First contact: the trouble with linguists

Great mini-story on linguistic relativity; a reductio ad absurdam. Hat tip to Mark Liberman at Language log. Warning of a touch or two of strong language. Looks like the author is David Chess. The title is one I gave.

Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't been each other's First Contacts. Virgin civilizations, groping each other in the dark.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it," the smaller of the two men moaned, his head down in his arms on the broken table, as the sounds coming in through the half-boarded-up window swelled louder.

"If they wanted to destroy us, why didn't they just send a missle, an asteroid, a fucking army?"

The taller man took another drink from the bottle in his hand, staring without seeing at the window.

"We started it, you know."

"Bastards, bastards."

"We nearly destroyed them."

"Should have."

"It was the linguists," his voice was rough and slow, detached, almost toneless, "that went out in the first starship. We taught the Tanatha suicide."

"Bastards." The sounds outside moved away a bit, grew softer.

"Their language was utterly alien. No reflexive forms, strange verb tenses. Eventually they learned enough of it to try to ask them questions, eventually they asked them what their word was for 'suicide'. They didn't have one."

"Bullshit."

"They didn't. They had no reflexive forms, and 'to be' and 'to kill' were such utterly incompatible concepts that they had been literally unable to imagine killing the person that you are. Until we asked the question, and kept asking it until they understood."

He took another long drink, a deep breath, and shuddered. The man at the table raised his head just long enough to wipe his eyes.

"It nearly destroyed their civilization. They didn't have the millennia of evolved defense mechanisms that we do, the cultural institutions that discourage killing yourself, the structures to deal with it.

"They experimented.

"They died.

"Their cultures crumbled."

"Not fucking far enough they didn't," the smaller man muttered, and lay his head down again with a thud.

"They fell so fast. Our linguists came back on the last starship they sent out, along with what was left of their Tanatha colleagues. Half the crew died on the way, but they got here."

"Bastards."

"And their linguists, the ones that stayed alive, learned our language in return, and one day they knew enough to ask, to ask what was our word for --"

"No, no, no, no, no," the man slumped over the table moaned monotonously, as another explosion bloomed outside and a chorus of voices raised in an ululating scream, full of fear and an incomprehensible ecstacy.

Explaining the cocktail effect's neurology

You know how you can manage to home in on a particular conversation in a room of conversations? (All other things being equal). Well, it looks like they have cracked the neural dimension of that.

This is the approach the Zador lab has taken to explain “selective attention,” or what Dr. Zador calls “the cocktail party problem.” Half of the neurons measured in the reported experiments showed no reaction at all to incoming stimuli. The researchers hypothesize that each neuron in the auditory cortex may have an “optimal stimulus” to which it is particularly sensitized.
“Your entire sensory apparatus is there to make successful representations of the outside world,” said Dr. Zador, who is director of the CSHL Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. “Sparse representations may make sensory stimuli easier to recognize and remember.” Recognizing the brain’s ability to distinguish “optimal stimuli” could help scientists find ways to improve how sounds are learned.

It just show that perception is more an active process than naive 'representation' models (such as that undergirding the kind of knee-jerk positivism that Dawkins seems to slip into a lot). It further indicates that an active part in interpretative processing is played by human subjects. Perhaps no surprise to hermeneuts but more solid brain data to back it up helps us to think about the correlations. Such as some further evidence that flows with a constructivist approach to learning and relating theologically to the naming the animals motif.
How Does The Brain Attend To One Voice In A Noisy Room? New Findings On Selectively Interpreting Sound

Constructivism and Christian Teaching

I've mentioned constructivism in education before. And I have been thinking, but can't find a reference to show I've written it down on this blog, that an implication of the Adam naming the animals scene is to support a constructivist approach to learning. Taking the basic insight from the posting just referred to, "God seems to want to see what we will make of the Creation, how we will understand it and wonder at it and how we will speak of it. And when I write 'speak', I mean to include the languages of the arts as well as the more 'scientific' or formal linguistic registers." And it seems to me that this is a constructivist approach. Not a radical version where there is no objective reality and we entirely construct our own world, but a moderate version which accepts the [God-] givenness of the world but sees God as leaving room for us to see what we make of it and be creative with what we discover and how we 'taxonymise' it. This contrasts with a strong sovereignty view of God, such as that shown in the Qur'an, which minimises human creativity and responsiveness. It seems to me then, that this article comes to reasonable conclusions, on the whole when it concludes

Constructivism is a theoretical framework that has gained prominence in education in recent years. It is clear that this framework is based on premises not acceptable within a Christian worldview. However the methods implied by this framework are in most cases consonant with good Christian teaching. Although the Christian teacher cannot accept the assumptions, there are modified premises, which are consistent with the Christian worldview This may explain why a framework apparently so contrary to Christian thought may still produce an acceptable approach to teaching.

I would however aver from the bit about not being within a Christian worldview: for the reason outlined above, I would say that moderate constructivism is demanded by a Christian worldview.
Constructivism and Christian Teaching:

The cultural effects of surveillance?

I'm still thinking about this, though I think there may be something in it, hence I'm sharing it here. "Britain has become a witness culture, inured to watching and being watched. Be it Big Brother or posting friends' antics on YouTube, our leisure time has become increasingly infected with the imperative to expose ourselves and others. No activity, no individual, is deemed valid without an audience."
Which seems to make personal the old philosophical chestnut about whether a tree falling in a deserted forest makes any sound... Is the writer just a modernist individualist unable to see the importance of social construction of identity, or implicitly decrying it? Am I right to think that this is more to do with popular social constructivism than celebrity mimesis?
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | CCTV is no silver bullet - it risks making life less safe:

Why impose on me what you know when I want to learn what's unknown?

I just found this and found it really helpful and inspiring. The tranlation for non-Hispanologues follows.

¿Por qué me impones lo que sabes si yo quiero aprender lo desconocido y ser fuente en mi propio descubrimiento?
El ruido de tu verdad es mi tragedia; tu sabiduría, mi negación;
tu conquista, mi ausencia; tu hacer, mi destrucción.
No es la bomba lo que me mata;
el fusil hiere, mutila y acaba, el gas envenena, aniquila y suprime,
pero la verdad seca mi boca, apaga mi pensamiento y niega mi poesía,
me hace antes de ser.

No quiero la verdad, dame lo desconocido.
Déjame negarte al hacer mi mundo para que yo pueda también ser mi propia negación y a mi vez ser negado.
¿Cómo estar en lo nuevo sin abandonar lo presente?
No me instruyas, déjame vivir viviendo junto a mi;
que mi riqueza comience donde tú acabas,
que tu muerte sea mi nacimiento..

Me dices que lo desconocido no se puede enseñar;
yo digo que tampoco se enseña lo conocido
y que cada hombre hace el mundo al vivir.
Dime, que yo tejeré sobre tu historia;
muéstrate para que yo pueda pararme sobre tus hombros.
Revélate para que desde ti pueda yo ser y hacer lo distinto;
yo tomaré de ti lo superfluo, no la verdad que mata y congela;
yo tomaré tu ignorancia para construir mi inocencia.
¿No te das cuenta de que has querido combatir la guerra
con la paz, y la paz es la afirmación de la guerra?

¿No te das cuenta de que has querido combatir la injusticia con la justicia,
y que la justicia es la afirmación de la miseria?
¿No te das cuenta de que has querido combatir la ignorancia con la instrucción
y que la instrucción es la afirmación de la ignorancia porque destruye la creatividad?
Tu conocimiento nos muestra el mundo o lo niega, porque es la historia de tus actos,
o lo negará porque despertando tu imaginación te llevará a cambiarlo
Deja que lo nuevo sea lo nuevo y que el tránsito sea la negación del presente;
deja que lo conocido sea mi liberación, no mi esclavitud.
No es poco lo que te pido.
Tú has creído que todo ser humano puede pensar,
que todo ser humano puede sentir.
Tú has creído que todo ser humano puede amar y crear.
Comprendo pues tu temor cuando te pido que vivas
de acuerdo a tu sabiduría y que tú respetes tus creencias;
ya no podrás predecir la conducta de tu vecino,
tendrás que mirarlo;
ya no sabrás lo que él te dice escuchándote,
tendrás que dejar poesía en sus palabras.

El error será nuevamente posible en el despertar de la creatividad,
y el otro tendrá presencia.
Tú, yo y él tendremos que hacer el mundo.
La verdad perderá su imperio para que el ser humano tenga el suyo.
No me instruyas, vive junto a mi;
tu fracaso es que yo sea
idéntico a ti

FAntastic; though a strong critique of the instructional mindset, but perceptive, given that the author was young. Here it is in English.

Don't impose on me what you know
I want to explore the unknown
And be the source of my own discoveries.
Let the known be my liberation and not my
slavery.
The world of your truth can be my limitation;
Your wisdom my negation.
Don't instruct me; let's walk together.
Let my richness begin where yours ends.
Show me that I can stand
on your shoulders.
Reveal yourself so that I can be
Something different.
You believe that every human being
Can love and create.
I understand, then, your fear
When I ask you to live according to your
wisdom.
You will not know who I am
by listening to yourself
Don't instruct me; let me be.
Your failure is that I be identical to you.

An abridged translation of a poem in Spanish, originally written by the young son of the Chilean Biologist, Umberto Maturana.

Of course there is the challenge too, to much Christian 'education' which has been adapted from the instructional and mass models of our surrounding industrialised approaches. But if we rethought our educational strategies with discipleship, the emphasis on experiencing the Divine and the example of Christ, the theological valuing of the person and their uniqueness and the example of the very early church in mind, we would be making far more room for personalised approaches focusing on the individual's learning journey. This is actually vitally, crucially, related to the issue of contextualisation and enculturation, ultimately inspired by incarnation. Again, I am struck by the similarity between what is happening in education at the cutting edges and what is happening in emerging church circles.