Camil Stoenescu's blog

Există vreo legătură între limba (maternă/nativă) și modul în care gândim și percepem realitatea?

SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.[…]

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world. […]

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

Articolul integral, aici.

Acum ceva vreme fragmentul de mai jos făcea parte din manualul de filosofie pentru clasa a XII-a, capitolul „Dreptatea”:

[…]

— Întrebarea este ce a vrut să spună R. Daneel prin folosirea termenului „justiţie”.

— Din contextul conversaţiei noastre, el s-a referit la ceea ce am înţelege eu, dumneavoastră şi orice alt om, dar ce n-ar putea înţelege nici un robot.

— Domnule Baley, de ce nu-i cereţi să definească termenul?

Baley simţi că siguranţa începea să i se destrame. Se întoarse spre R. Daneel:

— Ei bine?

— Da, Elijah?

— Cum defineşti tu justiţia?

— Justiţia, Elijah, este ceea ce există când toate legile sunt aplicate.

— O definiţie bună pentru un robot, încuviinţă Fastolfe din cap. Dorinţa de a urmări aplicarea tuturor legilor a fost recent încorporată în Daneel. Pentru el, justiţia este un termen foarte concret, deoarece se bazează pe aplicarea legii, care la rândul ei se bazează pe existenţa unor legi specifice şi definite. Nu este vorba de nimic abstract. Un om poate recunoaşte faptul că, pe baza unui cod moral abstract, unele legi pot fi proaste, iar aplicarea lor injustă. Ce părere ai, R. Daneel?

— O lege injustă, răspunse egal R. Daneel, este o contradicţie în termeni.

— Aşa stau lucrurile pentru un robot, domnule Baley. Din acest motiv, nu trebuie să confundaţi justiţia dumneavoastră cu cea a lui R. Daneel.

                                                                                                                                        Isaac Asimov – Caverne de Oțel

Despre nevoia de exprimare/comunicare – facilitată de dezvoltarea explozivă a ceea ce numim îndeobște „social media” – și despre cât contează cu adevărat ceea ce spunem, suprapus peste „zgomotul de fond” din mediul online, într-o formulare radical-sugestivă:

It’s not so much that I don’t want to write 300 words a day, the bigger issue is that I have nothing to say. In fact, I doubt many of us do. I, for one, wish to minimize my personally engraved bubble of meaningless drivel sent into the ether. Drivel seems to be a particularly irritating condition afflicting my generation: saying nothing and saying it often. Life has become one huge, amorphous glob dripping with status updates and twitpics. Timelessness and substance have been replaced with real-time perishables.[…]

As a social media whore, I pray for a time when updates are thought-provoking, interesting, funny or at the very least, worth 2 seconds of my brain function. Not always, not as a rule, but as a courtesy. We’re losing our filter. "Think before you speak" applies just as much to written words as it does to our face-to-face interactions.

O altă opinie ilustrativă în acest sens:

Then last night I noticed that my Buzzes were no longer showing up on Twitter (I use a service called Buzz Can Tweet that has been pretty reliably rebroadcasting my Buzz posts to Twitter.) I looked more closely at my Buzz feed and noticed that there had been considerably less engagement over the past few weeks. Then I noticed that I wasn’t seeing my posts in my Buzz timeline at all. A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. Fifteen posts buried, including show notes from a week’s worth of TWiT podcasts. Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson.

No one noticed.

Not even me.

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan.

Iar în tot acest timp, cunoștintele noi se fixează și creativitatea se dezvoltă tocmai când suntem „off-line”, decuplați de la zumzăitul informațional, mai mult sau (adesea) mai puțin relevant. Viitorul stă sub semnul solipsismului.

„anul nou 1945.

Baza aeriana Hiro din Honshu-ul de Nord. Căpitanul Joshiro Tsubaki, comandantul bazei, tocmai convocase o adunare extraordinară.

Tăceam cu toții, nu se auzea decât plânsul ploii pe acoperiș. Căpitanul ne-a permis să ne așezăm, el însuși ședea cu mâinile încrucișate, împungându-ne pe rând, pe fiecare cu privirea. După o clipă, care nouă ni se păru o veșnicie, spuse:

- În sfârșit, a venit timpul. Ne aflăm în fața unor hotărâri capitale…

Dupa care tăcu. Eu însă simțeam cum mă cuprinde frica, o frică mai mare decât toate cele pe care le cunoscusem până atunci. Intrase moartea printre noi, pusese stăpânire pe fiecare. Iar cuvintele căpitanului sunaseră atât de ciudat…

- Niciunuia dintre voi, care nu-i în stare sășsi dea viața pentru marele imperiu japonez, nu-i voi cere s-o facă. Cel care însă nu-i capabil să onoreze această cinste, să ridice mâna.

Se făcu din nou liniște, moartea devenise aproape palpabilă. Apoi, ezitant, timid, unul ridica mâna. Al doilea…al treilea…al cincilea…Șase, în total. Trebuia sa mă hotărăsc, să aleg între viață și moarte. Sigur, da, categoric vreau să traiesc! Dar mâinile mele tremurătoare rămaseră încremenite. Voiam să le ridic, dar ele nu mă ascultau.

- Așa, spuse căpitanul privindu-i pe cei care ridicaseră mâna. Aici, continuă el arătându-i pe cei șase, toți cu fețe de cenușă, aici se află șase insi care și-au manifestat lipsa lor totală de patriotism și curaj. Ei bine, acești indivizi vor alcătui prima grupă de șoc a bazei noastre!

Asta ne-a tăiat respirația pe care și-așa ne-o auzeam de multă vreme. Șase oameni de la baza noastră fuseseră aleși pentru a muri primii…

Primele bombe umane de la baza Hiro."

Ryuji Nagatsuka -  "Am fost un kamikaze"

Pentru a studia modul în care tehnologia modernă afectează creierul și comportamentul uman, cinci cercetători americani au petrecut o săptămână în Utah, izolați de lume și fără mijloace electronice de comunicație:

Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.

Cellphones do not work here, e-mail is inaccessible and laptops have been left behind. It is a trip into the heart of silence — increasingly rare now that people can get online even in far-flung vacation spots.[…]

Scientists have long thought about how new forms of media affect attention — from the printing press to the television. But the modern study of attention emerged in the early 1980s with the spread of machines that allowed researchers to see changes in blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. Newer machines have let them pinpoint the parts of the brain that light up when people switch from one task to another, or when they are paying attention to music or a movie.

Concluzia? Bombardamentul la care suntem zilnic supuși de către informația digitală – în cea mai mare parte neimportantă cu adevărat – creează o falsă senzație de urgență, de a fi mereu conectat, dinamic și ocupat, iar capacitatea de concentrare și atenția pe termen lung au de suferit.

Personal, găsesc o plăcere subtilă în a închide telefonul pentru ceva timp și a nu verifica e-mailul câteva zile. Dar până la dezideratul „o lună fără Internet” mai este de lucrat.

PS O lectură interesantă cu privire la dependența de Internet poate fi găsită aici.

The Economist scrie despre un adevăr empiric cunoscut de către toți mai: caritatea este mai răspândită în rândurile celor cu venituri modeste:

LIFE at the bottom is nasty, brutish and short. For this reason, heartless folk might assume that people in the lower social classes will be more self-interested and less inclined to consider the welfare of others than upper-class individuals, who can afford a certain noblesse oblige. A recent study, however, challenges this idea. Experiments by Paul Piff and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, reported this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggest precisely the opposite. It is the poor, not the rich, who are inclined to charity.

In their first experiment, Dr Piff and his team recruited 115 people. To start with, these volunteers were asked to engage in a series of bogus activities, in order to create a misleading impression of the purpose of the research. Eventually, each was told he had been paired with an anonymous partner seated in a different room. Participants were given ten credits and advised that their task was to decide how many of these credits they wanted to keep for themselves and how many (if any) they wished to transfer to their partner. They were also told that the credits they had at the end of the game would be worth real money and that their partners would have no ability to interfere with the outcome.

China execută mai mulți oameni decât restul lumii la un loc, conform ultimului raport al Amnesty International. Lucru firesc, dacă ne gândim că inclusiv traficul de droguri e pasibil de pedeapsa capitală în Republica Populară Chineză. În toată această vreme, Statele Unite – cea mai cunoscută țară din acest punct de vedere – nu se poate mândri „decât” cu 52 de execuții în 2009, număr ce pălește în fața celor peste 388 ale Iranului, de exemplu.

Iar Amnesty International le plânge de milă, desigur, în numele progresului și al drepturilor omului șamd:

Amnesty International has been campaigning for the total abolition of the death penalty since 1977. The organization believes that the death penalty violates the right to life and is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. It opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception regardless of the nature of the crime, the characteristics of the offender, or the method used by the state to kill the prisoner.

Amnesty International believes that the death penalty legitimizes an irreversible act of violence by the state. Research demonstrates that the death penalty is often applied in a discriminatory manner, being used disproportionately against the poor, minorities and members of racial, ethnic and religious communities. The death penalty is often imposed after a grossly unfair trial. But even when trials respect international standards of fairness, the risk of executing the innocent can never be fully eliminated – the death penalty will inevitably claim innocent victims, as has been persistently demonstrated.

While the death penalty runs the risk of irrevocable error, it has not been proven to have any special deterrent effect. It denies the possibility of rehabilitation. It promotes simplistic responses to complex human problems, rather than pursuing constructive solutions. It consumes resources that could be better used to work against violent crime and assist those affected by it. It is a symptom of a culture of violence, not a solution to it. It is an affront to human dignity.

The world witnessed further progress towards ending judicial killings by states in 2009. For the first time since Amnesty International started keeping records, not a single execution was carried out in all of Europe, while important steps were taken to turn the United Nations General Assembly resolutions calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions into reality. 
Two more countries, Burundi and Togo, abolished the death penalty in 2009, bringing the number of countries that have removed capital punishment entirely from their laws to 95. The world is in reach of 100 countries declaring their refusal to put people to death. 
In the Americas, the United States of America (USA) was the only nation to carry out executions in 2009. 
In sub-Saharan Africa only two countries executed prisoners: Botswana and Sudan. 
In Asia, there were no executions in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Mongolia and Pakistan in 2009, the first execution-free year in those countries in recent times.

These successes follow decisions by the UN General Assembly in 2007 and 2008 to call for a global moratorium on executions as a first step to total abolition. Amnesty International hopes and believes that the UN General Assembly resolutions – the first of their kind – will continue to be a major influence in persuading countries to abandon their use of capital punishment. A similar resolution will be considered at the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly in late 2010. 
But even as world opinion and practice shift inexorably towards abolition, the extensive and politicized use of the death penalty continues in countries including China, Iran and Sudan. In 2009, as in previous years, the majority of the world’s executions occurred in two regions: Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. 
The continuing executions of juvenile offenders – those under 18 years of age at the time of the crime – continued in two countries: Iran and Saudi Arabia. These executions were in violation of international law.
Secrecy surrounds the use of the death penalty in countries such as China, Belarus, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea and Viet Nam. Such secrecy is indefensible. If capital punishment is a legitimate act of government as these nations claim, there is no reason for its use to be hidden from the public and international scrutiny.[…]

De aici.

Un studiu actual confirmă un adevăr vechi de când lumea: oamenii se asociază conform preferințelor și afinităților, evitând relațiile și interacțiunile problematice:

A new study analysing interactions between players in a virtual universe game has for the first time provided large-scale evidence to prove an 80 year old psychological theory called Structural Balance Theory. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that individuals tend to avoid stress-causing relationships when they develop a society, resulting in more stable social networks.

The study, carried out at Imperial College London, the Medical University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute, analyses relationships between 300,000 players in an online game called Pardus. In this open-ended game, players act as spacecraft exploring a virtual universe, where they can make friends and enemies, and communicate, trade and fight with one another.

Scientists currently study data from people’s electronic interactions, such as emails, mobile phones and online retail behaviour, to improve our understanding of human societies. Online games such as Pardus produce vast amounts of data that scientists can also use to study interactions between players, applying their findings to understanding the way that people interact in society.

Structural Balance Theory is an 80 year old psychological theory that suggests some networks of relationships are more stable than others in a society. Specifically, the theory deals with positive and negative links between three individuals, where ‘the friend of my enemy is my enemy’ is more stable (and therefore more common) than ‘the friend of my friend is my enemy’.

Din Science Daily.

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a…" Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

De aici.

Deși aparent ființe raționale și logice, când vine vorba de decizii economice oamenii dau dovadă de suprinzător de puțină inteligență și clarviziune:

Which would you do: Accept a guaranteed gift of $500 or gamble by taking a risk on a coin toss that would give you $1,000 for heads — and nothing for tails?

Most people would play it safe and take the sure $500, Santos said.

What if, instead of a gain, you faced a potential loss? Your choice would be to give up $500 for sure or take a risk on a coin toss that could cost you $1,000 if you lost — or nothing if you won? Most people opt for taking the risk rather than playing it safe.

Using tokens as a form of money and grapes as prized products to be exchanged for the tokens, Santos has shown that capuchin monkeys make the same set of irrational choices — taking more risk when they have something to lose than when they have something to gain.

"The errors we make are predictable, we make them again and again," said Santos, explaining that she wants to learn "how a species as smart as we are" can make such persistent mistakes. We can overcome our biological limitations, she said, but first we have to recognize what they are.

În ceea ce privește raționalitate consumatorului moden, Tim Jackson este și mai plastic: „Cheltuim bani pe care nu-i avem, pe lucruri de care nu avem nevoie, pentru a impresiona temporar oameni de care nu ne pasă de fapt.”

Dar o consolare tot există: și maimuțele fac aceleași alegeri prostești în ceea ce privește riscul, la fel ca și oamenii.

Mai multe detalii – aici.