Is Water Hydrogen Hydroxide?

Which it seems to appear from this post that you didn't.

Sorry, I should have been clearer.

It's a lot more than being a parrot. The animals follow rules of grammar, initiate conversation; ask for things and even combine words in creatively unique and untaught ways to produce new (more complex) ideas and so forth... So by any rational definition it is a language. A fairly simple one, but still a language.

I think, because of our differing conceptions of language we are being lead to different conceptions of what is to be classed as a language. Which will explain why I am skeptical that the "animals follow rules of grammar," and so on. If you could give some examples, or links, that would be helpful. But for the moment, I don't think we can talk about this subject—due to our differing conceptions of language.

But the point is exactly the same. The environment somehow triggers something that isn't learning. It somehow sets parameters, without learning what those parameters are. It's a bit like saying that a swimmer doesn't really need water to swim... the water just triggers the innate ability to swim. It sets the parameters for where the swimmer can swim. But the swimmer doesn't actually need the water to swim.

I think a better way to think about it is like this (and I hope I haven't used this one before). Human's undoubtedly have an innate ability to grow legs. That is undeniable. But, that in itself is not enough for the growth of human legs. The person also needs the environment to provide the right nutrition for leg growth. Once the environment has provided that, then leg growth will invariably occur.

You said the child's environment is too input starved to LEARN something as complex as talking. But I showed an example of a child picking up on barely perceptible environmental clues to learn a fairly complex set of behavior patters--which, by the way must be carried out by some biological mind/brain organ too, don't you think? So it puzzles me how you could miss the relevance.

If I looked back at the right post, then you were talking about gender roles and socialisation. I think there is a crucial difference between language and gender roles, though; which allows one to be taught, and learnt, and the other to be internal. Ultimately, for the child to pick up the gender roles all he/she needs to do is mimic human behaviour. That is, all that the child needs is there in the environment. But the difference with language is that the environment is not fully equipped to teach a child a language. For instance, how could the environment possibly teach recursive structures to a child, which have the potential to produce an infinite number of sentences? So, I think there is a big key difference between gender roles and language. That's if I read your post properly, you might have been meaning something other than gender roles.

Let us not confuse means of ingestion with the emotion of hunger. The baby mammal, human or not, who will not suckle may be unable to do so because it is moribund or very ill, or as you mention, allergic to most milk. Or it may be unable to suckle because the mother was unable to get it to the teat. A normal healthy baby possesses the emotion of hunger together with the instinct to take stuff into its mouth it will even suck on a hamburger or worse.

Yes, of course there is a large measure of instinct involved. But there is a large measure of learning too. As you said, the baby instinctively understands hunger... and (barring deformity or some other complication) it has the mechanics needed to suckle. But it needs to learn what things are appropriate to suckle. Sometimes the infant will suckle a hamburger (as you said). And sometimes it will be confused by a nipple and be "unwilling" to suckle, even though hungry (as I pointed out). Once it discovers that the nipple provides milk... then it will suckle. Which is why it is sometimes helpful to get milk on the nipple before putting it in the child's mouth--if it is having this problem. The taste of the milk will inform the child that this is an appropriate sucking object, and once it has LEARNED this it will begin to suck.

I doubt if he can distinguish between a tree and grass by looking at them.

Personally, I DO believe that a person WITHOUT an adopted mE-Language can distinguish betgween such things as a [tree] and [grass] just by looking at them... much as a dog or a deer (or any other higher animal) can distinguish between them. A deer, for instance, can eat tree leaves and other types of plant materials when it has to... but it prefers soft, tasty grass when it is available. It recognizes that grass grows in the summer and that it grows almost exclusively on the ground. So you generally don't find dear trying to graze in the tree limbs. It knows the difference between the ground and a tree and it knows which to go to for food and which to go to for shelter from rain.

I think he has also to use the pressure nerve endings, and the kinaesthetic sensors in his joints. Probably smell too.

Helen Keller, before she learned to sign, could distinguish between something she wanted and something she didn't. She was undisciplined and tempermental, but she could tell if she wasn't receiving what she wanted--and that's largely why she was tempermental. She had no way to communicate to others what she could distinguish for herself, and it was extremely frustrating. Noe dhe didn't have sight. She relied on her other senses. So these other senses are often also sufficient for making such distinctions--but I'm not sure why you would think these other senses would be REQUIRED.

... if I understand Antone, that there are means of knowing which are independent of language. Those means of knowing are subconscious, and the subconscious of mind is vastly more huge than the linguistic, conscious part.

Yes and no... I would characterize these "internal" ways of knowing as being PART of the mI-language. In fact, this part of the mI-language is (by my thinking) the part that comes closest to achieving Metaman's mystical LEARN-LESS language aquisition. It is something that happens without conscious thought... When a child learns to speak, the process is not something we think about consciously--but the learning process does happen in the conscious part of the mind. This unconscious ability to distinguish between things does not happen in the conscious portion of the mind... but it is still learned. We come to distinguish between a [tree] and [grass] by observing these objects and LEARNING what characteristics they have. Once we have learned these "categories" we can distinguish between them. Earning to Speek involves associating the words from an mE-language with these termless mI-language "categories".

Thus, when a child points to a [ball] and says, "Ball!" They have spoken a TRUTH... becasue the "category" [ball] corresponds positively to the physical object they are calling "ball". This means there are three crucial parts to an mI-language. 1) the internal "categories" or ideas. 2) the ability to analyze a [new physical object] and determine which "category" it belongs to, and 3) the [names] which can be used (at various times) to refer to any of the following: (1), (2) or (1 & 2).

With a few exceptions, these names (or signs) are largely shared by most of the people who speak the same mE-language. Where different mI-languages differ most is in the [way the "categories" are organized] and the [way the "categories are paired with actual physical objects]. And the reason is because these are processes of the individual's subconscious mind. They are things which we learn to do instinctively... without conscious thought. But they are still LEARNED associations.

That's all I'm saying.

A child raised in total isolation, without being allowed to explore it's environment would not be able to LEARN to make these associations. The fact that this learning occurs at a subconscious level does not change the fact that it IS LEARNING. In fact, I suspect that's one reason why children who are raised in "foundries" where they receive little interaction with adult human and lay in their bed all day just looking at the ceiling tend to experience severe emotional and (I suspect) learning disabilities. Similarly, a monkey who looses it mother and is raised without the contact of its mother will experience the same sort of severe learning trauma.

Part of this, of course, is emotional. But I suspect that it is also largely because they have not been allowed to LEARN what they needed to learn.

Instinct only gets you so far... that's why not all the young birds that are pushed out of the nest actually fly. Some fall to the ground and die. The bird has to LEARN to fly as it is falling. Instinct helps greatly... but it isn't everything.

-- Updated Mon Apr 02, 2012 10:24 pm to add the following --

I think, because of our differing conceptions of language we are being lead to different conceptions of what is to be classed as a language. ...for the moment, I don't think we can talk about this subject—due to our differing conceptions of language.

I agree.

If you could give some examples, or links, that would be helpful.

The main reference I was thinking about was an article in Scientific America from about 20 years ago, I think. But I haven't found it, and don't want to waste hours looking. So I did a quick google search for [Apes + Language+ symbols]. Below are links and excerpts to a few articles I found:

But first, a few things are worth noting. 1) I'm not suggesting that apes possess human-like abilities with language. Their language ability is similar to ours in the same way that an infant is similar to an adult. We can recognize the shape--but we expect only one of them to stand up and walk. 2) I admit that animals have many disadvantages. They do not have the same brain configurations and are missing much of what humans have which make learning so easy for us. They do not have the facial and vocal cord muscles that allow us to utter a lot of unique and different sounds. 3) For this reason, teaching spoken language has pretty much been a dismal failure. Even in the most successful cases, the animals have a very limited vocabulary--and can understand many more words than they can speak. 4) sign language has had more success, but that success has still been extremely limited, from what I've seen. 5) the most succussful primate efforts have involved using symbols, which the animal accesses by touching a computer screen. 6) Different animals clearly have different abilities to understand and use language. Many show little or no aptitute--but a few show moderate aptitude. By contrast, virtually all humans (except those with physical or mental problems) show far greater aptitude than even the best animal subjects. 7) Part of this may be that lower primates have a shorter youthful learning period than humans, and most animals who become part of these experiments are older (say 2 years) so they are in effect analogous to adult humans learning a second language... only without the benefit of having a native language. And perhaps most important for the purposes of our discussion, note the excerpts below on baby Kanzi. This animal was the baby of the mother who was being taught. Kanzi was not being taught... but instead picked up the language in much the same way that a human baby does... by observing. AND Kanzi was much more successful at learning language than the mother.

This last point supports my premise that the way a human baby learn language is NOT a disadvantage (as you've suggested) but is instead the most effective learning method possible--not just for humans, but for animals too.

greatapetrust.org/science/history-of-ap ... reat-apes/ Lana is a female chimpanzee born in 1970... Her name derives from the LANguage Analogue (LANA) Project, which sought to develop a computer-based language training system... Lana joined the research as a subject when she was two-and-a-half years old.

Lana demonstrated that she could discriminate between lexigrams and associate them with ideas. As she progressed, she would sequence words and use them grammatically, later starting to create novel utterances in response to unplanned events that affected her life. For example, Lana would request that the research technician refill her computer vending device when it was empty of treats, or request an item she had seen outside her room that the computer had no facility to provide to her.

http://acp.eugraph.com/apes/index.html Two chimps, Sherman and Austin, learned, with extensive training, to communicate by way of keyboards in a cooperative effort to use simple tools to get food. In the process, they had to learn lexigrams for foods and for tools they needed to obtain the food. With much less training, they learned to categorize 20 lexigrams for foods and 20 for tools using a lexigram for tool and another for food, a significant linguistic feat in itself. ...Without specific training, both chimps were able to look at a lexigram, then reach into a box they couldn’t see into and pull out the named object. These feats appeared to show at least that Sherman and Austin grasped the concept of naming. They seem to use symbols as words.

...a separate project with an adult ape called Matata ... Matata was a working mom, however, and brought her adopted baby Kanzi to work. ...While Matata sat bemused by the keyboard, Kanzi crawled in her lap and on her back or played nearby. The researchers tolerated Kanzi, but never trained him. He grew up for two years in an environment where humans continuously made sounds to his mother and tapped at a keyboard, trying to teach her individual signs. When Savage-Rumbaugh finally gave up on Matata she hadn’t learned to use lexigrams to ask for what she wanted... Like the child of an immigrant, Kanzi soon showed he had absorbed just what Matata had resisted. Within a week he spontaneously began to use the keyboard to make his desires known, But he also appeared to name objects even when he did not want the object. Savage-Rumbaugh and Sevcik decided not to train Kanzi at all, but to see if he could continue to soak up the keyboard “language” during daily interactions with researchers, who talked to him, using both lexigrams and speech, as if he understood. In other words, they treated Kanzi like parents treat a preverbal child constantly hearing language. Kanzi’s keyboard helped in this effort by generating synthesized speech to sound out the English word for each lexigram. ...They use the phrase “non-random lexigram combinations” instead of “sentences,” ... But Kanzi works for attention, not food.... Kanzi’s non-random lexigram combinations rarely exceed three lexigrams. ... Kanzi’s two-and-three-word sentences on the keyboard may seem less than impressive. But a set of experiments comparing Kanzi’s understanding of spoken English to that of Alia, the two-and-one-half-year-old daughter of a Language Center researcher appears to show a very different level of understanding. Kanzi and Alia were presented with sentence-understanding tasks as similar as the researchers could make them. ...

Kanzi sits in a room with two researchers ... A third ... stands outside the room with a microphone. The two inside researchers wear earphones playing loud music to reduce the chance they can give Kanzi any clues. The room has a “kitchen,” and a large playroom with a number of objects Kanzi has never seen. A child’s toilet, a pitcher of water, a rubber snake, a stuffed dog, a 25-pound bag of carrots, a hand puppet vaguely resembling a rabbit. The voice from outside says “Kanzi, make the dog bite the snake.” Kanzi immediately picks up the rubber snake and the plush toy dog. He carefully puts the snake’s head into the dog’s mouth and gently squeezes the dog’s jaws shut. An impressive show of understanding made more impressive by the fact that Kanzi has generalized the spoken words dog and snake to toys he’s never seen. This is me... notice that the primate is forming "categories". He understands the concept snake (in some form) and is able to compare that concept to a new, previously unseen object, which he can identify positively as [snake].... this is the very essence of language use.

“Kanzi, tickle Rose with the bunny,” says Savage-Rumbaugh. Kanzi picks up a bunny hand puppet, carries it to Sevcik and tickles her. Sevcik says in explaining the videotape that Kanzi’s only previous knowledge of “bunny” was a videotape of a Language Research Center worker dressed in a bunny suit. The researchers had never drilled Kanzi (or Alia) on the requests, and all of the objects were new, purchased just for the experiment.

Duane Rumbaugh summarizes the results: “Kanzi’s comprehension of 500 novel sentences of request were very comparable to Alia’s. Both complied with the requests without assistance on about 70% of the sentences.”[/color] ... Kanzi learned by observation alone very early in life, and further that the researchers only discovered this fact by the lucky decision to keep Kanzi around after Matata was sent home. “The apes can come to understand even the syntax of human speech at a level that compares favorably with that of a two-to-three-year-old child—if they are reared from shortly after birth in a language-structured environment. Reared in this manner, the infant ape’s brain develops in a manner that enables it to acquire language. First through its comprehension and then through its expression, a pattern that characterizes the course of language acquisition in the normal child.

“Though none will argue that any animal has the full capacity of humans for language, none should deny that at least some animals have quite impressive competencies for language skills, including speech comprehension.”

Human's undoubtedly have an innate ability to grow legs. That is undeniable. But, that in itself is not enough for the growth of human legs. The person also needs the environment to provide the right nutrition for leg growth. Once the environment has provided that, then leg growth will invariably occur.

I have no problem with this analogy... but suggesting a child can aquire a language without learning is a lot like saying that a child can grow a leg without nutrition. Learning is the nutrition that makes language grow.

...all that the child needs is there in the environment. But the difference with language is that the environment is not fully equipped to teach a child a language. For instance, how could the environment possibly teach recursive structures to a child, which have the potential to produce an infinite number of sentences?

Actually, recursive sentences structures are probably one of the easiest things for a human child to learn. It seems very natural for them to pick up this idea.

Now granted, this is a concept that animals in language learning programs seem to pick up only with the greatest of difficulty... so clearly, there is an innate aptitude in the human child. But as soon as you truely understand the term [and] you understand the recursive structure. There are other ways to produce it too... but they do not add all that much complexity to the situation.

Animals can't count very well either--and I suspect that this recursive aptitude actually has more to do with innate mathematical abilities than with language aquisition abilities.

In any case, I think it's pretty clear that the child begins to learn this recursive structure the first time they hear someone say something like, "Johnny runs and jumps and hides so that the others cannot find him." Or any other sentencde that strings together more ideas than simply x does y. And that includes going from a sentence like "Johnny walks home" to "Johnny walks home quickly" and then to "Johnny walks home quickly so that he will not be late for dinner"... and then "Johnny walks home quickly so that he will not be late for dinner with his friend Ben"... and then "Johnny walks home quickly so that he will not be late for dinner with his very best friend Ben, who lives next door... " and so on. The very observation that sentences can become increasingly complex intuitively implies that this increasing complexity has no NESSESSARY end. So how could the child possibly not learn the recursive structure?

Yes, we have the intelligence to do so... but we still have to LEARN the rules by observation and immitation...reinforced by both positive and negative feedback. The rules we get right, we get positive feedback... in the form of approving nods, smiles and other body language that you've acknowledged is so simple to pick up. Each time we pick up on these subconscous clues it is a reinforcing LEARNING experience. Whether it's simply understanding a sentence well enough to do what an adult asks us to do... or the more difficult linguistic task of forming actual sentences of our own. It's all just various stages of the learning process... Which primates like Kanzi appear to be able to master about as well as a human child of a few years old. If we don't assume that the primates are absorbing language mysteriously (without learning)... why would we suppose that the human children are?

The human children have many more years of learning to build on that initial beginning; and fortunately we have the mental ability to make that transition to the more complicated forms of language use... which the primates do not seem to have. But this is a sign of the different levels of learning that we are capable of... not an absence of learning in Humans.

Does anyone know about strokes and other brain pathologies that affect language abilities? I imagine that anatomical correlations if sufficiently extensive of language behaviour with brain lesions/wholeness would provide the definitive answer.

-- Updated Wed Apr 04, 2012 4:26 am to add the following --

I have though of a different approach to the original question 'Is water hydrogen hydroxide?' So-called qualia are as I have argued bits of knowledge which are difficult or more likely, impossible, to communicate.

But the attribute of water that it is hydrogen hydroxide is knowedge that can be publically demonstrated by a chemistry teacher. Now I come to the crunch! The contexts for individuals of this teaching event are not the same despite the best efforts of the chemistry teacher or the author nof the chemistry text book.One learner may have learned it from a book while cosy on a sofa in front of a warm fire with a fag and a beer ready to hand. Another may have learned it from an unpopular teacher with a bad cold while worrying that the class bully is ready to strike. Etc. Therefore that water is hydrogen hydroxide is not as pure a bit of knowledge as I first assumed but is intimately linked in the individual's memory with affect and other pieces of memories.

-- Updated Wed Apr 04, 2012 4:26 am to add the following --

Does anyone know about strokes and other brain pathologies that affect language abilities? I imagine that anatomical correlations if sufficiently extensive of language behaviour with brain lesions/wholeness would provide the definitive answer.

-- Updated Wed Apr 04, 2012 4:26 am to add the following --

I have thought of a different approach to the original question 'Is water hydrogen hydroxide?' So-called qualia are as I have argued bits of knowledge which are difficult or more likely, impossible, to communicate.

But the attribute of water that it is hydrogen hydroxide is knowedge that can be publically demonstrated by a chemistry teacher. Now I come to the crunch! The contexts for individuals of this teaching event are not the same despite the best efforts of the chemistry teacher or the author nof the chemistry text book.One learner may have learned it from a book while cosy on a sofa in front of a warm fire with a fag and a beer ready to hand. Another may have learned it from an unpopular teacher with a bad cold while worrying that the class bully is ready to strike. Etc. Therefore that water is hydrogen hydroxide is not as pure a bit of knowledge as I first assumed but is intimately linked in the individual's memory with affect and other pieces of memories.