One of the central questions about linguistics asks how much thinking influences language and how much language, in turn, influences thinking.\u00a0 Clearly there is a link between how we express a thought and what the thought entails.\u00a0 The words we know, the familiar phrases we invoke certainly shape how others perceive our expressed thought; but what of ourselves?\u00a0 How much of a feedback loop exists wherein the manner in which we express a thought influences how that thought is perceived by the ourselves is unknown.\u00a0 Each of us plays the role of both speaker and listener when speaking and often how we express ourselves influences how we perceive ourselves \u2013 at least as we imagine how we are perceived by through others eyes.<\/p>\n
Clearly there is a link but measuring that link and determining which direction is strongest (thought to language vs language to thought) is ephemeral.\u00a0 Natural language has been around for so long and with no formal metrics kept until what is essentially yesterday in terms of the march of history that it seems nearly impossible to find out much by examining everyday speech.\u00a0 Much like the fish that lives in the ocean, we are often even unable to see the medium of speech in which we swim since it is so pervasive.<\/p>\n
Mathematical languages have offered better laboratories.\u00a0 Formal mathematical expression is relatively young \u2013 perhaps 500 years old \u2013 and is continually refined.\u00a0 By examining the evolution of mathematics, both the thoughts codified and the method used for the codification, a consensus has been reached that the form of the expression is often as important as what is being expressed.\u00a0 Why else are there what amounts to holy wars over mathematical notation.\u00a0 The camps of Newton and Liebniz often warred with each other over the best way to denote the calculus.\u00a0 Friction of this sort continued on into the 18th<\/sup> and 19th<\/sup> centuries with arguments over vectors and quaternions, sets and logic, and so on.\u00a0 The general observation is that that better notation means better thinking.<\/p>\n This sentiment is also very much alive and well in the equally contentious \u2018discussions\u2019 about which programming language is best.\u00a0 Adherent s on all sides will talk about the advantages and disadvantages that each has but, regardless of the particulars, one thing is clear; each programmer thinks his favorite language provides him the best avenue to express his thought, while simultaneously holding that other languages limit just how a programmer even thinks about how to solve a problem.<\/p>\n In a nutshell, all three disciplines \u2013 linguistics, mathematics, and computer programming \u2013 possess practitioners, who at one time or another, expressed the old proverb:<\/p>\n Unfortunately, all three of these disciplines pre-date modern big data metric collection and analysis.\u00a0 But there is a modern language-and-thinking loop that is amenable to quantitative analysis.\u00a0 Each and every day, millions of web-enabled searches are performed.\u00a0 Some are looking for news, some researching information, some surfing for gossip, some rummaging for products or services, but all are getting auto-completion tossed there way.<\/p>\n It would be interesting and revealing to see to what extent auto-completion influences how we think.\u00a0 I am sure each of us has started typing a search string into Amazon or Bing or Google only to find ourselves distracted by an auto-completion that was suggested by other searchers. \u00a0Surely these entities have the data and probably are sitting on it for commercial purposes but whether they are looking at it from a scientific point-of-view is unknown \u2013 although the probability is against it.<\/p>\n Perhaps there is a sociology or psychology department out there that can craft a well-thought out experiment, complete with control and test groups, where they ask students to perform research on the internet in support of a course.\u00a0 The students are then given two identically-looking search engines.\u00a0 The test group would get an unmodified search engine and the test group on with a different approach to auto-complete; maybe with more suggestive or more distracting completions relevant to the stated research goal. \u00a0\u00a0Once the data were reduced and analyzed new insights into how to understand the way language and thought interact would be available.\u00a0 These insights may then shape how we think about thinking, and so on.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the central questions about linguistics asks how much thinking influences language and how much language, in turn, influences thinking.\u00a0 Clearly there is a link between how we express… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}