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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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chapotraphouse
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I said very early that I am not a linguist and I wasn't going to perfectly communicate the ideas. Do you think I was attempting to write a dictionary definition of anything? Your hypothetical and logical conclusions from my premises fall short if you acknowledge I'm trying to have a productive conversation and refine my thinking rather than tell the rest of you 'how it is'. I'd like a linguist to come and define the language-first school of thought wrt to human development in better terms than I did, even if I was misrepresenting it.
you're not doing that though, you're just concerned with breaking down what I said into gotchas: "narrow your definition of "language" to something resembling how linguists actually define it (excluding gesture, for example)" like what if you just outlined various ways linguists define language and how I was incongruous with them? this is still a mystery, who excludes gestures? why? this is not self-evident.
It's difficult to believe you, because you ignored my explanations completely. Your first reply to me was just taking the conclusion and telling me you resented it while the explanations went unremarked upon. I also told you to literally just read any introductory article on the subject, because this is genuinely the sort of thing that you can google on your own to have a much stronger starting point.
A counter example is not a gotcha, it's literally just an explanation that you are wrong, that your answer to this question of definitions and delineations is a failure. If you tell me that every number has a positive square root, it's intuitive and there are a lot of cases that don't falsify this, but there are plenty of numbers that don't have positive square roots, e.g. (-1), so it's just a false statement and non-trivially so.
Anyway, here's a link on your question, since you asked:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/gesture-sign-and-language-the-coming-of-age-of-sign-language-and-gesture-studies/40B9B8E3C35C7005D4D588EC39E34C80
The really important more general point is that language is not the same thing as communication. Communication is any way of intentionally signalling to a recipient to give them information, which includes gestures, and can be literally anything used for that purpose (e.g. a signal flare, a raised tail, musk). Languages, like the various sign languages as well as spoken languages, are systematized, having definable morphology, syntax, and so on, while gestures are basically vibing (and the two are usually both used in conjunction, as the article notes).
If we now understand that language is a complex system of communication, one that very few and arguably zero non-human animals exhibit, it becomes easier to understand why language definitely is not a necessary condition for having ideas, because plenty of intelligent animals very obviously have ideas, as we can determine from their patterns of behavior changing based on conditioning (etc.), and perceiving a person with a white beard specifically being a threat must surely be having an idea about that person, right? This also, incidentally, shows why rain does not communicate (no language, no intention) and why pre-verbal children can have ideas (language is not needed for ideas, only the articulation of ideas within language (because of course it does)).
you made the 12-month-old and earthworm up! I didn't say that, and you did not present any evidence about 12-month-olds vs. earthworms! we can get past this. I have read most of (but fuck it's like 100 pages) your link
this is an article with an argument that defines language in a certain way that other linguists don't. you can argue this is heresy but i am demonstrably not alone. i'm not sure i find this paper's arguments about symbols vs pictures compelling. i think it is strange that their arguments in (3.) are about ASL and not a broader study of sign languages. they clearly know about other sign languages, why are they not evidence? it genuinely feels like non-ASL is brought up when it is conveinient and not elsewhere, when they would provide a preponderence of evidence to support the arguments of the authors, were their rules shared across all the sign languages.
despite it all--i think it's cool that we do debates that make people read actual literature on this site. thank you for it being something i could read for free.
What evidence do you need for those examples? I wasn't referring to information only discovered by longitudinal studies of earthworm gyrations, though sure earthworm behavior has been studied. I'm literally just talking about information most people know: 12-month-olds mostly don't talk (that's right around when more precocious babies start) and earthworms, creatures with no brains or any remote equivalent, behave differently in different conditions, which includes differences in "body language" (you could even say this of a bacterium). If I wanted to score points, I'd say that I didn't write that out to avoid condescension, but really even I can find things tedious and that's all it was.
Is there anything still missing from those lines of argument? I'll recap:
If we are accepting that both spoken language and gesture are language, and language is a prerequisite to having any idea at all, then the logical implication is that something that you cannot express linguistically is something that you have no idea about, despite the fact that we obviously know this is false from observing babies, who have lots of knowledge that they are unable to communicate or can only communicate in very limited circumstances. For example, a baby knows what their primary caretakers look like, but if the caretaker is absent (so we aren't leaning on the crutch of the baby gesturing at the caretaker), the baby has no way to communicate that knowledge.
And body "language," if we accept it as language as you do, gives us a dilemma: Ideas supposedly need to be articulated as "language" to even exist (and this is still fundamentally question-begging nonsense and you're ignoring that), but does language need to have ideas? If language needs to have ideas and body language counts, then how can we say that earthworms don't have ideas, since they do have body language? If language does not need to have ideas and ideas like "syntax" and "morphology" are irrelevant to something qualifying as a language (needed to allow "body language" as a language), then why is the sound of rain not a language? Unless you revise your definitions, one of these two things needs to be true (and both are absurd, so you need to revise your definitions).
Also, it is still ludicrous that ideas need language. It's somehow both theoretically unsound and simultaneously deeply contrary to personal experience. Why would I need a word for "red" to be able to contain the idea of redness in my mind? I could use different terms for different shades of red to help me delineate them, and I could probably be culturally convinced that red was really just a range of shades of orange, but that orientation, those habits of thought encouraged by language, are obviously not preconditions for having any experience at all. Back to the infant thing, infants plainly do still see and learn, and they will recognize a toy whether you give it a name or not. You're basically mistaking a magnifying glass for an eyeball, language is a tool that augments a set of basic capacities that we have that observably precede language development.
You can position yourself a Galileo, bravely looking through the telescope, but there is no equivalence between you and the linguists who conclusions you endorse. You just vibe better with their conclusions, but they mostly did not themselves get to those conclusions on vibes (or "intuition," if you find that term more dignified).
You're using the fact that there's disagreement to dismiss contrary claims as "just, like, your opinion man," and yet launder your claims based superficially on contrary opinions. It's confirmation bias.
Among philosophy academics, it's somewhat popular to reject the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics -- the one we all have an ambient familiarity about that says that the universe is random -- and favor the Bohmian interpretation, which is deterministic. The reason that they do this is not because they really understand the science, they don't, but because the Bohmian interpretation flatters their sensibilities more. They don't care that the Copenhagen view is generally more-supported and more-accepted among professional physicists, it seems wrong to them, so they reject it. (For the record, Copenhagen bothers me too, I just don't have a pretense of being able to say shit about it.)
The issue with this is, even if the pendulum swings in the direction of Bohm later, they will take it as a vindication, even though it was supposedly meaningless or an indictment that Copenhagen was more popular before, and even if it turns out that Bohm is somehow provably correct, these people are still unjustified, because they didn't arrive at their conclusion through serious engagement, they arrived at it through cherry-picking, confirmation bias, and vibes. They have nothing in common with the physicists who support the Bohmian interpretation, which is essentially an accident because there is no similarity in how the two groups reached their conclusions.
This might retain some relevance going forward to the last part.
Do you know anything about non-ASL sign languages? Do you have literally even a single piece of information about a given other sign language that would begin to call a single thing they said into question? Or are you just instinctively resorting to calling their argument bad faith because they must be hiding something that makes you more right when you have no idea what it would even be? Literally, even if there did happen to be qualities of other sign languages that complicates this, that outcome bearing a resemblance to your hypothesis would be by accident because they are already mentioning several other sign languages as evidence, they just aren't using every language as examples to make every point. Even if they did use them for every point, wouldn't you just point out that there's another 300 sign languages that they didn't cover? If they don't cover it all they must be hiding something or missing something. It's sort of like God of the Gaps, if you're familiar with that.
ASL is not the most popular sign language globally, but it's overwhelmingly the most popular in America and Canada and have many studies about it published in English, and it may just be a matter of the personal familiarity of the authors (both work for American universities), who don't know as much about Indian Sign Language or another one that has many speakers elsewhere in the world. The worst I think you can say of them is that there's a convenience bias to the sampling, as it were.
By the way, Susan Goldin-Meadow has a bunch of other papers besides this one on the site that you might be interested in. The other author seemed less relevant to these topics (just from skimming, I might have missed things).
It doesn't, though. The Copenhagen interpretation is not the strong claim that the universe is random, nor is it the strong claim that the universe is predeterministic. Bohr rejected an axiom called that of statistical independence, arguing that in reality it is physically impossible to separate yourself from what you are trying to measure, as you are yourself a physical system that acts on the system through trying to observe it and it acts back on you. He believed this inability to separate yourself from the system creates a limitation in the maximal amount of human knowledge one can gain about a system as gaining knowledge about some parts of a system inherently disturbs and thus erases knowledge about another part, a principle he called the principle of complementarity.
Bohr thus saw quantum mechanics as kind of a "final theory" at the limitations of what is possible for humanity to know about nature, rather than as a direct description of nature as it really is. He once stated that "physics is not about nature, but what we can say about nature." It wasn't meant as a strong claim about the underlying ontology of the universe, but instead a position that the underlying ontology is fundamentally unknowable due to the principle of complementarity. Heisenberg agreed due to his uncertainty principle. He did not outright dismiss the possibility that there are hidden variables, but said that even if they exist, the uncertainty principle makes it impossible to measure them, so it is pointless to speculate on them.
The Copenhagen interpretation isn't the strong claim that the universe is random or not random, but instead the viewpoint that fundamental physical limitations prevent the construction of a measurement device that could actually prove nature in such a way to reveal how it actually is at a fundamental level, and so any speculation regarding that is unfalsifiable and there is no possibility to choose which is correct vs incorrect, so there is no point in such an endeavor. It does leave open the possibility of hidden variables, but does not leave open the possibility (if the interpretation is correct) that there are knowable hidden variables, if an underlying ontology exists, we can't know it. It's a claim about epistemic limitations rather than an ontological stance.
When it came to the US, this was largely during WW2 when the Manhattan project was going on. Americans were much more practically minded and not philosophical because they were trying to build something rapidly for a war effort. This led the Copenhagen interpretation to morph from an argument based on physics and philosophy as to why we cannot meaningfully know the universe's ontology to a purely utilitarian argument that we should "shut up and calculate" because metaphysics is "a waste of time."
Thank you for the correction.
FUUUUUUUCK OFF! i'm epistomologically naïve if i don't engage with your specific evidence, but when i do oh i'm just such a fucking baby i don't understand anything. white anthropologists actually don't need to investigate if their conclusions are in any way affected by white supremacy! all sign language can be represented by fucking yankees! you can't criticize this approach unless you are fluent in 18 sign languages!
well, friend you can't criticise me until you speak esperanto, and sign esperanto. my real arguements are buried in esperanto. the opportunities i gave you to just not be a fucking dick and you just can't resist, even when you are very obviously twisting sources to be belligerent. go outside. kiss someone. you make me fucking sad you ridiculous fool
I don't understand how one conclusion or the other of this affects white supremacy, nor did I ever claim you need to have any level of qualification. My point is that you're going on vibes assuming that there is counter-evidence in material that wasn't covered, not because you know anything about that other material but just because there must be something somewhere that proves you right, and it wasn't what was covered, so it must be in that other stuff! My whole point is that there is no standard of evidence that you would accept, which you somehow managed to invert into me demanding infinite evidence when I only asked you to cite literally any evidence at all.
The study does discuss many sign languages outside of ASL, as you noted in the last message. ASL is over-represented, I agreed with you on that already, but it's not remotely the only language involved.
Honestly this seems like a cynical and gross weaponization of the idea of white supremacy to misrepresent the study because you're just mad at me.
This especially feels confusing. I'm not demanding you have credentials, what I'm saying is that your epistemology is bad if you simply assume there is evidence that proves your case. I literally asked if you had a "single piece of evidence" about something being hidden -- which was your accusation -- and your response was to scream at me and act like I think you need to be fluent in literally anything. I'm just asking you for a single piece of evidence for your accusation and you scream at me, insinuate that I'm a useful idiot for white supremacy, accuse me of "twisting sources"(?!), and call me a "ridiculous fool." I was pretty rude (sorry about that, I tried to tone it down but evidently that wasn't enough), but this seems pretty uncalled for to me.
you EXPLICITLY did. are you just used to talking to bots on reddit? i'm not fucking stupid and my memory extends beyond the last 10 minutes.
Demonstrate that YOU have the qualifications to interpret that article more appropriately than me. Three sign languages that support the non-language suppositions of the paper, according to the arguments it makes.
I think that you're seriously misunderstanding what I'm saying, which is definitely partly my fault. I'm sorry for being unclear.
I present the article as evidence regarding the sign vs gesture issue. You accuse the article of bad faith arguments, claiming it make use of selective information. I ask you if you can provide one single example of something that was excluded from the paper that challenges any of their conclusions. You start screaming.
The nebulous fact that some other linguists have different conclusions is not an example of counter-evidence, that's the vibe-laundering part, but you can provide information from them that is evidence, e.g. if one of them has said something about Indian sign language that is contrary to a claim that the paper makes only with the support of other languages. I didn't mean that you need to be a trained linguist, I meant that you need to engage with the argument rather than use the mere fact of some linguists believing something else as a permission structure to dismiss evidence that challenges your claims. Hence my asking for a "single piece of evidence" for a few messages now, which you hopefully understand isn't asking for fluency or expertise.
Your "interpretation" of this article was to dismiss it as being a bad faith use of evidence. I'm just asking you for evidence, literally any single piece of evidence using any language to challenge literally any single point that the paper makes, because I don't think you have any basis in evidence for challenging their evidence, which the logic of your accusation hinges on.
Reread the bolded parts. Do you have one single piece of evidence to support your accusation?
Edit: I didn't want to complicate this too much because you tend to take one single thing I said and ignore the rest of it, so please make that selection from some part of the above, but I wanted to explain my view of expertise. Specifically, I think that structures of certification are good from a regulatory standpoint, but in terms of two people just having an argument, I think that if it's a field where you actually need to engage with the world, then you can point to the experience you have as evidence, but if it's just having a formal education and writing papers back and forth, there is nothing in there that counts as evidence aside from maybe making a claim about what people write papers about. Theoretical expertise is a good thing to have, but in an argument would need to be exercised rather than just pointed to, e.g. if you're a mathematician, show them the math instead of just saying you're a mathematician (though there's nothing wrong with also saying you are a mathematician). If one can't actually make their theoretical expertise concretely relevant, then functionally it is not relevant.
Obviously none of that is about you because you aren't claiming to be an expert, as you said from the outset, I'm just explaining my own view on the topic because you felt that I was fixating on expertise as a gatekeeping thing. My views are so far opposed to that that many academics would call me a philistine.