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From: lady@uhunix3.its.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Subject: Re: Sentences and Meaning (Part 4)
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Summary: Evolution doesn't just create something new.  
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Date: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 01:31:27 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.psychology:45194 sci.lang:41765

In article <3vmc5s$973@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> tlw@Eng.Sun.COM writes:
>Lee Lady writes:
>>To me, it just doesn't make sense that evolution has created
>>portions of the brain especially adapted to understanding abstract
>>concepts.  It just has to be a kludge.  My guess is that the brain (or 
>>the unconscious mind, if you prefer) doesn't make distinctions between
>>abstract nouns and concrete nouns.  For an abstract noun it creates a
>>cluster of images, feelings, sounds, and words (but only a few words)
>>that are just like what it would use to store the concept representing
>>a concrete noun, and this cluster is what the subject recognizes
>>internally as the "meaning" of the word "freedom," "justice," or
>>"science."
>
>No, meaning is in the world, not in the head (except, of course, in
>the case of words to refer to mental or brain states). What I mean by "square"
>is a feature that physical things have (or approximate to). I don't mean
>anything in my head. Even if sometimes a person has square images whenever
>they exercise the concept "square", it doesn't follow those images are
>what they mean by "square." 

Well, okay.  This is just a question of how one defines the word
"meaning," and maybe your way is actually preferable.  But my point is
that somehow or other, the brain has to store some kind of representation
that lets it know what the word means.  I think that there are several
reasons that it is unrealistic to believe that the brain stores
dictionary definitions for words, in most cases.  For a concrete word
like "dog," I believe that the brain has an association between the
sound of the word and an image of a dog, or maybe a cluster of such
images, and possibly also sounds and feelings (the tactile feeling of a
dog's fur, or certain emotional feelings about dogs).  And I believe
that for abstract nouns, the brain uses similar sensory gestalts.
Needless to say, this is purely speculative, a hypothesis to be
investigated experimentally.

>I don't see why you think the ability to represent abstract aspects of
>reality would not be adaptive. Is human speech/language adaptive?
>It seems that it would be adaptive to have the ability to discriminate
>commonalities between various concrete situations, e.g. that this and that
>thing have something in common, a certain common feature.

There's more at issue than whether the capability is adaptive or not.
For one thing, evolution doesn't just suddenly produce structure that is
totally new, it builds on what was there before.  And there's also the
matter of the speed at which evolution occurs.  

In any case, it's a major step from simply noticing that several
things/situations have a similarity to having an abstract concept
representing that similarity.  And in fact, I don't think that's quite
the way abstract concepts became part of the language.  I think that
one can observe the process happening in Plato's use of Greek, where he
takes adjectives and uses them as nouns ("the Good").  I think that
it's clear that Plato's usage was an innovative use of the Greek
language at that time.

I think that it's also useful to look at the classical Chinese language,
where it is common for verbs to be used as nouns and vice-versa.  In
fact, the very concept of parts of speech seems to be something that is
not innate in Chinese (except that it did seem to me when I was studying
Chinese that there were such things as prepositions).  (Not that I ever
learned enough Chinese to claim much expertise.)  

I think that to a child learning language, "brown" represents a certain
sort of sensory information and "dog" represents other, but analogous,
sensory information.   Something can be "brown" and also be "dog," but
this is no stranger than the fact that something can be "mother" and
also be "nurse" or "doctor."

To repeat, I don't believe that the distinction between the abstract and
the concrete is intrinsic to the brain.  I think that even making this
distinction represents a fairly sophisticated level of thinking.  

--
If a kid asks where rain comes from, 
I think a cute thing to tell him is, "God is crying."  
And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is, 
"Probably because of something you did."   --- Jack Handey
