List

Here’s a piece about an MIT research team study on an Amazonian tribe that has no word for numbers. They use quantifiers like “some”, “all”, and “most”.

Is this good news for nominalists?

2 Responses to “Language Without Numbers”

  1. MC

    Ah yes, the old “One, Two, Many” thing.

    Years ago when this research came out, my hyper-Platonist (read: near-Pythagorean) professor scoffed at this, echoing Chomsky (also a hardcore Platonist), among other comments, saying:

    “Even if they don’t have a referential term for it, if you steal five goats from someone who belongs to this tribe, they’re going to know exactly how many goats they had before and after the theft.”

    I suppose that she’s right. The real implication of the research, from what I remember a few years ago, is that it challanged Chomsky’s theory universal grammar prima facie . Even though I am unfamiliar with their responses to the research, as far as I know, Chomskians in linguistics and philosophy of language haven’t changed since in light of it.

  2. Andrew Cullison

    MC,

    Yeah – I didn’t think it would be that easy to uproot Platonism just because some culture didn’t have words for the numbers. Being able to get by without talking about a thing surely couldn’t be evidence against the existence of the thing.

    For example, if a tribe didn’t have a word for cats and coveniently had their language worked out so that they never had to refer to cats, even cats that they owned – there would still be cats.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  Posts

April 3rd, 2014

Ethics and Technology Panel This Week

I’m participated in a panel yesterday Fredonia on Ethics and Technology. The title of my presentation was “Grounding a Moral […]

March 27th, 2014

Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death

This is unreal. Doctors in Pittsburgh will try to save the lives of 10 patients by placing them in a […]

March 26th, 2014

Diversity and Inclusiveness: Amy Ferrer over at newAPPS

The executive director of the American Philosophical Association is doing a series of guest posts this week over at newAPPS […]

March 20th, 2014

Thinking about moral realism may lead to better moral behavior.

This is really interesting. A recent article published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that being primed to think about […]

March 14th, 2014

APA Now Accepting Nominees for Leadership Positions

The APA now has an online nomination system. There are vacancies on all twenty APA committees. You can access the […]

February 27th, 2014

A Discovery Based Account of Intellectual Property Rights

One of the issues, that’s most interested me so far in the Ethics and Technology class I’m teaching is how […]

February 26th, 2014

How the MPAA inadvertently gave American Artists Leverage Against Hollywood

This is a very interesting read. For the most part it is an over-view of the global subsidy war between nations. Here’s […]

February 25th, 2014

Spritz – New Technology Aims to Boost Reading Speed to 500 words a minute

I just learned about Spritz today. It’s starts out to be pretty mind-blowing. The technology is designed to feed text […]

February 6th, 2014

Gettier Case in The Simpsons

If we assume that Bart (at some point) justifiably believed that the lemon-shaped rock was a lemon, then he had […]

February 4th, 2014

The Case of the Copyright Hoarder

I’m teaching an Ethics and Technology class this semester. I came up with a thought experiment today that I’m going […]