Wait: what is "basic language" supposed to be practically? Is it just a hypothetical construction, an "imagine if we had this" or "imagine if we limited ourselves to this" for the purposes of . . . I don't know, eliminating the linguist's boredom for a moment?

The very first human "language" (if you accept language developed gradually, and not everyone, notably Chomsky, does) probably had no tense at all (tense is one of those things that doesn't really make sense unless you have more than one anyway). Utterances (apart from their necessarily vocal nature) would then essentially be coterminous with what we would call ideas - but these ideas constrained in scope by the bounds of a rudimentary language may be as unrecognizable as ideas as any "basic language" would be as a language - I mean the more basic you make a language, the less it is a language, and if ideas are inextricably linked with language, they may, the further you trace them back, lack the qualification of being ideas and end up as just emotions or motivations or drives.

As I said.. I stole it from human origin studies. There are hominins who had the apparatus for speech, but there's no clear evidence of abstract thought in the remnants we have of their cultures. Thus.. maybe they had some sort of abstraction-free speech.

Arguments for innate ideas sometimes feature aspects of abstraction (particularly necessity). Could an opponent attack these arguments with a materialistic view of ideas (which reduces them to features of language) while actually talking about the above mentioned "basic" language? If so.. that wouldn't be fair. Or maybe it doesn't matter.. if so, why not?

I mean the more basic you make a language, the less it is a language, and if ideas are inextricably linked with language, they may, the further you trace them back, lack the qualification of being ideas and end up as just emotions or motivations or drives. — Baden

You know, honestly, I've long pictured thought as a section of a piano. Emotions and basic drives are the base notes. The intellect is the high notes. I could reference songs that I experience as blending a lot of different aspects of the psyche....

But anyway, you're reminding me that we may be analyzing the psyche... laying the pieces out on the table and then forgetting that a functioning psyche isn't nicely sorted in piles like that.

I like the metaphor; I think too that drives blend into emotions, which blend into nascent ideas, which blend into linguistically clear concepts of various levels of complexity and layering, and the process doesn't always happen in an ordered way. Where an "idea" actually begins and ends is hard to pin down.

Agreed.

Which makes the idea of an innate idea particularly hard to define and the argument hard to set in place. I mean you could define it as some kind of potentiality, like a physical grammar module in the brain which programs recursion and other universal aspects of language into us, or you could define it as something necessarily linguistic or at least proto-linguistic (in which case the concept becomes somewhat incoherent)..

What I mean is: are we just talking about a battle of definitions here?

EDIT: (I haven't read your other thread on innate ideas btw. Just noticed it now. I'll take a look before I go any further).

People have been complaining about me "inconveniently" bring physics and scientific research into such philosophy discussions as if philosophy had nothing to do with objective physical reality! Noam Chomsky's theory of grammar being inherited has already been totally discredited by studies of how small children acquire grammar. Even all the neurological evidence indicates language and the entire human mind and brain are based upon pattern matching which means it is an emergent effect related to quorum sensing among cells. In other words, language and mathematics are built into nature and the whole idea of a mind-body duality is rapidly going down the toilet along with all of metaphysics in the last century.

Like it or not, it means life is about to get much more interesting and the entire planet is about to hear the loud hissing of eons of accumulated hot air finally being ventilated from academia to loud protests over who is stinking up the room more.

What it means is language is first acquired contextually and then we fill in the details with what we consider meaningful content.

What I mean is: are we just talking about a battle of definitions here? — Baden

For Leibniz and Locke, it had implications that reached as far as how we deal with religious intolerance. If there are innate ideas, then we could sit all the religious leaders of the world down and let them commune with their innate ideas to realize a Grand Reconciliation. That was something near to Leibniz's heart. Locke said screw that. Life has painted a different picture on each of the tabulas that make up a room full of clergymen. Stop dividing people up by religion and divide them up by who will embrace Separation of Church and State and who won't. Kill the ones who won't (or lock them up... whichever.)

So what does it mean in our times if someone accepts innateness of ideas or doesn't? I guess this thread is about whether the question can shown to be in need of reformulation. Is it really a question about language?

I think you're right to focus on what you call 'the idea of never', and what I generally prefer to call 'negation': it's negation, the ability to designate a "not-x", that allows language to become representative and abstract. It allows this because negation is what allows language to refer to itself (it introduces recursion into language) insofar as to say 'not-x' is to refer to one's use of language, rather than some positively existing entity.

Negation (and with it recursion), in turn allows language to separate into 'levels': 'object-language' and 'meta-language', where the 'meta-level' talks about things in the 'object level' (via a 'not': "I am not talking about that"). And once this starts, you can stratify 'levels' pretty much infinitely, so you get meta-meta levels of language and so on - in a word, abstraction (although we can generally handle only so many layers of abstraction, cognitively speaking). In the study of semiotics, negation basically marks the distinction between what is called either the 'icon' or the 'index' on the one hand, and the 'symbol' on the other (where only symbols employ negation, strictly speaking).

As far as ideas go, the more one can take advantage of this ability to abstract (to build level upon level, along complex with 'rules' about how 'higher levels' apply to the 'lower levels'), the more abstract, complex, and generally powerful one's ideas can become. The question then turns upon exactly how 'exclusive' the function of negation is to language. That is, is language powerful because it has 'exclusive rights' to negation, or can and does negation find expression outside of language?

Given that organic systems are known employ 'negation' in their function (nerve axons, DNA helixes), it's probably fair to say that negation is not exclusive to language, and that it just so happens that language (due to the minimal energy expenditures needed to employ it) is very well suited to take advantage of negation. So while ideas cannot be said to be wholly linguistic in nature, language does allow a kind of fantastic acceleration of idea formation - especially complex, multiply recursive ideas.

It allows this because negation is what allows language to refer to itself (it introduces recursion into language) insofar as to say 'not-x' is to refer to one's use of language, rather than some positively existing entity. — StreetlightX

I follow your point and not to be pedantic, but let's not forget the standard use of the word "recursion" in linguistics. This sense of recursion isn't automatically introduced into language with negation allowing the latter without the former (Pirahã (arguably) lacks recursion but retains negation). And you can apply recursion to negation just as you can to other modifications. Also, you can stratify levels without recursion simply by starting new sentences that add layers of qualification to the previous ones (as Pirahã (allegedly) does).

True, true. I guess I'm employing a different sense of recursion, not in the sense of nesting (qua linguistics), but rather 'self-reference' (although I tend to avoid talking about self-reference because of it's association with paradox). While qualifying nested clauses does allow one to expand what one can 'do' with language, I think negation takes it even further to the degree that it allows us to speak of the purely imaginary or what is not present at hand (Tolkein's world, say), whereas recursion qua nesting always needs to begin with a present and then qualify from there. I hope that makes sense.

So what does it mean in our times if someone accepts innateness of ideas or doesn't? I guess this thread is about whether the question can shown to be in need of reformulation. Is it really a question about language? — Mongrel

It means that ideas are an emergent phenomenon. According to the latest study, infants only acquire the ability to imitate people after several weeks and only acquire a sense of humor at about four months. Its the brute force approach to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps when you are individually as dumb as a neuron. They are acquiring a data base of extremely complex patterns our neurons crunch and then compare against each other. Humor revolves around bullshit, what's missing from this picture, or anything low in entropy and, obviously, there is a progression of ideas that "leap out at them" from the data like assembling a tabletop puzzle.

That is what is widely known as pattern matching and its existence suggests there is an underlying systems logic that is applicable to everything. Notably, bacteria have been discovered to use quorum sensing where the sheer number of bacteria determines their behavior and how they can communicate and even use translators to pass information on to sometimes the most remotely related species giving them immunity faster than can be accounted for by how bacteria multiply and spread.

Its a numbers game, but more fundamentally it is pattern matching revolving around the most efficient way for them to organize as both individuals and collectively and it means all of nature and even the laws of physics themselves may speak a single language. Supporting both using a scalar analog logic means the same simple, but subtle, pattern matching can be applied to how they organize in every way imaginable. Its systems logic and means it should be possible for computers in the near future to instantly make themselves as amenable to conversing with anyone as its humanly possible to be. Soon enough, the entire human race will be discovering artificial intelligence can seriously lift them off the ground both individually and collectively using something as simple as a cell phone.

That may sound outrageous, but a lot of computer programmers know exactly what I'm talking about.

As I said.. I stole it from human origin studies. There are hominins who had the apparatus for speech, but there's no clear evidence of abstract thought in the remnants we have of their cultures. Thus.. maybe they had some sort of abstraction-free speech. — Mongrel

Using archaeological studies to guess what early hominid language would have been like semantically seems particularly ridiculous to me.

The archaeological studies suggest that our ability to produce stone weapons required an extensive period of apprenticeship that increased as the weapons suddenly became more complex. That's pattern matching and the visual centers of the brain incorporate heuristics and have already been mapped out as the centers of our ability to appreciate both mathematics and beauty among other things. It works on the basis of speed and efficiency as well with our occipital nerve using a data sieve to reduce the amount of data coming from our eyes to virtually nothing and feed just the important bits to the heuristic networks.

I'd like to comment further on that. Can't now though. Leibniz was a big fan of binary numbering... which consists of one and not-one (none). I wonder if that relates.

Slabs!

But what is basic language for? For the hominims? I'd suggest - imperatives. Then the negative must be ready to hand: to be able to refuse.

Slabs!

But what is basic language for? For the hominims? I'd suggest - imperatives. Then the negative must be ready to hand: to be able to refuse. — mcdoodle

According to Quantum Cognition theory our minds obey fuzzy logic and quantum mechanics and that is rapidly becoming the consensus today. Sociologists were puzzled by some of their research which came back with nonsensical results and, while they didn't know anything about physics, they knew their statistics and applied a simplified version of quantum mechanics to the results and found answers. For example, "The Sure Thing" is an experiment where they offer people a 50-50 chance to either win $200.oo or lose $100.oo. Its a sure thing and everybody can easily see the odds are heavily stacked in their favor. Nonetheless, they discovered that although people would keep playing if they lost a few rounds, the minute they stopped telling them whether they had won or lost a particular round they would stop playing.

According to quantum mechanics, its because without that information you cannot predict what will happen next. While we might ordinarily do better in such a situation using classical logic, it implies along with a lot of other evidence that the brain itself is fundamentally quantum mechanical and analog and does these kinds of calculations first simply because they are faster and more efficient to process. You can think of a sea slug which is basically a walking tongue that can either choose to run, ignore, eat, or mate with what few sizable things it comes across on the largely barren mid-ocean floor. The ability make such decisions as quickly and efficiently as possible is critical because it only has a token of about 18,000 neurons to play with to begin with. Its a scalar or recursive architecture that also allows every cell in the animal's body to look after its own interests in times of emergency and focus on memory rather than actually trying to think.

Language appears to obey similar rules with a recent study indicating the error rates are very high, but nature is forgiving.

It allows this because negation is what allows language to refer to itself (it introduces recursion into language) insofar as to say 'not-x' is to refer to one's use of language, rather than some positively existing entity. — StreetlightX

I agree in general, but I think it is more technically precise to talk of dichotomies or symmetry breaking rather than negation alone, and of hierarchies rather than simply recursion.

The point is that a logically crisp idea like "never" has to arise not just as a negation, but as a dichotomous division. It's logical counterpart - always - has to arise in mutually grounding fashion.

So we can imagine a basic distinction in language - frequently~rarely. And then through inductive generalisation or abstraction, this becomes the absolute distinction of always~never.

Now this shift to proper abstraction is hierarchical rather than simply recursive as recursion is already happening at the level of the dichotomy. Even the notions of frequently and rarely are negating each other in self-referential fashion. And always and never are a stronger version of this self-referential act of mutual definition.

But the strong version of the dichotomy brings in the further thing of the concrete representation of the global symmetry they break. Always and never appeal now to the backdrop notion that is eternal time.

Frequently and rarely speak about the occurrence of events - the foreground action. Always and never make it clear that they are the absolute poles marking the extremes of some idea still larger than themselves. They point hierarchically to the third thing which is "time", the global symmetry from which they could spring as a dichotomy.

So a hierarchy is about the memory, the backdrop higher level idea, that can fix a local distinction in a definite fashion. It stabilises a negation.

No doubt this might seem a pedantic analysis, but it makes an important shift from a dyadic to a triadic logic of sign relations. Negation and recursion frame matters in terms of this against that - A vs not-A, and the repetition of a distinction. Complex reference might emerge as a result, but it is essentially unaccounted for. It simply is treated as emergent in an open-ended fashion.

But a triadic sign relation closes the story. Unlike negation, the dichotomy has recursion built in as each half of the dichotomy refers to its "other". And unlike recursion, the hierarchy explains how dynamical uncertainty (where is recursion going to lead?) gains generalised stability. The third player in the triad - the global symmetry that the local symmetry-breaking claims to break - is itself now named. Always and never get their meanings fixed in terms of the further notion of time, a temporal dimension.

Triadic sign relations also introduce vagueness and asymmetry in natural fashion.

Dyadic logic always demands counterfactual crispness. The middle gets excluded. It only wants to speak of either/or. But triadic logic creates room for middles, both as points of departure and places of arrival. Middles are what get developed by dichotomisation or symmetry breakings. You start off with a vague potential and break it into a definite spectrum of states bounded by two complementary poles of being.

So frequently~rarely is a little vague as a dichotomy as it simply states that some thing is either more or less. And then always~never takes that nascent relation to its crisp or absolute limit - a polar pairing that then admits of every intervening shade of "occasionally".

Likewise, triadic logic is large enough - it has enough dimensionality - to speak directly about asymmetry.

Symmetry breaking comes in degrees of hierarchically-fixed definiteness. The simplest and most unstable symmetry breaking - because it is single-scale and easily reversible - is a negation. It is like positive and negative charge. You can produce both for free from the splitting of "nothing", but then they are so weakly separated (so eager to get back together) that they annihilate back to nothing in the next blink of an eye.

So to fix symmetry-breakings, a separation must be achieved across hierarchical scale - an asymmetry must be formed. And this is what a hierarchy does. It disconnects the global from the local, the global becoming a state of "memory" for the system, its long-term prevailing constraints, while the local becomes its individual degrees of freedom.

In the example of always~never, time is the general idea that stands orthogonally to the notion of "the event". The event itself can freely either be or not be on the local view. It seems a perfectly reversible state of affairs - a fluctuation - at that level. But step back into the background notion of time and now the event can be seen as either always or never (or occasional, periodic, intermittent, unpredictable, etc).

When it comes to language evolution, the triadic point of view allows for negation and recursion always to exist vaguely in any language use. It is there in weak form even indexically. I could shake my head to signal negation, in the way any infant would twist away from food it didn't like. As a metaphoric sign, it could gain meaning quite naturally, building on already dichotomised and hierarchically integrated reactions of approach and avoidance that we all share as part of the same biological inheritance.

But language proper is a machinery for a social memory. Habits of abstraction can become fixed in a way disconnected from the individual and held collectively as named ideas. So as you say, that makes all the difference in the world. There is the open-ended meta-possibility of infinite levels of recursion or self-reference.

So the idea that basic language - some kind of proto-speech - must have preceded more advanced language is problematic. The essential trick - the division of communicative intent into words and rules - must have been there from the start.

Again, the standard approach to language evolution relies on dyadic logic. So either the habit of naming, or the habit of grammatical organisation, must have come first, in this view. There is the classic chicken and egg dilemma that dogs anthropological speculation.

But a triadic logic has the advantage that if words and rules are the dichotomous elements of speech acts, then they must co-arise, being each other's context. The habit of abstraction is already built in from the get-go, even if its first expression is a vague as hell.

According to Hegel, Spinoza thought that all determinations are negations. “Omnis determinatio est negatio”

"Determinateness is negation posited as affirmative - this is the proposition of
Spinoza: omnis determinatio est negatio. This proposition is infinitely
important. "
Science of Logic

"We certainly also represent being as absolute riches, and nothing, on the
contrary, as absolute poverty. But when we consider the entire world, and say
simply that everything is, and nothing further, we leave out everything
determinate, and, in consequence, have only absolute emptiness instead of
absolute fullness
.... The basis of all determinacy is negation (omnis determinatio est negatio, as Spinoza says).
Encyclopedia of Logic

Quoted from
‘Detremination Is Negation’: The Adventures of a Doctrine: From Spinoza to Hegel to the British Idealists by Robert Stern

" The process of abstraction" seems to begin with determination, and when we determine something we determine it as being of some kind, which is to say we implicitly determine it as 'not being of any other (exclusive) kind'. To determine anything as something seems to be to identify it as a member of a category; isn't this the beginning of the process of abstraction?

Its not negation, instead everything can be viewed as a social interaction with the question being how much do we socialize. A sea slug might ignore something like a rock, but its still "socializing" with the rock in that they are part of the same sea. Its contextual systems logic rather than dualistic semantics where a tree has no meaning outside of a forest.

Socialization is a two way street; the rock might mean a lot to me; but I can't make any sense of the idea that I might mean a lot to the rock.

Basic Language: has nothing but present tense, and can't be used to express abstractions or universals. It can't be used pass on old sayings like "Never eat the yellow snow", because it doesn't contain the word "never." — Mongrel

You gotta love speculative pseudo science, aintcha?! Here's a thought. Just throw it out there. What if the reason for the development of language is precisely the need to express abstract thought? We know that the basics of survival, finding food sources or hunting, parenting, even tool use etc. can all be achieved easily without any form of language because every creature on the planet does just that.

I've honestly given up trying to make sense of anything wuliheron says. He seems to be post-linguistic!

I think ever is the negation of a negation. Ever and n'ever (not ever) are interdependent ideas. As Baden pointed out, if you only have one tense, you don't really have any tenses. Without negation, the positive isn't there either. Sorry if that's cryptic. Bleehhh!

Socialization is a two way street; the rock might mean a lot to me; but I can't make any sense of the idea that I might mean a lot to the rock. — John

According to quantum mechanics it just depends upon the context. If nothing else, the two of you will feel a mutual gravitational attraction and could be a marriage made in heaven. Gravity can be viewed as social and inertia as anti-social with the two always coming together.

What if the reason for the development of language is precisely the need to express abstract thought? — Barry Etheridge

Or it could be the step that allowed human culture to think. The necessity could lie in sociality achieving a concrete memetic presence in the evolutionary game itself.

Again, a dyadic way of thinking about origins always has to decide which is chicken, which is egg. Humans obviously evolved to get where they are. So either the power of abstract thought came first, and speech became the way to express those ideas to others, or the communal habit of language came first, and abstraction became possible through the use of this new tool.

You can argue either as the necessary first step forever and a day because - dichotomously - each is the perfect "other" of the other.

A triadic view recognises that both sides of the equation do in fact emerge together. And then can be "caused" - in finalistic fashion - by their future outcome.

So cultural evolution was already a (vague) fact even before articulate speech came along. It can be seen in the tool use and other survival practices of chimp troops and other primates even.

But then this nascent level of memetics - that we can say encodes a preformative desire in "wanting to join the evolutionary game as fully as possible" - got properly expressed once human language finally started to take shape.

A lot of tool use didn't really change the game for culture. But the tiniest inkling of speech suddenly broke things wide open. Culture could express its latent desire to exist in fully autonomous fashion. A play of abstraction, a play of symbols, could become part of the wider evolutionary game.

So in a sense, language could be the product of the needs of abstract thought. But now this doesn't mean that Homo sapiens had evolved an individual biological capacity of abstract thought that needs its expression. We are now talking rather more Platonically of the Cosmos as a realm of ideas that had to have a speaking animal to use as the vehicle of its expression.

One minute, we were hunter-gatherers slathering our faces in red ochre and painting magical eidetic images of our prey, the next we found ourselves spouting the eternal truths of maths and philosophy, eventually even science. The Universe had discovered us as its suitable mouthpiece. :)

Of course I am exaggerating the cosmic-ness of it all. But the point is to illustrate that we habitually think about issues of origination as a problem of bottom-up construction. For humans to start speaking, they must have already had a definite reason. And a frustration at not being to articulate the big ideas buzzing around their brains seems the kind of definite reason - the crisp first cause - that has persuaded many in the traditional "thought first vs language first" philosophical debate.

But a triadic logic allows for finality to be a true cause of origination. Abstract thought - of the definite kind we are now familiar with - could have acted to favour the evolution of articulate speech right from the beginning. Even the tiniest first steps towards organised symbolism - words and rules - was an opening that was going to grow itself every wider.

It established a disconnect between individual psychology and social mental habits that was hierarchically-enduring, and so also the most powerful form of connection. The constraints organising individual minds no longer depended on those minds but became cultural-level systems themselves in inter-tribal and inter-generational competition.

in a sense, language could be the product of the needs of abstract thought. But now this doesn't mean that Homo sapiens had evolved an individual biological capacity of abstract thought that needs its expression. We are now talking rather more Platonically of the Cosmos as a realm of ideas that had to have a speaking animal to use as the vehicle of its expression. — Apokrisis

(Y) Now you're speaking my language....

I've honestly given up trying to make sense of anything wuliheron says. He seems to be post-linguistic! — Barry Etheridge

Everything I say obeys the simple rule that words only have demonstrable meaning according to their function in specific contexts. That's a Functionalist or Contextualist approach that I use to express Asian ideas. Philosophical Taoism has proven particularly difficult to reconcile with western philosophy because the law of identity can go completely down the rabbit hole or toilet of your personal preference, while I'm attempting to do so using a more Pragmatic Taoist approach that meets the standards of academia for being self-consistent and nontrivial because it eschews both metaphysics and mysticism.