Linguistic relativity

This is an interesting idea that I have heard a bit about before. In some ways it makes sense that our perception of the world is influenced by the language we speak due to the large amount of processing that our brain does on the information it receives from our senses. I've never been totally convinced about it though. I have heard that the ancient Greek texts didn't have a word for blue but does this mean they didn't really see blue?
(Also I'm a bit skeptical about this one in particular because the Greeks could just have been poetic in their descriptions -- from what i remember Homer tends to describe the sea as "wine dark" but I always thought this was just figurative language not necessarily describing the colour).

Of course if I don't have different words for blue and green, I might say to someone who asked that I think they are the same colour but does that mean I can't see the colours are different, it's just I don't consider them different in my language. I'm not sure and I think it is difficult to test.

It's an interesting idea though.

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To clarify what's going on here, the actual perception has to be unaffected by language. But when the memories are coded, language tags them with the corresponding symbol, and on subsequent recall, blue will essentially come out green, the closest available tag.

Now, when you're actually looking at blue and green, side by side, you've got a sort of circular reference going, because memories (with their verbal tags) are being formed continually. You could construct some experiments to show the effect of the verbal tagging / memory loop (e.g., flash two colors side by side for just a split second, versus for 5 - 10 seconds, and in each case have the subject make a same / difference judgment. You would use green, blue, and various shades of blue-green.) I wonder if that's been done ...

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.

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Wittgenstein had said : "The limits of my language are the limits of my mind(or world). All I know is what I have words for." If you really think about it you cannot form thoughts without language and you cannot form language without thoughts. What came first, as the intelligence of the primordial man emerged, the thought to form language or the language to form thoughts? Or did both emerge at the same time?

Yes, the ancient Greeks did not have a word for blue. So, if they did not call the color blue "μπλε" presumably, if Wittgenstein is correct, they did not think of it as blue either.* They called dark blue "κυανόν"(cyan) but that could also mean dark green, black or yellow. And they called light blue (or light green, grey and yellow) "γλαύκος" (glaukos).

On the other hand the ancient Minoans used plenty of Egyptian blue for the wall paintings of Knossos(in Crete, a sight to be seen, seriously) already from 2100 BC, so I don't think they "didn't notice the color", as was claimed. So, you may not call something as a distinct entity but you may perceive it as such. By that I mean perceive it as something distinct, be able to distinguish it from the other colors but not have a word (and think of a word) for it.

*By "not think of" I mean forming a certain word for it in their mind, not being unable to understand the difference.

One of the wall paintings in Knossos (partially restored):
http://www.gtp.gr/MGfiles/location/image33212[1048].jpg

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Dang. Had posted this to a deleted thread, of all the stupid things to do. This seemed like the most appropriate "real" thread...

Remember, maths is a science and heavily intertwined with physics.

Mathematics IS universal. The "IDEA" of mathematics as an abstract concept.

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Ah..not so quick. The major germ of the story is that how we experience reality determines how we speak about that reality, and that physics and math are a form of perception -> language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or Whorfianism, is a concept-paradigm in linguistics and cognitive science that holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' cognition or world view. It used to have a strong version that claims that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. The more accepted weak version claims that linguistic categories and usage only influence thoughts and decisions.

The hypothesis evolved from work by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, which pointed towards the possibility that grammatical differences reflect differences in the way that speakers of different languages perceive the world. Linguistic relativity was formulated as a testable hypothesis called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis by Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg, based on experiments on color perception across language groups. Color perception and naming has been a popular research area, producing studies that have both supported and questioned linguistic relativity's validity. In the mid-20th century many linguists and psychologists had maintained that human language and cognition is universal and not subject to relativistic effects.

The hypothesis has influenced disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, neurobiology, anthropology, psychology and sociology. The hypothesis' origin, definition and applicability have been controversial since first outlined. It has come in and out of favor and remains contested as research continues across these domains. Most recently, a common view is that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways, but that other processes are better seen as arising from connectionist factors.

And Mathematics itself is built on somewhat unstable ground:

<a href="%3Cbr%3Ehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Foundational_crisis">;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Foundational_crisis</a>;

Foundational crisis

The foundational crisis of mathematics (in German Grundlagenkrise der Mathematik) was the early 20th century's term for the search for proper foundations of mathematics.

Several schools of the philosophy of mathematics ran into difficulties one after the other in the 20th century, as the assumption that mathematics had any foundation that could be consistently stated within mathematics itself was heavily challenged by the discovery of various paradoxes (such as Russell's paradox).

....

Various schools of thought were opposing each other. The leading school was that of the formalist approach, of which David Hilbert was the foremost proponent, culminating in what is known as Hilbert's program, which thought to ground mathematics on a small basis of a logical system proved sound by metamathematical finitistic means. The main opponent was the intuitionist school, led by L. E. J. Brouwer, which resolutely discarded formalism as a meaningless game with symbols (van Dalen, 2008). The fight was acrimonious.

...

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Contemporary_schools_of_thought

Mathematical Platonism is the form of realism that suggests that mathematical entities are abstract, have no spatiotemporal or causal properties, and are eternal and unchanging. This is often claimed to be the view most people have of numbers. The term Platonism is used because such a view is seen to parallel Plato's Theory of Forms and a "World of Ideas" (Greek: eidos (εἶδος)) described in Plato's allegory of the cave: the everyday world can only imperfectly approximate an unchanging, ultimate reality. Both Plato's cave and Platonism have meaningful, not just superficial connections, because Plato's ideas were preceded and probably influenced by the hugely popular Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, who believed that the world was, quite literally, generated by numbers.

{Mathematical} Empiricism is a form of realism that denies that mathematics can be known a priori at all. It says that we discover mathematical facts by empirical research, just like facts in any of the other sciences. It is not one of the classical three positions advocated in the early 20th century, but primarily arose in the middle of the century. However, an important early proponent of a view like this was John Stuart Mill. Mill's view was widely criticized, because, according to critics, such as A.J. Ayer,[5] it makes statements like "2 + 2 = 4" come out as uncertain, contingent truths, which we can only learn by observing instances of two pairs coming together and forming a quartet.
....
The most important criticism of empirical views of mathematics is approximately the same as that raised against Mill. If mathematics is just as empirical as the other sciences, then this suggests that its results are just as fallible as theirs, and just as contingent. In Mill's case the empirical justification comes directly, while in Quine's case it comes indirectly, through the coherence of our scientific theory as a whole, i.e. consilience after E. O. Wilson. Quine suggests that mathematics seems completely certain because the role it plays in our web of belief is incredibly central, and that it would be extremely difficult for us to revise it, though not impossible.

{Mathematical} Formalism holds that mathematical statements may be thought of as statements about the consequences of certain string manipulation rules. For example, in the "game" of Euclidean geometry (which is seen as consisting of some strings called "axioms", and some "rules of inference" to generate new strings from given ones), one can prove that the Pythagorean theorem holds (that is, one can generate the string corresponding to the Pythagorean theorem). According to formalism, mathematical truths are not about numbers and sets and triangles and the like—in fact, they are not "about" anything at all.

In mathematics, intuitionism is a program of methodological reform whose motto is that "there are no non-experienced mathematical truths" (L.E.J. Brouwer). From this springboard, intuitionists seek to reconstruct what they consider to be the corrigible portion of mathematics in accordance with Kantian concepts of being, becoming, intuition, and knowledge. Brouwer, the founder of the movement, held that mathematical objects arise from the a priori forms of the volitions that inform the perception of empirical objects.

and on and on about different ideas of what mathematics is until we get to the most interesting and relevant idea of mathematics for this thread:

Fictionalism in mathematics was brought to fame in 1980 when Hartry Field published Science Without Numbers, which rejected and in fact reversed Quine's indispensability argument. Where Quine suggested that mathematics was indispensable for our best scientific theories, and therefore should be accepted as a body of truths talking about independently existing entities, Field suggested that mathematics was dispensable, and therefore should be considered as a body of falsehoods not talking about anything real. He did this by giving a complete axiomatization of Newtonian mechanics with no reference to numbers or functions at all. He started with the "betweenness" of Hilbert's axioms to characterize space without coordinatizing it, and then added extra relations between points to do the work formerly done by vector fields. Hilbert's geometry is mathematical, because it talks about abstract points, but in Field's theory, these points are the concrete points of physical space, so no special mathematical objects at all are needed.

Having shown how to do science without using numbers, Field proceeded to rehabilitate mathematics as a kind of useful fiction. He showed that mathematical physics is a conservative extension of his non-mathematical physics

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