you to coordinate with others around the

environment and certain socially useful ways so in other words language wasn't

Why language was evolved?

evolved to get give us an ability to do science or study nature Etc it was

evolved just for this kind of social bonding cohesion phenomena right

well yeah that's my view I I think uh like people like Robin Dunbar and I I

also think that many other kind of thinkers in the field of language Evolution you know believe that social

interaction is a really important part of the story I certainly agree with

people like like Dunbar or Mike Tomasello or many others that you know that the foundation

of language is is social interactional and is based

on you know what what some might call joint intentionality which is you know

where two people share their attention or share their understanding of something in the world now

I would I would want to immediately say to your comment um

this is crucial for science right so if you're talking about

a scientist as you know a single individual who's somehow trying to understand the world in front of them I

don't think that's really what science is right I mean science is um

it obviously is wanting to understand reality but if you're an individual agent in an environment you're just

trying to maybe make some predictions and not get hurt and you know achieve whatever your

local goals are you're not necessarily Desiring a kind of an explanation

 and I think this is what's really crucial about language is that once you have the capacity to use language to

coordinate with others and then then you have a capacity to ask questions and ask things like why

 then you know that is a prerequisite I would say it's a science in the sense that we usually mean it and that is

where you you cooperate with others you collaborate with others you create

joint systems of of belief and common understanding and then that leads to

cumulative culture and I would say you know science is like a perfect example of cumulative culture

 that you build and build and build over time Beyond let's say the immediate needs of of your environment

 

On Donald Hoffman's work

exactly I mean yeah there is no I think no scientist would argue that science is a collective process

 there'll be humans we come together and try to understand nature or study

nature in more elaborative way so there was another book which was

published on on reality it's called the case against Reality by Donald

Hoffman so I interviewed him and he also has these two major points first

of all Evolution doesn't give us an ability to understand nature or reality

to see reality it doesn't I mean the the payoff there is the fitness the the

we need to survive long enough to pass on our genes to the Next Generation rather than you know be compatible uh

to observe the reality and the second thing of course then he goes on to another extent and and

explains the reality in Beyond space-time like that's like the

Consciousness part what he tries to explain so I don't know what are your views on at least the on on these two

points do you did you come across his work yeah I did

 I do cite it in in my book at least in passing in the sense that

 you know I certainly agree with with the essential idea that you know we are

constructing reality in some kind of important sense that is we're projecting to ourselves

some kind of useful theory of what is in front of us

 and when I say useful well it's evolutionarily proven to be useful and we don't need to to sort of expend more

energy on finding out anything more about about the reality that's in front of

us I think that one thing that maybe I'm not sure how much

I emphasize this explicitly in a book at least in that section but there's something very important about the word

reality and that is that you know there are there are I follow I would follow the philosopher

 John Searl and saying that there are two distinct forms of reality so one is what he would

call Brute reality and that is you know the world of physical causes

and I think there's a an interesting that's where the discussion of Hoffman's

discussion about saying well okay you can split that as well and say okay well there's the real world that we have no

access to and then there's you know our representation of it which is what we work with

 but I think that those are all kind of in the realm of physical reality and how we reason about cause and and how we

experience the world and so on the second type of reality is social reality

and you know I think well many

many who've looked at this point really emphasize that you know there's nothing less real about social

reality but the way that it becomes real is very different so a piece of social

reality would be something like if you have a license to drive in the

state that you live in you know either you do or you don't so I have a I have a driver's license in

my state in Australia and New South Wales so it's a fact that I am licensed

to drive but that fact is not made True by

atoms you know it's not made True by causal processes that you know can be

inspected in the piece of plastic that shows my my my license that fact has

come about through social coordination through linguistic actions so through people signing forms and through people

are passing laws and you know these kinds of social agreements that make the

conditions under which it's we can say it's true that I am licensed to

drive so that's another whole realm of reality that I don't think that Hoffman and Company are really kind of they're

not really looking at that but but I think that in my conception

 of what you want to talk about when you talk about reality really must include that whole uh

social reality kind of element and and what sir argues is that you cannot have

social reality without language but you but all the rest of reality

is is you know it's not dependent on language in in any way

Brute reality and social reality

yeah this is interesting so about brute reality I mean of course the

the language does play a role there first of all we don't have I think good

language itself especially once we go over the this quantum mechanics level Etc

um and the same thing goes for the social reality where again language plays an important role so both of them

they are bound at least with the tool that we call language yeah well I would just say I mean

they're affected by language in in interesting ways that I would just want to say that

 just because you can't describe something very easily or understand it

very easily it doesn't you know mean that I mean language has no effect on it's

not so much about the reality itself it's really you're talking more about our problems in

accessing this or our problems in coordinating around it or whatever but the reality which just carries on doesn't care about us in some stance

 and that's kind of cell's point about social reality is that if you change what people believe or what people say

 then you can change those realities as a direct result but you can't you can't really affect brute reality

directly through saying things yeah so Yuval Harari he talks about 

Yuval Harrari's imagined reality

social reality as you described in his book sapiens as imagined reality we

kind of Imagine our stuff for example money or as you mentioned about driving license

 and it's just that we collectively agree on this thing and we kind of make it a reality but it's like Beyond

human species it's not like it really exists yeah

 I think that's almost right but it sort of Misses maybe

something important and when you say imagined reality it kind of individualizes the process

and it seems to suggest that you know you can create something just by imagining it and I don't think that's

right I think you know that suggests some kind of magic but you know just take something like

money right so piece of paper or a piece of metal has a certain

 value and I don't think that we just imagine that I do agree that you know

it is the value of money is maintained by human behavior that's the kind of key

it's maintained by human agreement and obviously the value of money changes all the time depending on people's behavior

the key thing is not the Imagining the key thing is the agreeing right it's the

holding each other to account for having a common agreement so when I talk about

going back to the example of being licensed to drive you know I don't just imagine that I'm licensed to drive it's

really true that I'm licensed to drive and if I am challenged on that point I

can back it up with evidence I can you know show you my card with some language on it that certifies that I am licensed

to tribe and you can trace back to these various kinds of speech acts so it's actually I think this is the one thing I

would emphasize is that it's more than just imagining it's that all of these things like language laws

you know Norms you know possession ownership all of

these kinds of classic Notions of social reality are are truly backed up

 by this kind of what so we're called declarations

 and I guess to say one last kind of Point is that

ultimately though it all comes back to brute reality because things like the value of money

  ownership you know whether you're licensed to

drive or or you know legally married things like that they are all ultimately legally

you know if you cannot agree you'll ultimately go to the courts and the courts the The Last Resort of

the court is force The Brute reality right so you know if

you drive without a license you will get fined and if you don't pay your fine

you can be put in jail you know so that's being put in jail that is not that's pretty reality you can't get out

of yourself right as a physical how you're physically contained so you know that's what's referred to as the

state Monopoly on force or Monopoly on violence and and so it's a it's just a kind of footnote but I think it's

important that ultimately social reality is is underpinned by brute reality um

because brute reality is what that's the final the final Resort of Kings as at

sometimes called yeah this is really interesting the interplay between brute reality and

Power of all the languages

social reality and since we are talking about that let's also so first of all we can

make a note here once we are talking about language here it doesn't mean it means all all the languages that we have

 for humans right it's not like any specific language or something so we are

going well but I should say though you know I'm talking about I'm making General points about the power of of

language but I'm not saying that I I would say that all languages have that sort of power and

 it's just that the the the the modality of the individual language or the

specific things that an individual language can do they can be quite different so you can take a language from one part of the world and

compare it to a language from another part of the world they might they will give you quite different categories they

will encode quite different concepts so the social realities that they can create won't be the same but all

languages will give you ways to create that sort of social reality so they'll give you ways for example to

 bestow a name upon a person so my name is Nick

 different cultures have other ways of naming you can have two names three names five names you know they're all

sorts of different but things get named everywhere you go and so and the name of the thing is is a piece of social

reality and so that you know in answer to your question you have in languages you

have Universal functions like for example bestowing names or coming to agreements

 but how those things are done will differ from language to language

yeah but in the case of brute reality all the languages can go down to kind of

this human Communication System rather than well of course because all all to

actually operate you know once you get right down to the very sort of low level of operating the system

 you know it's still you're still bound to brute reality because you're used you have to have

some perceptual signal perceptible signal so I if we're using spoken

language I have to be able to hear you you're right now you're in another country we have technology that you know

creates this noise that can go into my eardrum so we can hear each other because we have technology that that

manages brood reality in these kinds of ways but if we didn't have this Tech

I couldn't you couldn't hear me because you're you know thousands of miles away so we are always subject to

 the reality that's around us purely because you know language is a semiotic system and all semiotic systems must

operate based on essentially based on perception is the kind of bottom

level you know without having a possibility of perceiving some sign nothing can follow from that you know

it's a prerequisite to any kind of communication happening at all so if you go back to I mentioned the Krebs and

Dawkins work and the work on you know animal communication systems your when

you're manipulating another individual using communication what you're doing is playing on their senses

you're touching you know their senses you're using their senses as a kind of tool your your your commandeering uh

their their sensory system because of their brain through their sensory system so it's always uh

the reality is always limiting you through exactly that channel of perception and then everything else kind

of follows on from that yeah I think this is important because especially if we think of any

Language in an AI society

future kind of silicon based life or AI in even in that sense so even if it will be like more advanced still it'll be kind of limited in in its perception or receiving signal just because the world is so complex and I think these these understanding that which comes from your work will be applied there as well that's still it'll be kind of limited to

explain or to observe the brute reality but also probably I don't know what

will happen at the social level but yeah yeah well it's worth noting that with language

 you know the the a typical spoken language is is very kind of cleverly

designed I mean I don't they're not designing of course but you know let's say evolved cleverly evolved to

use a very small number of perceptual distinctions so if you look at for

example vowel system so you know all spoken languages have vowels and so they will have contrasts

between sounds like and you will see that you know most

languages are going to have a pretty small number of they're going to use a pretty small number of distinctions so average for our system in the world is going to have something like five distinctions or four distinctions or something like that

so something like you know ah or E air okay those four sounds and so

what's interesting is that you know even though you've got this very very fine potential perceptual set of perceptible

distinctions in the vowel space language just picks a very small subset of that so it's very efficient right so

in in the in the brute reality of the kind of you know auditory possibility

space language is very frugal very economical and it says okay I'm just

going to see if I can take like three or four I'm going to cut this big space into just four pieces and then I'm going

to have a combinatoric system I can have syllables and I'm going to have some consonants and then that's my

that's the brute Reality Part you know the people I'm talking to they've got ears they can distinguish you know

these sounds and then I get a combinatoric system where now I can start to generate words out of those

things so it's a very clever kind of digital system ultimately that that heavily compresses the The Brute

Reality by using these kind of systems of of categorization um

so why what I was saying before is still true that language depends on brute reality to be just carried as a as a

science system it's very cleverly kind of economical at how it does that

Complexity of a language

and the other important thing is the complexity in the language so there are

some examples that you talk about in the book as well where if two people they are communicating about certain objects

they very quickly they come up with a system which is fairly simple to point

out at the like at that system so and we do see that this kind of

complexity in the languages in human languages right so is there any

 way to understand if the complexity means I don't know better success in in the language or what

it's or what it would help in a way to explain the reality also like

brute reality or social reality the complexity of the language well I would go back to kind of this

 distinction between the first level of sort of simplification of reality and

the second level of simplification so the first level is kind of the the Hoffman kind of part is you know how

much you can simplify reality for your perception is dependent on you know what

is what function do you put that perception to so what functions do you need to perform what goal are you trying

to meet why do you need that information well you need that information to avoid

you know tripping over or you know avoid hitting your head or you know you need

to have balance you need to see obstacles so again as an agent trying to get

through a physical environment but then the question of what you

need in your language is not about that it's about getting through coordination of a social environment and

for that the question is so when the question is what's my function you have

to ask well what is what what is socially required in the community that

I live in so what do I have to coordinate with other people around so an example I think that I talk about

in the book at least in passing is is the kinship systems so you know all

languages have ways of talking about kin relations so words like brother and

sister and and son and daughter and father and mother and cousin and uncle and aunt and Grandma and Grandpa you

know these kinds of words are found in all languages but

there's great diversity in what they mean so you look at a language like English and

if you just ask well how do I refer to the people who are the brothers and sisters of my parents

right so in English um

you know there's there's really just these two words right aunt and uncle

and it doesn't matter if it's my dad's sister or my mum's sister it's still my

art it doesn't matter if it's my dad's older sister or my dad's younger sister it's

still my aunt right and with those kind of two possibilities mother's side Father's

Side male sibling female sibling older younger you know you've got these eight possible

categories and they are collapsed in English just into aunt and uncle whereas

there's plenty of languages in the world where those distinctions are made separately so I work on a language in

Laos that distinguishes have a separate word for each of those eight people okay mother's side Father's Side male sibling

 female sibling older younger so there's eight totally separate words so there's no General category for

aren't right there are four different kinds of people that you have to refer to as aren't so coming to your question

 you would say then that that system in this language is called Cree spoken

in Laos that I work on you would have to say that system is more complex right you have eight uh

categories I have to remember eight words I have to track eight different kind of distinctions I have to know

is that person older or younger than that you know to track more information so there's a kind of cost you might

argue and I reduce that costs in the English system but the

argument is well it's you're not just reducing the cost you're also losing the

possibility of making finer distinctions if I have to go to extra effort to say well that's

my father's older sister instead of just saying my aunt right so I have to go to

extra trouble if it's an important piece of information and the argument is that

 you will have the more complex system like the cree one in a community where

there is some cultural importance on making those distinctions for example

in that in in the community that I'm talking about there are different social obligations for example towards

your nephew or niece depending on whether you're older or younger than

that person's parents okay so I'm not going to get into all the kind of details of it here

but you know basically in let's say in the English-speaking world you have an idea of what an art is like and what

an uncle is like and you know people conform to that idea to some degree irrespective of which

side they're on and so forth but in another culture actually you need to distinguish because there will be

different obligations from those people different expectations from those people and and it's the it's the need to

coordinate around those differences that requires you or that gives you some payoff to paying that extra cost of

having of maintaining a more complex system so is it good or bad or it's

conditional well good or bad the only way to answer that question is to say well is that

culture better or worse than this other culture and you know that's like it's

kind of like it's a taboo question in some sense then but it's also like an impossible question most of the time I

mean you know it opens up it could look a whole lot of

sometimes opens up moral questions around cultural practices and so forth but also a lot of the time it's pretty

arbitrary like you know is it good or bad I eat rice versus pasta you know

which is a good or bad not neither of them are bad they're just different right so I I think

it's like everything in a kind of complex system there are trade-offs and you know you have these kind of

one of the points I talk about in the book is is that you know you can think about this trade-offs as a kind of a

Frontier where you're you know there's a trade-off between more complex on one dimension and less complex on the other

dimension and you you know there are some domains like this kinship one where it's argued that you have a kind of

there's a kind of constant along which you can you can vary

 if you're just a kind of a regular human language so I don't think you can say that better or worse but you can

the reason is because if the evolutionary pressures are about

arriving at a balanced trade-off then there are different solutions to that problem that are equally good as

trade-offs right but if you there are certain types of points in the possibility space that

would be bad right so you would for example not have a language where you had to

have a different word for every individual object in the universe it just couldn't work right

 You have to generalize you have to have categories so you've got to you know you have to lose information to

some to some sort of extent and then you also wouldn't have a language where you just have one word for everything

 because it doesn't it gives you no capacity to differentiate right so there's there's always these extremes

which would be impossible and those would be bad systems and I guess the point is we don't really see

particularly bad systems precisely because they're adapted to human

communication and they're adapted to you know culturated societies that you know

whether the language actually has a function and that function is tested every single day

 through the transmission and the usage of the language yeah and I mean of course it's when

 

Can complexity of a language affect psychology?

we are comparing the cultures and languages that there are all the all the different issues that you mentioned

but then there is another important question is like if this kind of

language or you know the complexity of the language can affect psychology you know so in in Reverse once we think

 means having this elaborative structure kind of give you a way to

understand I don't know different things can the social reality in a better way or something

yeah I mean I think there's a lot of evidence that you know the structure of your language does affect psychology

and I I review quite a lot of that work in the book and there's a lot has been written about this

 you know so there are many many studies of what you might call

linguistic determinism and if you compare across languages a kind of linguistic relativity where

different languages will kind of direct your thought in different sorts of ways now this is a somewhat controversial

area people like to disagree about how significant these

effects are but most people would agree that working with different categories in thought

directs your attention in certain kinds of ways and leads to certain patterns of reasoning so that's

the first thing that people would agree on so there's quite a lot of literature around for example linguistic framing how

situations get described actually leads you to reason differently about those situations so that's a linguistic effect

 on on on reasoning on on cognition so everyone you know it accepts that it's

been demonstrated in various ways and then

what we also accept is that the thousands of languages in the world contain very different categories so if

you study the semantic categories of languages in the way we were just talking about some languages elaborate

certain domains others treat them in very general terms some languages

structure a concept in one way and other languages structure that Concept in another way or they don't have that

concept of you know essentially each language is a kind of Factory of frames right it gives you all

of these ways of thinking about the the world around you ways that are

adaptive to your particular cultural kind of setting right

 and yeah I think it's just well established that those different framings those different

World Views that are encoded through language will affect the way you think in certain

kinds of ways and coming back to your question about you know what's good and what's bad well

it's all really a matter of what context you find yourself in so if you're working within the cultural context to

which your language is adapted then you know it's generally going to be adapted by definition right

 but it's really when you're thinking in one language and operating within the kind of world of another language

 you know that that's one place where sometimes you get these kind of mismatches

 but you know I mean I think in general the the the effects of

language on reasoning are I mean they're real they're not

always highly consequential but in a small percentage of cases I think they

can be yeah here we can also talk about this Superior Wharf hypothesis which is

Sapira-Whorf hypothesis

again linked with the behavior and psychology and like the language

yeah yeah that's right so I didn't talk a bit about that hypothesis in the

book and it's interesting I mean in a way

you know I don't always kind of talk about it necessarily by name because in the popular

imagination people have an allergic reaction to the superior Wharf

hypothesis right so the superior War hypothesis is basically the idea that the languages

speak affects the way you think in certain ways and it gets kind of

caricatured in certain ways it gets described as you know that language is You Know You're a prisoner of your

language and your language forces you to think this and that and yeah

it's basically like any of these domains that captures the imagination of the public that as soon as it gets out into

public discourse it morphs into something not highly systematic and

 not directly related to its kind of origin so I think it's really important when you're talking about the superior

War hypothesis or the principles behind that you

know that you go back and look at the actual work that was done by the people who originated it so in a book I

talk about wolf and his work and you know

thinking about Wharf is that he was just a very interesting thinker and

somebody who was engaging with language and obviously had a real talent for it but he wasn't doing systematic studies

 he wasn't doing experiments he wasn't doing you know comprehensive surveys of languages he was just noticing really

interesting stuff and and he and he had really interesting insights and I think that

some of the most famous critiques of that work so one would be in Stephen

Pinker's book The Language Instinct where he's sort of famously dismisses a wolf hypothesis it says it's it's

completely wrong it's not based on anything well you know that's nearly

30 years ago that book and and in the last two or three decades you pretty

much since around the time that book came out there's been an extraordinary amount of work in psychology

Linguistics in Neuroscience that is really kind of looking much more systematically at at possible

ways in which language the language you speak can affect the way you think so I think now it's very well established

there are a lot of different kinds of effects I think what's sort of still open is

how consequential are those effects and how much do they really kind of

matter for what it means to be a speaker of a certain language as opposed to

merely being a human who has a certain cognitive system so those considerations

actually I mean I think they're important because they bring us back to something really fundamental about

language which is that all humans have it so it's part of what it means to be

human is that you have language you are a language using type of species and and that's unique to

us and yet as a person as an individual human you don't there's no one who has

the language in the abstract you have a language which is which is a culturally

evolved system and so that brings in this very that's where human

diversity comes in so it's it's a great kind of language is a great kind of overlapping point between human

universality and and human diversity and of course our species is has cultural diversity

which is which is radical and and quite unlike anything in the animal world

Co-evolution and evolution of languages

and I think it's also important to think in terms of the school Evolution

 work like now nowadays A lot of people they are studying the co-evolution of the species

 so I mean of course the interaction between different life forms which are around us

 and also the the sort of conditions which are there so thinking in

that terms you know how culture evolves and what sort of conditions are there one example that you also

give in the book is the number of tree species reported in different

languages so the fact that because these these things are or these things

were important once those languages were being evolved so of course then we get different uh

 complexity but also a different Focus of the language so the question here

is what is about for example there is a something else which is human reasoning rationality that we call if

that there is a connection there between kind of different languages or it is common for all the humans

well I I think one thing that's really important about language is that

it is inherently highly flexible system right so it's it's radically flexible so

you can you know there's a lot of sort of constraints on language but within those constraints language is

wonderfully flexible so I mentioned before about you know the vowels that

a language can have so some languages have like three vowels and some languages have you know 20 vowels it

depends on how you count you know and some languages have 10 consonants and sometimes we just have

a hundred you know you have this amazing kind of diversity and and that's just the sound systems

you can go the the you know the the the the the the vocabulary of thousands and thousands of words and all of these

domains like the the plant names that you mentioned what that shows is that the system is

evolved for flexibility it's evolved for local adaptability right so you don't

biologically inherit these languages and the the point the fact that

some In some cultures you you know the average person will know 500 names

for tree species in their local area and in another language you know they might know 10.

 you know that's a that's a great range and it shows that language will uh

it's basically designed to adapt it's designed to be flexible in that way and that's exactly what culture is like so

one of the important kind of thing evolutionary arguments that invokes co-evolution

 is the idea that you know humans somehow were able to

innovate this very important trick culture which was innovating not the

content of the culture not the content of the local knowledge but the capacity to

share and build upon local knowledge in this highly adaptable way so you know we

famously you have populated the entire Earth and we have people who live in ice

environments and people who live in desert environments and you know we have these ways to adapt a culture gives

us that and is really bound up with that adaptability and and and I think

that's the important way to think about language in these terms is is that it

is inherently an adaptable system A system that adapts to human needs

Desmond Morris' work on neoteny

yeah I mean I remember talking to Desmond Morris who talks about the that just

because humans spend a lot of time in their childhood I mean and with parents that's how or even with the

community that's how we end up kind of learn more and you know inheriting

also the culture part rather than adjust the genetics yeah that's a very important Point 

it's certainly very important in relation to language because you know there is this

cycle of transmission with language so to to know human language you must have spent years

acquiring it and to Know It natively those

years must have been spent as a as a as an infant as a small child

 in a in a very intense very sustained social life within a particular context

of family and a village and and some kind of small community I mean most humans don't really travel around and

meet too many strangers until they've fully acquired their local language and they've spent already kind of several

years so I think that's a really important point that Morris makes there and

it comes back to the point that I was making at the beginning about you know how language is sustained by

this really complex adaptive set of really quite diverse systems and

so one of those systems is the population and the Dynamics of our

social networks and so if childhood is a critical period for

 acquiring language and for acquiring cultural norms and for sort of you know

internalizing the kind of emotional Norms of the place you live in

 you know it's important that that children are socialized In This Very

a relatively closed kind of social situation and and of course cultures

vary in the degree to which a kid can can go out of the household and so on

 so it's not really about limiting a child to one family but it's more about limiting a child to one let's say

small village or small kind of extended area and and and that those kind

that's an example of the kind of social requirement that is causally related to

 account for you know why languages are the way they are it's just it it goes alongside these other more

cognitive considerations that are equally important but not at all the whole story so from the language point of view if we

Purpose of a language

will think the use of language so what is it good for that's first

question and then if on the basis of that question we start thinking that

okay which cultures are are really

good at employing language you know just from the language point of view to use it to for the betterment of

society in a way right well I'd say language is good for

what I say in a book at some length is that you know language is is good for social

coordination it's good as a tool for social coordination at all sorts of

levels so maybe at a very practical immediate level like getting someone to

pass something to you you know influencing people's behavior at a sort of very local level

 but also equally good or coordination at a kind of higher

Social level so through for example Collective sense making you know

myth-telling storytelling that circulates shared values that we have

 you know gossip that circulates shared sort of evaluations that we have

about what's good and what's bad and who is part of our group and who is not part of our group I mean these are the things

that language is is good for and I would say that those

things you know language is good for those purposes wherever you go in the world

 that these are the things that people will use language for they use it to get each other to do things for them they

use it to forge social relations and to manipulate social relations so all of

those the very high level kind of functions no matter where you go a language would be good for that

 what else it will be good for you know that that's a a more local question when

I say oh it's good for coordinating social activities and then your question should be but what are these social

activities and the answer is well you have to go and look at the the environment that you're in so if I am in

a if I'm a mechanic and I work in a in an auto shop and and you know I spend

the day fixing cars I need a vocabulary

 so that I can talk to my fellow Workshop

workers when I say all I need is I need a spark plug or you know pass

me a carburetor or you know Phillips head screwdriver I need all this terminology that comes with my language

that allows me to coordinate around categories and objects that are highly

specific to my cultural setting so the type of technological con context

 so you know every culture will have specializations it will have knowledge that's specific to certain groups and

the language will be adapted to kind of suit that now you're kind of asking well could you

sort of look for a culture that was you know would provide some kind of Advantage General advantage in some

sense or a language rather that would you know we should all learn that language and speak it

 I I don't think that you can say that there would be such a language

because there's always the question of but what would you need that language for what

 context is the same everywhere in the world you know there isn't so you're

always in a in a different cultural setting you're also you're always in a different ecological setting you're

always in a different Matrix of kind of cultural assumptions and once you

know those things then your best bet would be to speak the language that the people around you are

speaking right because the language isn't tuned they're not tuned to some kind of absolute set of functions

they're tuned to to the local functions uh that that people use them for

 in in whatever that locality is so I would resist this kind of view that

 one language or another language or another language is kind of better in in

some absolute sense because the question is always going to be there better for what so you hear sometimes people saying

oh this language is better because it's more logical well this language is

better because it's more you know intuitive I don't you know I don't know

how you would measure those things firstly but secondly I just think that the question that always comes to my

mind is you know for what if it's functional it has to be functional for

some purpose for some community and there is no generic purpose and there is

no generic Community for language okay this is I think really important

Rationality, reasoning and language

because especially once we start thinking about human progress

 Beyond language I mean we we have made some some absolute changes in a way like

we can talk about human rights or animal rights that people are fighting for nowadays right

 yeah which are Beyond imagination and and I think it's also kind of Beyond language If he if we go there and that

goes to to certain extent about human rationality human reasoning part that

whether it's limited to certain language or it is just a kind of human phenomena

of social coordination as you mentioned that just because we coordinate we kind

of discuss with each other we can reach to certain conclusions which are even if

we don't have good language for or or good words they can describe that

phenomena but still we can reach to certain conclusions which are Beyond on our

vocabulary or are you know explanation at that time so what are your thoughts on the

rationality and reasoning part of humans well I mean

I guess there's a few things one thing I want to say is that you know the

with progress and with kind of innovation the flexibility of language that I

mentioned is is is always there and so you can come up with a new idea you can try to promote A New Concept and you can

just make new language language is being innovated all the time right our language is changing just right in front

of us all through our lives so there's no sense in which you're kind of um

you know imprisoned or limited by your language because we can just create new kind of conventions

 and so it's very dynamic in that way and and again very adaptable

I think you know you've asked a couple of times about rationality and I think

 it's a great question and it's something really worth trying to talk about I I

have been thinking more and more about this topic and I think about it

 from the point of view of Hugo Mercier and Dan sperber you

might have encountered their book the Enigma of Reason in which they

make the case there you know human rationality

is really I don't know like an appropriation or

an exhaptation from something that is really evolved for not for arriving at

new knowledge but for persuading others

 so it's really kind of parallel to the argument I've been making for language but it's specifically about thought and my view actually is that language is more important I think in that argument than perhaps the mercy and sperber say you

know I think they they understand very well the power of language but what I would want to emphasize is

that if rationality is fundamentally about a system for justifying or arguing or

persuading others then all of those things like justifying arguing and persuading those are speech Acts those

are communicative acts and they're not mental Acts I mean they involve mental acts but

there's if primarily communicative Acts so you know essentially if you think of

rationality as being kind of somehow based on language then the way to think about it is that you start with a system

for influencing others you start with a system for you know getting others to think new

things getting others to act in certain kinds of ways then you know with a sit with this with a semantic system you get

others to come to New beliefs all of these things are using information to kind of manipulate others

 mental States to for some benefit and then

eventually you see that oh that can be you that system for interpersonal

influence can be used to arrive at new knowledge

right and that's how you know we can use that in a new way for a kind of rational

as what we would now today call kind of rational thought is really more about taking a

socially evolved system and redirecting it towards the

kind of purpose of trying to arrive at new knowledge and I think I mean this is something that I've begun

to think more and more about it particularly in light of uh

the concept of rational thought put forward by people like Carl popper

 so what I think so important about Popper's work on on you know how do you

arrive at knowledge I mean he he argued for

 what he called a clash of cultures that you know it's very important when

you're trying to advance in your knowledge that you be make yourself open to Relentless

critique that you subject yourself to Relentless critique you put forward your

ideas in a creative way and you allow yourself to to be critiqued and so this

idea of critique is again another kind of speech act right it's another kind of communicative exchange where you uh

you really require another person to use language to talk about what you've said so this comes us back to our reflexive

 function of language that language allows you to talk about the communication system itself which means

I can take what you said and evaluate it you made a statement I can say no that's

wrong or why do you think that or whatever the case is you're taking a system for persuasion

and turning it into a system or using it as a system for generating knowledge and so to my mind that's how I would

want to see the fundamental connection between language and rationality

Truth and rationality

now this question is interesting because like your subtitle as it goes that

its language is good for lawyers but not for scientists because once we think

of this rational view I mean the even from the lawyer's point of view because

that's what the evidence points at that okay this criminal is not like

really criminal right so that would sound seems like a rational view but you

know even if that person is a murderer right but thinking from science

point of view it'll be something different that okay maybe this theory that it works at some like at this point

but maybe it is rational or not rational like it it'll depend on how we

account for evidence I guess yeah and I yeah so I think it's always important to acknowledge that

in these kind of scenarios like you know a person has committed a crime you're trying to figure out who it was

 you are always balancing

simultaneously the needs of a scientist and and a lawyer right so that it's not

like there's 100 scientists over here 100 lawyer over there that you know

we all of us have some element of both of those sides in us at the same time so

you know a a scientist wants to arrive at the truth but they

should be trying to persuade others there should be you know on this model this proper model of kind of

self-critique you need to have a spirited defense and a spirited attack you know for

the longer term purpose of arriving at the truth right so I mean that's one

point I think another point is that uh

there's an ethical Dimension to this right so you know if you are

in a court of law and someone has committed a crime I mean let's just leave the kind of monetary I mean the

problem with talking about lawyers in this kind of cartoonish way is that you know lawyers are paid to they're paid by

their clients right now if you just think maybe from the

point of view of the judge okay so the judge is not supposed to have any

predisposition to want to see that this person is put in jail or set free right

they just want to know what is true what happened and that you know so there'll be two

lawyers one on one side one on the other trying to kind of convince them as hard as they can so from that when you think

about the judge as being sort of in the middle then of course the ethical Dimension

comes in and that's where you know in a system like court of law with a judge

you've you've decided that to place a kind of an ethical importance on truth

that we actually do want to know what the truth is and it does matter

 and we we know if this person committed the crime we want them to be punished and if they didn't they don't

want them to be so that system puts a certain ethical

weight on the facts and you know I think that science is like that

 and we know that culturally that's not always the case so you know like I'm thinking of studies for example where

 you know if you look at legal arguments in different cultures

 if I damage your property completely accidentally

right not through any or even I don't know let's say like uh

I don't know a pig escapes from my farm and goes to your farm and eats your

carrots or something like that right you know I would be probably liable for

damages in some sense but there's

it would be different from if I had gone over and actually dug up your carrots I mean maybe it's not the best example but

there are different cultural kind of norms around how I would decide on your culpability and how

I would treat that in some kind of cultural settings like I think a certain legalistic settings and

scientific settings facts of the matter the kind of the truth is in the

foreground and that's the thing that we're supposed to kind of get at and you know I I don't think that's that's

necessarily always the case and I think as long as rationality uh

puts that in the foreground then you know then things will will go in the right direction

but you will still need to have persuasion in interaction with you know some kind

of evidence-based representation of of what is true

Fighting misinformation

yeah these arguments I think they are really they would make sense especially

to fight for example misinformation that we that we are seeing nowadays

 and of course there are reports that okay it's increasing this and that but I

mean at the end if humanity is all about persuading the other humans then

maybe we have I think we'll we'll have to I think narrow down the problem in a in a better way like the

persuasion has to be kind of based on certain evidence and Truth as you as you

mentioned right yeah absolutely and I think you know if we go back to the Mercia and sperber

 kind of argument you know in a in certain settings

the persuasion is all that matters right I mean oftentimes it doesn't

matter what was true if I just get you to believe what I'm saying to you then I've succeeded

 you know and and so evolutionarily that's kind of part of their argument is to say well if the real function of

persuasion is just to get other people to to join your side in some sense then

truth is not doesn't necessarily provide a kind of an evolutionary pressure

 what's really important is did it convince other people to to adopt your your point of view right so that's

the danger is the slippage between you know the power of language and and

reasoning as a speech as a communicative act to bring others you know into

line with you you know that that's a slippage between that and getting

them to actually believe true things and it's clearly the what the best world is where you can align both of those things

right I'm the if I'm the best Persuader but I also have the truth that's the

best yeah maybe I'm the best Persuader but I don't have the truth and of course that's the problem at

the moment with with things like you know our current media landscape and the

fact that the best persuaders do not have our interests at heart and they are

motivated by their business models and you know we understand quite well the

problem at the moment is but it's basically a misalignment between

the incentive to persuade and the incentive to represent the truth

and the interesting element there would be confirmation bias means I want to

Confirmation bias

believe the other person you know even if the Persuader doesn't have the truth

Etc so absolutely absolutely so yeah it feels good you know and I think so

actually again to decide he has a this wonderful book called not born yesterday and he talks about you know the idea of a market

 for you know they talk about Market of ideas right you you you you go out into the

world and ideas come around and you shop around and you pick the best ones

and and you know everyone becomes smarter you know that's the theory and says no it's it's not a market of ideas it's a market for justifications or a market for rationalizations of the ideas that I already hold and and you know when I introspect my own kind of

media consumption Behavior I see exactly the same thing I like it when I find something that confirms what I

already think right it's very hard to kind of counter that it takes work

 and so I certainly agree that things like confirmation bias I mean those those play an important role in in the

argument around where the rationalization is fundamentally designed for

influencing others in communicative acts versus arriving at new knowledge in

mental processes yeah and do we have any or like

Should we care if a language is dying?

can we learn from different languages about fighting these kind of uh phenomena so for example

should AFE think that language is this kind of dynamic process

 should we care if the languages they are going extinct in a way that they are

dying as you as you mentioned also in other conversations

well yeah I mean it's an interesting kind of jump that you make there

 first thing I would say would be um

that I think all language communities have these problems

I mean language one of the most important things about language is that you can use it to lie and you can use it

to cheat people and and you can use it to gossip and you know it's a very susceptible everywhere you go to exactly

this Dynamic and so I don't think that there

would be any kind of language we're lying and and misrepresenting or persuading you know

is not part of is not part of life but the question is

you know do you see some variants there and this is not something we have very good data about so we have a lot of data

on languages of the world about things like you know what is

the sound system like and what is the grammatical structures like and you know we have some good basic data for for you

know hundreds and hundreds of languages but data about things like this is actually very hard to to get so this is

you're asking questions about Norms around

truth Norms around making assertions but having said that there certainly is a

sense in the particularly in the literature by anthropologists that there are quite different Norms from culture

to culture around what to what degree we assume that other

people you know have access to the truth so maybe I'll give you an example

 that's just come to mind so this is not really part of the matter of of of kind of cultural values

around information but there are systems in in the world's languages where

 where they're called evidential evidentiality systems I'm not sure if

you've heard this term but you know in English I have to mark on verbs

if the event took place in the past you know so we have you know past tense so

walk and walked so I have the Ed stuff fixed there so you know my language requires me

to mark this kind of tense difference right now there are languages that require

you to Market something different which is called evidentiality and it's um

it's it's a it's a marking of weather let's say I tell you an event right so

 John's house burnt down right and the language requires me to put a

suffix on that verb to say I saw it with my own eyes

or I I heard about it from people who told me or I inferred it from some

evidence so I saw some smoke but I didn't actually see the house so this is

not a rare system and quite a lot of languages have some kind of marking which requires you to put on record

your source of the information that you're giving right so that kind of system might be

something that kind of responds a bit to your question and says okay well this is a kind of good

system in relation to Truth because it requires you to kind of go on record

with your with your you know your evidence and so on but to be honest you know in reality

  I I personally think that there's a kind of an over emphasis on the fact that

those are grammatically obligatory forms and because if you know if you

have a language like English it's true we don't have to mark those things like we have to mark tense but we

still we we mark them all the time voluntarily so I will use words like apparently or you know it seems that you

know all of these kinds of bits of language that will very subtly kind of packaged the

information that I'm giving you so the reason why I'm saying all this is to say

that that languages will give you a lot of resources

for packaging information in terms of you know how committed you are to the truth of it what's your source of that

information and I suppose what you could study which we don't have enough information

on is how much of the time people actually Mark these things in different languages and what are the consequences

of it so we see these studies of evidentiality systems but

it's very hard to get data which shows that I'm actually accountable so let's

say it turns out I say John's house burnt down and I put a suffix on that verb that says that I saw it with my own

eyes and later it turns out I didn't see it with my own eyes someone told me about it would I actually get

held accountable for having used the wrong   suffix maybe maybe not but it's just

like if I tell a lie in a language you know sometimes I get caught sometimes I don't and all languages

 allow that to happen so yeah that's the best I can do in to answer to your question but I think it's

a great question and it's something that is really open for for study yeah so when we are thinking of

Is mathematics a language?

different languages let's talk about a language which is good for science

mathematics so from a linguistic point of view first of all what do you think mathematics is a language or not like

who does it qualify as a language well I wouldn't say mathematics is a

language but I would say that it's linguistic it's a kind of weird answer but you know I have thought a

little bit about this and I I I think that you know

it's obviously a lot of discussion about you know what is mathematics is it sort of this set of truths that exist

independent of our stories at some kind of description of the world that's kind of

invented by us but I think it has a lot of things in common with with language so you know it has a

kind of a so it has some important things common with language there is it

includes for example statements right so you make statements

here's a statement and here's another one that would follow from that and here's another one that would follow from that so in a sense that you know you have these statements and these narratives that kind of get built up and certain things follow from certain other things

 you have kind of grammatical structure in some sense so a simple um

some very simple equation you know like two plus two equals four you have

in some sense like a kind of subject and a predicate so you know you're talking about something and then you're giving

some kind of characterization of that thing so I actually think that you know

mathematics as it's used by people you know is very much

linguistic in in in its character and and have functions

 I wouldn't say it's a language in the same way that say English is a language but I think it's a good

case of a language that you know has really intentionally Stripped Away a

lot of the vagueness and the ambiguity I know of course mathematical symbols are highly ambiguous

 just like any language but you know you you make sure in the way that you use them that people aren't confused

about what about what you're talking about so it is a kind of language I think

it's impossible without language and I think that it has the

characteristics of a highly specialized kind of vocabulary

 of course with Special Operations so syntactic operations and so on but I'm

not sure if it's really all that different to at least in terms of the vocabulary to let's say

 you know the highly specific language of auto mechanics right

 you know you have to be specialized you have to learn a whole cultural set

of norms and and knowledge and then you're able to get entry into using

that communicative system for coordinating

with others in the same community yeah that's brilliant I think the because I'm inside science has been

using mathematics and it so far it is like quite successful in in terms of

helping science you know doing all the predictions so in that sense like it it really

and of course I mean once you ask these questions even mathematics mathematicians they are a bit here and

there to really reply to that like what what is it like how we can how we actually use

mathematics to accurately describe in in your words brute reality right yeah yeah

I think I'm something else I would kind of mention about maths that I think is really close to to to languages or two

things I mean one is the the flexibility of the system for

local functions and the other is the the capacity of

the system to refer to itself so you know and these are really powerful elements of of of language

so I'm just thinking of very simple mathematical operation like saying let X be this right

um and you know that's like saying you know we this is we're going to

call this a a mug right and we don't have a a moment you know

when I learn English as a kid well everyone calls it a mug and I learn while we that's what we call a mug but

the basic operation is the same where you you you agree let's agreed to call this this and then we don't have to

negotiate every time we have that reference right and and in the course of a math you

know describing as a mathematical equation or something you may actually hear these kinds of speech acts we're

going to let this equal that and it's a it's a real time

kind of example of this of using language as a kind of coordination device but also in

this highly flexible way as a as a way of adapting functionally to what the

local coordinative needs are yeah the only thing is probably someone

should publish a book on like poetry of mathematics or something wow I'm sure it

is more than one book on that yeah if if someone can capture the you know the

depth of emotions and and kind of humanness that we have in mathematics

that'll be like really really great so thank you so much for the for

the great conversation I think we've covered a lot about language missed out on some topics

about emotions Etc but then maybe we can do it in the future

I'm really sorry you dropped out you said missed out and then I didn't hear you yeah so I was saying that we we

Thank you!

kind of missed out on few topics about but actually again there can be many topics but maybe that those topics we

can cover in the future sometime but yeah thank you for actually

putting language in this broader perspective it'll really help I think

the the listeners to put science in this broader perspective and also think language how

much it can help to describe science or reality but also where it lacks

so thank you so much well thank you very much I really appreciate the invitation and really enjoy that conversation thank you thank you