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Linguistics thought
Feb. 18th, 2018 11:50 pmI encountered some interesting topics in junior high or perhaps earlier. Mostly due to my reading science fiction.
A couple of the fun ones were "how do we know that (for example) what you see as green is the same as what I see as green. That is, how do we know the the 'sensations' inside our heads are the same?"
These days with things like functional MRIs, we may actually be able to answer that sort of question.
Another fascinating one was "Do we actually think in English or do we think in something else and translate to & from English as we hear things and say things?"
Well, I'm convinced of the latter. Even in junior high I'd had a number of moments where I'd have a quite clear, simple concept in my head, only to discover that it took a fair bit of expostion to get it into English.
Much of my internal language (actually I think of it as more of a symbol set. Think of the difference between words and ideograms) may have a one-to-one correspondence with English words. But some of it definitely doesn't.
A couple of the fun ones were "how do we know that (for example) what you see as green is the same as what I see as green. That is, how do we know the the 'sensations' inside our heads are the same?"
These days with things like functional MRIs, we may actually be able to answer that sort of question.
Another fascinating one was "Do we actually think in English or do we think in something else and translate to & from English as we hear things and say things?"
Well, I'm convinced of the latter. Even in junior high I'd had a number of moments where I'd have a quite clear, simple concept in my head, only to discover that it took a fair bit of expostion to get it into English.
Much of my internal language (actually I think of it as more of a symbol set. Think of the difference between words and ideograms) may have a one-to-one correspondence with English words. But some of it definitely doesn't.
