I am not appealing that they should have rights. I am arguing that if you are going to use argumentation to define rights then you have to exclude some humans from having rights. I am actually not against the concept of some humans having rights and others not, nor am I against the concept of all humans having rights just because they are human.
When I suggest considering those unable to communicate, I am merely asking proponents of Hoppe’s argumentation ethics to consider that his definition requires segregation of the human species.
I am merely asking proponents of Hoppe’s argumentation ethics to consider that his definition requires segregation of the human species.
its going to be hard to argue that that could be a bad thing if the ‘objects’ split out from the human race are incapable of even thinking an objection to such splitting.
I tend to agree. However, there are many who believe that all humans should have the same set of rights and this is incompatible with argumentation ethics.
call them out on what it is to be human? the dead bodies of humans are ‘human’… in some sense of the word…yet we bury and incinerate them rather than prepare meals for them and apply medicine to them.
rights equality amongst humans is admirable in itself and perfectly correct as it goes…, but if you combine that with philosophically naive uses of the word ‘human’, you get led into trouble. My breakfast fed me. I am a human. The breakfast was a good example of a typical human breakfast. As it was a human breakfast…human is just the kind of breakfast that it was… my breakfast deserved the same rights as any person… and so on…
What are you trying to get at with this so called "segregation’? How does this relate to the conflict resolving argument made by Hoppe? Is it wrong my impression that your biggest worry is mentally retarded people being coerced is compatible with argumentation ethics?
By merely saying “what about babies, what about brain dead people, what about…” I do not know what exactly you mean. Something about a potential conflict emergence, which way of reaction to this conflict violates the property rights of the parties involved and which does not, or what?
I edited my post, please review the second paragraph, too.
I am not worried about nor do I have a problem with segregation of humans. To be honest, I don’t remember how we got on this topic. I’ll scroll up and see if I had a point.
This comes from me stating I was a consequentialist libertarian which was argued to be impossible as stated by Hoppe. I then contended that Hoppe’s conclusion that consequentialist libertarianism requires certain assumptions that I do not agree with. This lead us eventually to where we are now, on a totally unrelated tangent.
I do not think that it is out of the scope of argumentation ethics if you think that it is compatible with initiation of violence. If you think that argumentation ethics actually does not resolve some conflicts, we are still on topic.
I am now going to bed, because here it is 4 a.m. I will write later.
It is bizarre to me that anyone would think this because “cognitive psychologists” believe it. Isn’t it obvious from your own experience that you can think without being able to put words to every thought? What do you make of the fact that you can sometimes not think of the right words to express a thought? (Or does this never happen to you?) It just seems odd that someone on these forums, and as careful a thinker as you seem to be, would be willing to doubt basic experiential evidence because of what some authority figures say.
I did not take their word for it. In fact, I didn’t believe it initially but after reading the research I was convinced that language does influence thought significantly. I am not suggesting that all thought occurs in language, just that language is integral in critical/complex thought (science/philosophy).
OK I agree language influences thought, if only in that the language one uses to describe something tends to be recalled when thinking about that thing. I think the exact mechanism is that thoughts are put into words, then the words are recalled and reinterpreted into the original thought that prompted the words (if you’re lucky).
But I don’t know what you mean by “language is integral in critical/complex thought (science/philosophy).” It might be helpful as a memory device, but I can’t think of an example where a word would be integral (necessary?) to a thought. In aiding the memory, especially though writing something down, I can see how that would help advance science, but then strictly speaking the benefit is coming from having some sort of thought recording device. As a memory aid, I would phrase it more as language is “peripheral/auxilliary” - in the way that a pen and paper are - rather than integral.
Studies have shown that people who speak a certain language perceive their world in a particular way that is in line with their language when compared to people of another language. That is, if my language describes primary colors as red, green and blue I will have a more difficult time identifying and remembering the color yellow when compared to someone whose language has yellow as a primary color. Similar results occur for people with regards to motion perception, emotion perception, object representation, and memory.
This research shows us that the language we speak influences how we think, remember and perceive the world. It also hints at the fact that without language, what does that mean for our world perception? If words have such an impact on our world perception, what does that mean for someone who has no language? How would they perceive the world?
The “common sense” reaction is to say the person would still perceive the world in the same way as we would, just without a means of expressing it. The science hints at the opposite result though, that the person would probably have a vastly different perception of the world than we would and this goes beyond just inability to express it. When shown two colors, they may have significant trouble identifying the difference. When shown two objects they may have significant trouble telling them apart, when asked to remember an object they may have significant trouble picking it out of a group later. This is all hypothetical of course and I don’t think there have been any studies with regards to this topic on people who have no language (there are very few people who have no language and they are in high demand by cognitive researchers and modern ethics prevents much study on them).
"Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it? I mean, considering how I regard you as a friend, I’m surprised that you would take a passive/aggressive swipe at me online. "
I didn’t think it was necessary. It wasn’t at you personally, hence it being a general statement. Its happened every now and then over time here on the forums and no sorry I don’t have the source to back that up, but if I do come across it will let you know. Similar type threads to this though. Although this time it was your action / inaction that irked me a bit after awhile. Part indirect vent - which is why I was avoiding shouting it from the rooftops… since you are a friend.
“Or maybe I shouldn’t be?”
Funnily enough, I referred this to a previous mod of the forum. He asked 'why I was surprised and what did I expect?’
“Remember who started it Conza.”
And what exactly was started? I do hope it ends well.
“I had no idea you were talking to me.”
Really? Even though veduka surmised as much and he’s new? I also find that kind of hard to believe considering I directly quoted your question and pressed the respond button to your post twice. Although I didn’t name you (but then I don’t usually name anyone - I stopped ‘properly’ quoting after the forum ‘broke down’ and it become a hassle)People tend to remember what they wrote and see it being quoted. Benefit of the doubt though considering I added in a response to Merlin, but that was because you agreed with him.
If you read the post I don’t see how you could have possibly not seen it being as directed at you. The point about tolerance makes it glaring obvious, does it not?
But then it’s not just me. How about this. Was this addressed? I didn’t see any response to it, which considering it’s content & argument - which I thought was pretty good - was that the reason it wasn’t replied too - was because no-one has a good response against it. And yet as someone who strives for the truth, it annoys me when people continue on with their position in the thread / life and just pretend it doesn’t exist. When people also try take the morale highground -whilst they are acting in this way - well that to me is… well pathetic.
Culture affects perceptions, of course, and culture affects how language is formed for the same reason. I don’t know of any study reaching that kind of conclusion that is able to tease out any influence from language as separate from cultural considerations. Language usage alerts people using that language to something the culture deems significant. Like if I hear FUUUUUUUUUUUU!!! a lot, I know that the current culture deems such a word - and the corresponding emotional reaction - as significant, as not just another random emotion, and not as an emotion to be easily conflated with other similar ones. The current culture draws a line between FUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!! and Arghhhhh.
What these studies seem to be saying is that if you are in a culture where FUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!! and Arghhhhh are differentiated and referred to a lot, you will be more keenly aware of the differences. Yeah, that’s pretty much a prerequisite for making friends and such, at least in circles that use such language. But I see no reason to think the language is primary. It seems that the language is only primary as a vehicle. More fundamentally, you have a lot of people feeling the emotions pointed to by “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!” and “Arghhhhh” a lot, and finding these things worth differentiating, so you end up with different words for them. Language doesn’t influence people; people influence people. Language is a tool by which people do that, although it does create a sort of ripple effect after that.
From another angle, anyone who speaks a language only can do so because they understand the culture in the relevant ways, and it is culture that determines such things as what colors a person learns to distinguish. In old Japan wearing a certain shade of black was punishable by death. To Americans it’s all “black,” but to Japanese at the time you bet they knew the difference. If family relations are valued highly in a culture, it will have a lot of words to clarify such relationships and related emotions. Etc.
If there is any study suggesting otherwise, I’m open to it. But anyway I don’t disagree that such influence happens on that level (people influencing people, and the remnants of such actions). What I disagree with is the idea that language is integral to scientific/philosophical reasoning.
They tease out the difference between culture and language by testing bilingual speakers. The study spanned 4 similar experiments and here are some of the conclusions that I found particularly interesting.
This pattern of findings suggests two things. First, it appears that bilinguals do think differently when speaking different languages. Even though the task was conducted in pictures, setting a linguistic context by providing instructions either in English or in Indonesian changed the way Indonesian-English bilinguals reasoned about the action events in this study.
Second, it appears that learning a new language can change the way one thinks. The Indonesian-English bilinguals who were tested in Indonesian showed a pattern that was somewhere in-between the pattern shown by monolingual Indonesian speakers and the pattern shown by English speakers. Even though they were tested entirely in Indonesian it appears that having learned English may have changed the way they think about action events. Further studies will be necessary to explore this possibility in more detail.
These results suggest that even something as subtle as linguistic context (whether instructions were given in English or Indonesian) can have an effect on how people encode and represent events. Even though subjects were not asked to encode the events linguistically (and the entire task was conducted in pictures), people’s ability to remember the tense of events they had witnessed (whether they saw someone about to kick a ball or having already kicked a ball) depended on whether or not tense distinctions were required in the language in which they had been greeted and given instructions just prior to the task.
I highly encourage reading the paper if you are interested in this topic, or at least the summary section at the end if you don’t care about the actual experiments. When I first was told about the language and thought hypothesis I was skeptical in all of the same ways as you are but after reading some of the research behind it I have been convinced that there is definitely something to it.
Well this^ is something a little different. Naturally the words used to frame a task will be suggestive, and there are necessary differences between languages that will affect framing, but those are primarily cultural: one is used to being made to pay attention to certain things when being spoken to in Indonesian vs. being spoken to in English. I am not opposed to such a possibility.
What I am opposed to is the idea that language is integral for scientific/philosophical thought. I would not even be surprised if people tended to draw different conclusions to scientific matters if told to think about a scientific problem in English vs. in Indonesian. That is taking two different socio-cultural reference groups into your mind as you solve the problem. For that matter, though, instructing the participants to imagine solving the problem with their family versus with their university colleages, or with their drinking buddies, would probably result in even more differences.
But even insofar as language itself influences thought (if it is present, how could it not? language is going to be a fairly large part of what someone experiences if the experimenters make it so), I do not see any way in which it is integral (necessary?) to thought.
The Indonesian/English bilingual speakers, as I understand it, learned English in Indonesia (not in America/Europe) meaning they did not get exposure to English culture so there can’t be said to have been cultural influences in their thinking process. Their entire cultural experience was Indonesian with English being learned as a second language because it is a very common language in SE Asia. The tests focused on tense differences which means if it was a cultural thing the subject would have to have used English in situations where tense was important compared to using Indonesian when tense was unimportant. It is unlikely that they utilized English in a significantly different environment than Indonesian so I don’t see how a claim could be made that it is a cultural influence.
The experiments also indicated that people who had learned english showed signs of recognizing, valuing and remembering tense even when tested in Indonesian. This indicates that just the act of learning the second language influenced the way they thought about problems. This is using a subject pool that is otherwise very similar with regards to cultural and educational backgrounds. To me this succussfully teases out cultural influences.
To me it’s an extension of the theory. Assuming you accept that the language you use influences the way you percieve the world then if you take that to an extreme how does that effect the way you perceive the world? Some of the research indicates that some things are more influenced by language than others. So perhaps there are a set of concepts that humans can think about and conceptualize without the need for language while there are others that require language in order for them to exist. I don’t remember what the generalized categories were but things like temporal concepts (past, present, future) seem to be influenced by language while other things (don’t remember again) aren’t influenced by language.
