Dear John, (01)
During my doctoral work I suggested the same is true of engineering languages,
where I claimed anecdotally that the effect is observable. There is the obvious
effect, engineering languages affect problem solving behavior, but I also
claimed that the affect was more pervasive than that, arriving at the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as a generalization. (02)
I had travelled the world (with INMOS) visiting a variety of engineering teams
in different countries using different languages and had noticed that C
programmers tended to behave in similar ways and similarly Lisp programmers
behaved in similar ways, but different from C programmers, and so on... and, it
appeared to me, this extended to things like style of dress and choice of
personal vehicle. (03)
I was never able to persuade anyone that this was important enough to give me
the funding to go back over this question more formally, so all I have are
anecdotes of my industry experience. But I continue to believe that a simple
analysis of engineering language usage and engineer behavior provides the means
to gain some insight the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - and that this would inform
engineering language design. (04)
In addition, there develops what I described in my thesis as "performance
semantics" - that is the development of idiomatic uses of an engineering
language based on knowledge not found in the manual, as John would put it, and
driven by some non-portable performance characteristic of the local
environment. In my case I saw this most in the use of parallel decomposition
since at the time I was developing languages for parallel machines. And so I
argued that it is necessary for language designers to call-out and be aware of
these pragmatics. (Incidentally, this is when I first became aware of the work
of Charles Peirce). (05)
In high performance computing this manifests in things like data layout and
decomposition. As a result, an entire layer of engineering has evolved where
human machine architecture specialists take programs written by specialists in
application domains and translate their programs to the machine - only to
repeat the exercise when the next machine comes along. (06)
Regards,
Steven (07)
On Feb 23, 2013, at 9:09 AM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: (08)
> The relationships between language, thought, and ontology arise in
> many debates in Ontolog Forum. They are related to the Sapir-Whorf
> hypothesis, which has been widely discussed, supported, criticized,
> and condemned by linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and
> philosophers.
>
> The hypothesis comes in a strong form, which is probably false,
> and a weak form, which is probably true with qualifications:
>
> 1. Strong: The categories and structure of a language determine
> and limit the thought and behavior of its native speakers.
>
> 2. Weak: Language is a means of thought, and the patterns of
> a language influence the thought and behavior of its speakers.
>
> The strong hypothesis implies that a person's native language makes
> it difficult or impossible to think outside the constraints of that
> language. The weak hypothesis implies that the language patterns
> favor certain lines of thought, but it's possible to learn or invent
> new patterns for "thinking outside the box".
>
> A research article by M. Keith Chen analyzes the effect of language
> on economic behavior. His middle and last names suggest that he's
> bilingual in English and Chinese and sensitive to the language
> patterns of both.
>
> See the following abstract and excerpts from the article. The
> article itself is 56 pages long, but it's possible to browse through
> it for a quick view of his conclusions and his research methods.
>
> Table 5 at the end of the article lists the 126 languages, ranging
> from Afrikaans to Zulu, which the author considered in the research.
>
> John Sowa
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
> http://faculty.som.yale.edu/keithchen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf
>
> The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings
> Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets
>
> M. Keith Chen
>
> Yale University, School of Management and Cowles Foundation
>
> Abstract: Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time.
> I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate
> the future and the present foster future-oriented behavior. This
> prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language
> structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically,
> I find that speakers of such languages save more, retire with more
> wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This
> holds both across countries and within countries when comparing
> demographically similar native households. The evidence does not
> support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss
> implications for theories of intertemporal choice.
>
> 1 Introduction
>
> Languages differ in whether or not they require speakers to
> grammatically mark future events. For example, a German speaker
> predicting rain can naturally do so in the present tense, saying:
> _Morgen regnet es_ which translates to 'It rains tomorrow'. In
> contrast, English would require the use of a future marker like
> 'will' or 'is going to', as in: 'It will rain tomorrow'.
>
> In this way, English requires speakers to encode a distinction
> between present and future events, while German does not. Could
> this characteristic of language influence speakers’ intertemporal
> choices? ...
>
> Specifically, I adopt a criterion which distinguishes between
> languages which Dahl (2000) calls “futureless”, and those which are
> not. Dahl defines “futureless” languages as those which do not require
> “the obligatory use [of grammaticalized future-time reference] in
> (main clause) prediction-based contexts”....
>
> 6.1.1 Skepticism of the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
>
> While many studies support at least a weak form of the SWH, there are
> a number of scholars who argue that on balance, the idea that cognition
> is shaped by language is misguided. Most prominently, in his seminal
> work _Syntactic Structures_ (1957), Chomsky argues that humans have
> an innate set of mechanisms for learning language, and that this
> constrains all human languages to conform with a “universal grammar”.
>
> Taken in strong form, a universal grammar would largely eliminate the
> scope for language to affect cognition. In _The Language Instinct_
> (1994), Pinker argues exactly this: that humans do not think in the
> language we speak in, but rather in an innate “mentalese” which
> precedes natural language. He concludes that: “there is no scientific
> evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of
> thinking”. While a rich literature since 1994 has disputed this claim,
> support for the SWH remains an hotly debated topic...
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
> (09)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J (010)
|