Cultural Presuppositions and Misreadings
« on: 2003-06-21 17:03:06 »
[rhinoceros] I stumbled upon this very interesting text during my web leisure time. It is to be expected that a Chinese would see the issues of cultural presuppositions and misunderstanding more vividly than most of us.
Abstract Of the many factors that may lead to misreadings in translation, cultural presuppositions merit special attention from translators because they can substantially and systematically affect their interpretation of facts and events in the source text without their even knowing it. This paper attempts to pinpoint the relationship between cultural presuppositions and translational misreadings. The author considers major elements in the four sub-systems of culture and examines how these elements help breed presuppositions that inadvertently affect the translator's decoding of the original message.
<snip>
Cultural presuppositions related to ideational systems are responsible for the greatest number of translational misreadings because the realities different cultures face differ much less than the ways in which different cultures regard these realities. For instance, both Chinese and Anglo-American culture regard time as a continuum, but when referring to the past and the future in terms of "back" and "ahead," they adopt different starting points. A traditional Chinese stands facing the past, perceiving what just happened as ahead of him and what is yet to come as behind him. A native English speaker, however, assumes the opposite viewpoint.
<snip>
Neglecting this difference in temporal perspective would result in a wrong translation of the following passage, in which the context provides no clues as to the relative earliness or lateness of the time in question:
"The first is in the two essays of part II on culture and biological evolution, where the fossil datings given in the original essays have been definitely superseded. The dates have, in general, been moved back in time..." [Geertz 1973: preface]
<snip>
Different cultures may cling to significantly different presuppositions in terms of values and attitudes. While Western culture prizes the individual, for example, traditional Chinese culture places great emphasis on the group. It is no accident that in the following illustration:
"There was nothing mass produced about the school. But if it was individualistic, it also had discipline." [Agatha Christie. Cat Among the Pigeons]
the translator should turn the phrase "mass produced" into the more favourable (and wrong) *daliang chu rencai de* "producing a large number of talented personnel," because in the Chinese mind, group behaviour is socially commended and usually regarded as antithetical to individualistic action, which is often met with suspicion and disapproval.
<end quote>
[rhinoceros] By the way, notice the four basic assumptions about culture. What are the implications of the assumptions (1) and (2) for evolutionary psychology? What are the implications of the assumptions (3) and (4) for memetics? Any thoughts?
<begin quote>
Most anthropologists agree on the following features of culture:
1. culture is socially acquired instead of biologically transmitted;
2. culture is shared among the members of a community rather than being unique to an individual;
3. culture is symbolic. Symbolizing means assigning to entities and events meanings which are external to them and which cannot be grasped alone. Language is the most typical symbolic system within culture;
4. culture is integrated. Each aspect of culture is tied in with all other aspects.
> > > [rhinoceros] > I stumbled upon this very interesting text during my web leisure time. It is to be expected that a Chinese would see the issues of cultural presuppositions and misunderstanding more vividly than most of us. > > > Cultural Presuppositions and Misreadings > http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/1999/v44/n1/003296ar.html > > Full text posted in the BBS here: > > http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=3;action=modify;msg=124740;threadid=28743 > > > <begin quote> > > Abstract > Of the many factors that may lead to misreadings in translation, cultural presuppositions merit special attention from translators because they can substantially and systematically affect their interpretation of facts and events in the source text without their even knowing it.
The conversation the Brazilian President Lula had with Bush yesterday is a nice example of that. Lula said "nossos ministros poderao trabalhar apesar de nos" our cabinet memebers will be able to work IN SPITE of us. Joking that the presidents could even make mistakes and the cabinet members could back them up. However, the American translator wisely choosed the term "independently" instead of "in spite" predicting that the joke would not achieve its intended meaning.
Re:Cultural Presuppositions and Misreadings
« Reply #2 on: 2003-06-23 06:54:05 »
Quote:
"For instance, both Chinese and Anglo-American culture regard time as a continuum, but when referring to the past and the future in terms of "back" and "ahead," they adopt different starting points. A traditional Chinese stands facing the past, perceiving what just happened as ahead of him and what is yet to come as behind him. A native English speaker, however, assumes the opposite viewpoint. "
Not entirely surprising given the importance of ancestors in Chinese culture. There was something similar cited by Lee Whorf in Language, Thought and Reality;
Quote:
"I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past and into a future. "
Quote:
"While Western culture prizes the individual, for example, traditional Chinese culture places great emphasis on the group."
Dubious relaibility but amusing nonetheless for the way in which China broke this particular form of cultural analysis:
Re:Cultural Presuppositions and Misreadings
« Reply #3 on: 2003-06-23 17:15:49 »
[Kharin] <quote from Ke Ping>
"For instance, both Chinese and Anglo-American culture regard time as a continuum, but when referring to the past and the future in terms of "back" and "ahead," they adopt different starting points. A traditional Chinese stands facing the past, perceiving what just happened as ahead of him and what is yet to come as behind him. A native English speaker, however, assumes the opposite viewpoint." <end quote>
Not entirely surprising given the importance of ancestors in Chinese culture. There was something similar cited by Lee Whorf in Language, Thought and Reality;
I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past and into a future.
[rhinoceros] First, my apologies to everyone for the long rant which is going to follow. It is just one of my latest toy-obsessions.
So, does anyone have any thoughts on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and the relationship between the spoken languages, Fodor's hypothesis of an innate "language of thought" or "Mentalese", and thought itself in any of its forms?
In short: There is a strong "linguistic determinism" hypothesis:
"People's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language (which means that the language of though is simply the spoken language)"
and a weaker "linguistic relativity" hypothesis:
"Differences among languages cause differences in their thought of their speakers (which means that the language of thought is not simply the spoken language, but it is affected by it)"
George Orwell seemed to adopt a version of the strong hypothesis in his "1984":
<begin quote> "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words....A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of "politically equal," or that free had once meant "intellectually free," than, for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable." <end quote>
Of course, the phrase "at least so far as thought is dependent on words" is crucial.
Let's see how Sapir and Whorf themselves put it:
".. the real world is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group. We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached." (Sapir, 1956)
"We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees." (Whorf, 1956)
Even Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus" is often cited in this context:
"The limits of my language indicate the limits of my world" (Wittgenstein, 1966)
Now, this view was not left undisputed. Pinker, in his "Language Instict" (1994), did not seem to be very happy with these ("outrageously mistaken") ideas; he seemed to find them contrary to the "language of thought" hypothesis (Chapter 3: Mentalese). I've talked about it again in this post:
Pinker, in his delightful writing style, even pointed out that "Whorf was an inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company" (rather than a linguist), made a joke with Whorf's native language, German, by quoting Mark Twain and, of course, proceeded to debunk some of Whorf's arguments.
<quote from Pinker's "The Language Instict">
"People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve the spectrum into color words at digfferent places, the fundamentally different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are not "in" the world but are imposed by one's culture (and hence can be challenged, perhaps accounting for the parennial appeal of the hypothesis to undergraduate sensibilities).
But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications. (The "fact" that we use only five percent of our brains, that lemmings commit mass suicide, that the "Boy Scout Manual" annually outsells all other books, and that we can be coerced into buying by subliminal messages are other examples.) Think about it. We have all had experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a "what we meant to say" that is different from what we said. Sometimes it is not easy to find *any* words that properly convey a thought."
<end quote>
Pinker actually goes on to debunk the argument of the "40 Eskimo words for snow" and the argument of the "Hopi concept of time". Actually, Pinker says that Worf didn't have personal experience with the Hopi and used a wrong translation of the researcher's work, and then he presents some cases where Hopi talked about time. However, this has been followed by a lot of passionate arguments and counter-arguments all these years. For example, here is a small flame war:
I found the last one very interesting. It begins with the very same quotation of Whorf's, followed by this:
<begin quote> I must confess that to me this statement is so self-evidently true -- in all but one respect -- that I find it hard to understand how anyone could disagree. Yet disagree they do, some people. For example, Steven Pinker finds it almost outrageously mistaken and even calls it "this radical position" (1994). <end quote>
Some final comments of mine.
Fodor's hypothesis for the existence of a "language of thought" or Mentalese is based on the logical requirements that thoughts should have a representation in the brain on which some processing is being done. Everything seems ok up to this point. However, could such a language cover every kind of thought?
A word can correspond to a simple concept (concrete or abstract), or to a complex technological or artistic artifact (concrete or abstract). Also, a word can correspond to a concept close to perception, or to a concept which is the result of elaborate processing with external means (a calculating machine or a series of scribbling on a piece of paper in the language of mathematics -- see Einstein: "My pencil is smarter than me").
Here is a question: Does our language of thought really process all these kinds of words which represent different kinds of concepts in the same way, and reduces them into its "low-level" representations? Or does it directly conjure new created tokens and works directly with them in some cases?
A second question: Does our language of thought have to be inborn and universal? To some extent, I don't see why not, as far as we are talking about concepts closely related to the mechanisms of human perception, which we could consider as universal. We could even include logic in the mechanisms related to human perception if we accept a kind of Kantian phenomenology of logic. But beyond that point, words seems to have their own newly created tokens. When, for example, I use the word "logic", I do not necesserily recall the laws of logic.
That's all. Open for comments. As a bonus, here are some words to play with. To be translated into Mentalese: "qabalah", "dada", "infinity".
Re:Cultural Presuppositions and Misreadings
« Reply #4 on: 2003-06-24 05:46:42 »
Quote:
"First, my apologies to everyone for the long rant which is going to follow. It is just one of my latest toy-obsessions."
I'm afraid you're largely preaching to the choir, since Sapir/Lee Whorf is demonstrably flawed, at least in its strong aspect (incidentally, this is also why I'm sceptical of the Dawkins idea, given that such concepts are typically a means of engineering social change through linguistic adaptation, which seems a little awkward to me).
The discovery of language formation by a group of deaf children in Nicaragua should have ended these debates. Given that the discovery made it abundantly clear that a genetic basis for language formation exists, it seemed fairly clear that the notion of the signifier is logically prior to the sign. The other problem is that the Lee Whorf hypothesis has little explanation of language change. The entire basis of socio-linguistics is the observation of language change in response to social change; it doesn't easily work in reverse.
For example, there was a recent piece (NY Times if you want to go and pay for it) suggesting that since Asian languages have each character correspond to a syllable of sound, and in Chinese, at least, a basic unit of meaning (i.e. a morpheme), they lack the abstract character of Western languages which inhibits the development of analytical thought. Excerpt as follows:
"Alfred H. Bloom... argued that the lack of a subjunctive tense in Chinese made it extremely difficult for native speakers to explore "counterfactual" conceits... When Mr. Bloom tested Chinese and American students on a series of counterfactuals, he found that the Chinese students were typically unable to distinguish between events that really happened and false hypotheticals. The implication, Mr. Bloom argued, is that Chinese is more concrete than English, and, as a consequence, Chinese speakers have more trouble with abstract thought than Americans. "
The issue here is that this has nothing to prove a deterministic connection between language and thought, and it could as well be argued that such is what we would expect from Chinese subjects in any case. For example, some psychological research a few years back came to these conclusions;
"Easterners, the researchers find, appear to think more "holistically," paying greater attention to context and relationship, relying more on experience-based knowledge than abstract logic and showing more tolerance for contradiction. Westerners are more "analytic" in their thinking, tending to detach objects from their context, to avoid contradictions and to rely more heavily on formal logic. "
That said, there is some evidence to suggest that a weaker version of the Lee Whorf hypothesis may have some currency, particularly since if language and thought could be described as having some form of interactive relationship, proving the nature of that relationship is fraught at best . I think the studies related to terms concerning gender and attitudes expressed by subjects in response to certain phrases. I haven't seen these studies, but I suspect it would relate to these sort of linguistic anomalies;
Quote:
"The sentence "Jon refused to be my master, and returned to his wife" quickly demonstrates that the terms master and mistress are not interchangeable, as in Jill refused to be my mistress, and returned to her husband "
Incidentally, as an afterthought, I'm not really sure that Fodor and Pinker make for natural allies. For example, I can hardly see Pinker finding this especially congenial; http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n19/fodo01_.html
Re:Cultural Presuppositions and Misreadings
« Reply #5 on: 2003-06-24 11:56:24 »
[Kharin] Incidentally, as an afterthought, I'm not really sure that Fodor and Pinker make for natural allies. For example, I can hardly see Pinker finding this especially congenial; http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n19/fodo01_.html
[rhinoceros] True. Their kinship seems to be only the "language of thought." I found another, more intersting, related link in that Web page, where Fodor deals specifically with Pinker's "How the Mind Works" and Plotkin's "Evolution in Mind."
Taken severally or together, they present what is probably the best statement you can find in print of a very important contemporary view of mental structure and process.
But how much of it is true? To begin with, Pinker and Plotkin are reporting a minority consensus. Most cognitive scientists still work in a tradition of empiricism and associationism whose main tenets haven't changed much since Locke and Hume. The human mind is a blank slate at birth. Experience writes on the slate, and association extracts and extrapolates whatever trends there are in the record that experience leaves. The structure of the mind is thus an image, made a posteriori, of the statistical regularities in the world in which it finds itself. I would guess that quite a substantial majority of cognitive scientists believe something of this sort; so deeply, indeed, that many hardly notice that they do.
Pinker and Plotkin, by contrast, epitomise a rationalist revival that started about forty years ago with Chomsky's work on the syntax of natural languages and that is by now sufficiently robust to offer a serious alternative to the empiricist tradition. Like Pinker and Plotkin, I think the New Rationalism is the best story about the mind that science has found to tell so far. But I think their version of that story is tendentious, indeed importantly flawed. And I think the cheerful tone that they tell it in is quite unwarranted by the amount of progress that has actually been made. Our best scientific theory about the mind is better than empiricism; but, in all sorts of ways, it's still not very good. Pinker quotes Chomsky's remark the 'ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries' and continues: 'I wrote this book because dozens of mysteries of the mind, from mental images to romantic love, have recently been upgraded to problems (though there are still some mysteries too!)' Well, cheerfulness sells books, but Ecclesiastes got it right: 'the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.'
Pinker elaborates his version of rationalism around four basic ideas: the mind as computational system; the mind is massively modular; a lot of mental structure, including a lot of cognitive structure, is innate; a lot of mental structure, including a lot of cognitive structure, is an evolutionary adaptation - in particular, the function of a creature's nervous system is to abet the propagation of its genome (its selfish gene, as one says).
<snip>
A lot of the fun of Pinker's book is his attempt to deduce human psychology from the assumption that our minds are adaptations for transmitting our genes. His last chapters are devoted to this and they range very broadly; including, so help me, one on the meaning of life. Pinker would like to convince us that the predictions that the selfish-gene theory makes about how our minds must be organised are independently plausible. But this project doesn't fare well. Prima facie, the picture of the mind, indeed of human nature in general, that psychological Darwinism suggest is preposterous; a sort of jumped up, down-market version of original sin. Psychological Darwinism is a kind of conspiracy theory; that is, it explains behaviour by imputing an interest (viz in the proliferation of the genome) that the agent of the behaviour does not acknowledge. When literal conspiracies are alleged, duplicity is generally part of the charge: 'He wasn't making confetti; he was shredding the evidence. He did X in aid of Y, and then he lied about his motive.' But I the kind of conspiracy theories psychologists like best, the motive is supposed to be inaccessible even to the agent, who is thus perfectly sincere in denying the imputation. In the extreme case, it's hardly even the agent to whom the motive is attributed.
<snip>
The literature of Psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalisation: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature's behaviour is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalise the behaviour if it were the creature's motive. Pinker's book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start. Here he is on friendship:
<quote from Pinker> Once you have made yourself valuable to someone, the person becomes valuable to you. You value him or her because if you were ever in trouble, they would have a stake - albeit a selfish stake - in getting you out. But now that you value the person, they should value you even more . . . because of your stake in rescuing him or her from hard times . . . This runaway process is what we call friendship.' <end quote from Pinker>
<snip>
Reductionism about this plurality of goals, when not Philistine or cheaply cynical, often sounds simply funny. Thus the joke about the lawyer who is offered sex by a beautiful girl. 'Well, I guess so,' he replies, 'but what's in it for me?'
<snip>
Much to his credit, Pinker does seem a bit embarrassed about some of these consequences of his adaptationism, and he does try to duck them.
<quote from Pinker> Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that 'animals try to spread their genes'. This misstates . . . the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. . . What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes 'try' to spread themselves (sic) by wiring animals brains so that animals love their kin . . . and then the[y] get out of the way.<end quote from Pinker>
This version sounds a lot more plausible; strictly speaking, nobody has as a motive ('conscious or unconscious') the proliferation of genes after all. Not animals, and not genes either. The only real motives are the ones that everybody knows about; of which love of novels, or women, or kin are presumably a few among many.
<end quote from Fodor>
[rhinoceros] Hmm... if you think of it, we seem to have the "egoistic gene" claiming back some territory from the "egoistic meme" -- both adding to our alleged delusion of conscious rational control over ourselves. I guess evolutionary psychologists will have to fight this one out with memeticists...
Do you remeber the 4 statements of that Chines guy which I posted at the start of this thread? That was what I was getting at.
<begin quote Chinese guy>
Most anthropologists agree on the following features of culture:
1. culture is socially acquired instead of biologically transmitted;
2. culture is shared among the members of a community rather than being unique to an individual;
3. culture is symbolic. Symbolizing means assigning to entities and events meanings which are external to them and which cannot be grasped alone. Language is the most typical symbolic system within culture;
4. culture is integrated. Each aspect of culture is tied in with all other aspects.
<end quote Chinese guy>
[rhinoceros] Maybe it is a matter of definition of culture, but... to whom should we grant culture? EPs (the egoistic gene), memeticists (the egoistic meme), or share it between the two? Although the etymology of the word culture seems to point away from the egoistic gene, it is still not so easy for memeticists to take advantage of this.
For the meme metaphore to be of any use, the memes would need to be identifiable, standalone, and devoid of meaning themselves (like the genes), while at the same time their evolutionary mutation and selection mechanisms should account for the generation of cultural context and meaning. I can see that Dennett has been trying hard, but has he come close to anything like that yet?
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