The Compositionality of Language explained

2023 ж. 28 Мау.
54 602 Рет қаралды

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This is a short lecture providing one of the foundational and essential concepts needed for a semester-long Philosophy of Language college/university course. The compositionality of language is that feature of language by which the meanings of whole sentences or phrases are composed out of the meanings of parts of those sentences (i.e., words). This might seem obvious, but it is the thing that allows human beings to generate and understand wholly new or novel sentences, and understand them the very first time they hear them.

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  • Jokes on you I said that exact sentence yesterday

    @oliverniehaus7159@oliverniehaus715910 ай бұрын
    • Jokes on you, i said that exact sentence 1 minute before you, i was first😎

      @sanquiem324@sanquiem32410 ай бұрын
    • That's correct I was there

      @warren-gump@warren-gump10 ай бұрын
    • They're both wrong he mentioned a Senata not the Rio!

      @bthomson@bthomson10 ай бұрын
    • Pretty sure it's in Genesis. And God Said: ........

      @chrisevans1255@chrisevans125510 ай бұрын
    • Next time keep your joke to yourself buddy. You are the type of guy that says, that’s what she said after everything and thinks it’s funny

      @keatonbrowning7140@keatonbrowning714010 ай бұрын
  • Please, never stop doing these. Much respect for what you do!

    @hexahills3d@hexahills3d10 ай бұрын
    • Man is amazing.

      @mabaker@mabaker8 ай бұрын
  • Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Same mechanical structure with some identical words, yet totally different meanings.

    @thecarman3693@thecarman369310 ай бұрын
    • 😊

      @cherylwade264@cherylwade26410 ай бұрын
    • Main thing is not mechanical structure.It's rather the compositions( words) which have definite associations in our minds

      @joharali1328@joharali132810 ай бұрын
    • Right and if you say the word of the item you are holding eventually the baby will understand that you are making that noise which is a word and clearly mean that item

      @beaupostma9357@beaupostma93579 ай бұрын
    • The same goes for all other items and words...

      @beaupostma9357@beaupostma93579 ай бұрын
    • It's an accidental coincidence ,though. Unfortunately, however, linguistics (imo) does frequently get far too hung up on such coincidences. It helps if you think of semantics less as an algorithm to get you from a string of words to some determined meaning, and more as about establishing a relations between sequences of words and the range of their possible meanings.

      @TAHeap@TAHeap9 ай бұрын
  • "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is so passé.

    @bigscarysteve@bigscarysteve10 ай бұрын
  • What is even more amazing is that you would get a gist of the sentence's meaning even if you wouldn't know what "polka dot" or "scurvy" is. From it's structure you would know that "polka dot" is some kind of adjective (if there were more adjectives you could even know what kind of adjective it is since English has canonical ordering of adjectives, you can say "wild green dragon" but not "green wild dragon", that is ungrammatical) and that "scurvy" is an illness, because illnesses are the kind of things that you "cure". What I want to get to is that you can't actually disentangle formal and semantic features of a language which is I think a good counterargument to the "mary's room" thought experiment that I don't hear too much. There is meaning in structure.

    @TheoEvian@TheoEvian10 ай бұрын
    • And yes, language is super cool. Go out and study linguistics and philologies! :D

      @TheoEvian@TheoEvian10 ай бұрын
    • "Green wild dragon" is grammatical, just not conventional.

      @SeeMyDolphin@SeeMyDolphin10 ай бұрын
    • Unless survey is a kind of meat, like pork.

      @noelpucarua2843@noelpucarua284310 ай бұрын
    • I'm not sure it's that big of a mystery as he states it since especially if you knkw the meaning of each of the individual words it makes sense and is to be expected you'd at least get the gist or a sense of the meaning..so?? See what I mean?

      @leif1075@leif107510 ай бұрын
    • you are correct. I am not a native english speaker so i didn’t know the word Scurvy but because it was preceded by the verb “to cure” i immediately assumed it was some sort of illness.

      @lokouba@lokouba9 ай бұрын
  • The sentences "The dog bit the man" and "The man bit the dog" are composed of the same set of words, yet mean different things. I think examples like this are important to introduce alongside the concept of compositionality to make it clear that it is not just compositionality but the syntactic structure of sentences that is important for interpretation.

    @cavalrycome@cavalrycome10 ай бұрын
    • He does specifically say that the order, the grammatical structure of the words matters. I'm sure he'll go into more detail. This was just a teaser.

      @fxm5715@fxm571510 ай бұрын
    • yeah he did say the meanings of the terms and the rules for structuring sentences are things that help us understanding the idea of the sentence. In some languages (I think Latin or Turkish) nouns have different endings when it act different roles in a sentence, or in some cases in English like "I bit him" and "He bit me", both have the same set of concepts but I think the words change for us to figure out the meaning of the sentence easier : )

      @uchuy4070@uchuy407010 ай бұрын
    • order is crucial! e.g. person woman man camera TV

      @uubuuh@uubuuh10 ай бұрын
    • I was reading “A Modern Introduction to Logic” by L S Stebbing (1930 I believe) which, as an introduction, is probably only showing concepts logicians would be all too familiar with. There’s an entire bunch of chapters explaining what you wrote with the example of “Brutus killed Caesar”. Stebbing wrote that common sense thinking can be distilled into things, their qualities and relations. The examples you listed about the man and the dog are distinguished by the direction of their relation, ‘man’ and ‘dog’ being the terms describing ‘things’ and ‘biting’ being the relational term. Stebbing explains that relations only work by the direction in which they act, and certain relational terms have different directions, which are all classified in the book but which I won’t get into here. For now, illustrating direction, we can see that ‘x bit y’ and ‘x was bit by y’ express opposite relations of ‘biting’. ‘y was bit by x’ is equivalent to ‘x bit y’ even though the terms x and y are in different positions in the sentence as the relational term of biting transfers the relation in the same direction, from x to y.

      @Mysteriousmachine1@Mysteriousmachine110 ай бұрын
    • ​@@uchuy4070yes, in some languages you can say the words in any order and the meaning of the sentence will not change.

      @VesnaVK@VesnaVK10 ай бұрын
  • I’m not in your class, nor a student in this discipline, but I love the way you put your lessons together and I watch for that reason alone. Well done.

    @stevegagner4150@stevegagner415010 ай бұрын
  • 00:00 The most important feature of human language is understanding a sentence that has never been said before. Even though your teachers and parents could never tell you what the sentence meant, you understood it. 01:00 Human beings have been thinking about this issue for a long time and have only ever come up with one potential answer: compositionality. This means a sentence comprises the meanings of the individual words that make up that sense. This idea is elementary but an essential Central feature of human language. It differentiates it from the Primitive kind of communication nation that other animals might have.

    @PricelessAudiobooks@PricelessAudiobooks10 ай бұрын
  • I've seen many of your vids and I'm about 3 times your age. You're good at what you do, bro

    @dennisk5500@dennisk550010 ай бұрын
  • Love it. When I was that age when kids protest taking a bath my Mother would say," if you don't shower or bathe you'll get scurvy. Do you want scurvy?" I had no idea what scurvy was but, I was positive I didn't want it. I later learned the truth about scurvy in history class. I didn't feel betrayed because I knew Mom just needed to get the desired results. We never owned a Kia Rio. Keep 'em coming Professor.

    @shuttlepilot_@shuttlepilot_10 ай бұрын
    • What if she said it would itch, and make you smelly so that nobody wanted to be your friend? 🤔

      @serversurfer6169@serversurfer61698 ай бұрын
  • at least in birds (Passerines), it's well known that they have some degree of "compositionality"; They have different sounds, associated with different things. And it is known _there are papers published on the subject- that they are capable of "creating" new combinations; even the same species can show different local "dialects" throughout its distribution range

    @pedrova8058@pedrova805810 ай бұрын
    • Yes. I thought it was strange he felt confident about making that blanket statement about other species.

      @JEBavido@JEBavido10 ай бұрын
    • Many apes have been taught a limited understanding human languages, and when taught sign language, they construct rudimentary sentences. So they too must be capable of compositionality.

      @fredbloggs8072@fredbloggs807210 ай бұрын
  • Ooo! I'm looking forward to this series!

    @fxm5715@fxm571510 ай бұрын
  • Oh man I was excited for the philosophy of language classes!!! Thank you so much!!!

    @hmind9836@hmind983610 ай бұрын
  • Thank you for posting new videos! The provide much value to education process after the main job.

    @alexr.7633@alexr.763310 ай бұрын
  • I did not know what Scurvy or a Kia Rio was, but when you say 'cure' before 'Scurvy' and 'drive around in' before 'Kia Rio,' you can guess the meaning from the context.

    @nikonp5994@nikonp599410 ай бұрын
  • What’s funny is we all lowkey know this but hearing you talk about it makes you realize.

    @jakexavier4958@jakexavier49588 ай бұрын
  • love this. please make more content!!! can you do anything on stoicism?

    @1k1ngst0n@1k1ngst0n10 ай бұрын
  • This is the/a key aspect to acquiring a new language. Chunk language into comprehensible ideas.

    @TheCompleteGuitarist@TheCompleteGuitarist10 ай бұрын
  • Hey jefferey I’ve been watching your videos for very long I love them sooo much! Please,if u ever gets the time, make video about Buddhist philosophy in general or any particular Buddhist philosopher like Nagarjuna. Thank you!

    @literalenforcer2172@literalenforcer21728 ай бұрын
  • Compositionality is not only characteristic of language, but of every brain function which have to do with recognizing things. We put things together based on their appearance, function, structure and properties etc. What is really interesting is that no matter with which sense we "scan" an object, - see, hear, scan ... -, we can put it together and compose what it is about. Compositionality is the most important function of the human brain, something that even animals have.

    @Kounomura@Kounomura5 ай бұрын
  • Thank you Professor Kaplan! Could you make a sequel to this video explaining the relationship, if any, between the compositionality of language and mathematics or computation? It seems what you are describing is that our minds develop a type of information processor, like a virtual machine running in our brains, that contains the rules of language, and then we can input words into that processor to get an output (the meaning of the sentence). Does this relate at all to mathematical functions, for example? Thanks, I always enjoy your lectures!

    @paulpease8254@paulpease825410 ай бұрын
    • Gematria.

      @JeffCaplan313@JeffCaplan31310 ай бұрын
  • You make it look so easy...

    @TheHardys01@TheHardys018 ай бұрын
  • Still waiting on the rest of the lectures on the Phil. if Language.:)

    @johemake@johemake9 ай бұрын
  • Bravo!

    @dragolov@dragolov8 ай бұрын
  • Great video

    @vafkamat@vafkamat7 ай бұрын
  • Words embody ideas or parts of ideas. Those ideas inhabit part of mind and dance across the stage of our mind when they are brought to the forefront of our consciousness. Our mind observes these ideas play out on the stage. Our mind then brings other ideas onto the stage to see where these ideas can exist. With such a sentence as this, many ideas dance on the stage and the mind says “fiction”

    @bigideasthescholar@bigideasthescholar10 ай бұрын
  • Anthropology 152 Lecture 5- 9/28/22 Essential characteristics of culture and language in the anthropological sense are: 1) CULTURE human _acts_ following rules and pursuing purposes. Rules and purposes can be expressed IN WORDS, SENTENCES, PARAGRAPHS, etc. (symbolic signs). A specific Culture is learned; it is not genetic, not instinctive; it is learned from other people, especially previous generations (shared). (A specific culture or language is learned. The capacity of a brain to learn them _is_ genetically based and unique to human’s genes). 2) All culture can be represented in language. Language is critical in teaching culture. 3) All language is culture; _but_ not all culture is language; that is , language is a form of culture. 4) ACTS are _bodily_ action, activity, motion, behavior.

    @charlesbrown1365@charlesbrown136510 ай бұрын
  • Love your videos. Moooreeeee

    @ja-no6fx@ja-no6fx10 ай бұрын
  • Yes this is true. Study into some Etymology will show this aswell.

    @looneycrow7978@looneycrow797810 ай бұрын
  • Brevity. I LOVE It.

    @aguy559@aguy55910 ай бұрын
  • Could you do a video on Compatibilism, I’ve always had a hard time understanding it and how it fits in between the positions on determinism and free will.

    @flamehead0025@flamehead00259 ай бұрын
    • Speaking as a determinist… compatibilists seem like determinists who can't get over the sense that they're still in control somehow, and could simply override the "reasonability flowchart" in their head if they _really_ want to. 😜

      @serversurfer6169@serversurfer61698 ай бұрын
  • Don’t know if you talk about it, would love to see you explaining emergence theories and systems in a broader way

    @joaovfm@joaovfm10 ай бұрын
  • In the era of LLM (Large Language Model), this precisely makes sense to me

    @ehza@ehza9 ай бұрын
  • Perhaps the greatest miracle of language is that it's a reversal of the transcendence of distal to proximinal stimulus.

    @myghkl@myghkl10 ай бұрын
  • Ordinary language has some hints or fragments of compositionality, but, in general, ordinary language does not have thorough compositionality.

    @christophergame7977@christophergame79779 ай бұрын
  • Nothing can beat the sentence... "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

    @albertusmagnus5829@albertusmagnus582910 ай бұрын
  • Is it the 'meaning' of the words that facilitates the comprehension and ability to reject the proposed argument or would experience or an understanding of cause and effect play a role. i.e. Starting from driving around in a car has no effect on my physical health, I know this to be true based on experience. Even if I then start plugging in the additional details, testing individually and in combination - Kia, polka dots, singing, driving and singing, singing Happy Birthday..etc. On the other hand, I have at times read something, understood the meaning of the individual words yet was left puzzled as to the actual message of the sentence/statement when combined.

    @bluesirva3574@bluesirva357410 ай бұрын
  • Strikes me as relatively simple, it’s stipulation and then logic along those stipulated lines. I’m sure animals do it also just nowhere near to the complexity we do, but it’s surely the same structure at its core

    @finndaniels9139@finndaniels913910 ай бұрын
  • Reminds me of our visual abilities too, training AI models to understand vague pictures have been pretty difficult over the years and even now with so much advancement in the field, the human ability to understand an image based on a composition of vague clues is outstanding. If anything we go even beyond that and see clues and patterns were there isn't any, pareidolia. The human brain is fascinating. Speaking of which, I didn't know what a Kia Rio is, and because English is not my first language, I'm very used to being in this situation where I hear something unfamiliar and only get to know what it is later, so my brain automatically filled in with "something" that is both purple polka dots and can be driven around, I imagined a purple polka dot cart that I sat in and sang happy birthday 😂😂. I didn't even realize that I did it until you showed the image of the car.

    @AriaHarmony@AriaHarmony10 ай бұрын
    • Even with English as my first language, my brain was forced to do something similar, albeit with more detail. I know that Kia is a vehicle manufacturer, and that a word following a vehicle manufacturer's name often describes a specific model of vehicle that the company produces. Therefore, I knew that a "Kia Rio" was a type of vehicle produced by Kia. However, I cannot recall ever seeing a picture of a Kia Rio. Therefore, though I knew not to imagine a cart with purple polka-dots, but rather a motor vehicle with purple polka-dots, I did not know what _kind_ of motor vehicle to imagine. So I supposed it was a sedan. That turned out to be correct, but it was a guess nonetheless. I may have built a more accurate mental picture than you did, but it was still not a perfectly accurate one. Despite this, we both got the true meaning of the sentence: an absurd mental picture designed to illustrate a point about the very process we used to understand the message. Language, eh?

      @irregularassassin6380@irregularassassin638010 ай бұрын
    • it speaks to the nature of randomness. all possible meanings superimposed on each other amount to white noise or complete randomness, so our ability to create meaning from incoming stimuli must be based of some kind of limiter or filter, where the true nature of the world is complete chaos, yet what we detect more often than not are structures that survive the test of time. makes me think of the survival bias of the shape of the world as the fundamental engine for intelligence.

      @arasharfa@arasharfa3 ай бұрын
  • Do you write facing you and then flip the video afterward so it’s facing us

    @biggSHNDO@biggSHNDO9 ай бұрын
  • Jeffrey's brain should be preserved and studied. Obviously highly intelligent without ever showing anything resembling wisdom.

    @xandror@xandror10 ай бұрын
  • Hey man just wondering why, in your video highlighting the argument of Peter Singer, the comments are disabled? It doesn't make any sense to me to sensor a philosophical video's comments. I listened to the whole thing and enjoyed it a lot but would have loved to see the discussions in the comments.

    @austin8313@austin83139 ай бұрын
  • ❤... from india

    @raghuvirktiwari4234@raghuvirktiwari423410 ай бұрын
  • The spoken phrase "It's a giant man eating fish" is it a large male human eating a fish or is it a massive fish eating a male human?

    @bubbaG42@bubbaG429 ай бұрын
  • Hope you cover Wittgenstein in detail

    @munawarcheema8991@munawarcheema89917 ай бұрын
  • "Hold the news reader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers." -- Stephen Fry

    @john-paulgies4313@john-paulgies431310 ай бұрын
  • How are you writing from behind the board?

    @user-be4ib8jt6l@user-be4ib8jt6l10 ай бұрын
  • Concerning Language, Fry and Laurie did a Bit covering much of this.

    @xizar0rg@xizar0rg10 ай бұрын
  • Anthropology 152 - October 5, 2022 Lecture 7 Last class lecture, I wrote ; Essential characteristics of culture and language in the anthropological sense are: 1) CULTURE human _acts_ following rules and instructions ; acts pursuing symbolic purposes. Rules and purposes can be expressed IN WORDS, SENTENCES, PARAGRAPHS, etc. (symbolic signs). A specific Culture is learned; it is not genetic, not instinctive; it is learned from other people, especially previous generations (shared). (A specific culture or language is learned. The capacity of a brain to learn them _is_ genetically based and unique to human’s genes). 2) All culture can be represented in language. Language is critical in teaching culture. 3) All language is culture; _but_ not all culture is language; that is , language is a form of culture. 4) ACTS are _bodily_ action, activity, motion, behavior. _____ Today I add, culture and language are rules and guides on how to act; are rules and guides in the form of language, symbolic communications _from biologically dead generations, ancestors_; culture is custom, tradition, history - passed on from the past. This is an essential dimension and capacity of language and culture. It includes an accumulation of knowledge about nature, human society, objective reality. This dimension of language and culture raised human relative Darwinian fitness through human evolution and history. It became the main way that humans adapt. Symbolic communication Anthropology's special contribution to scientific understanding of humanity is the concept of _culture_, or the symbolic nature of human behavior, communication and social organization. Culture is behavior ruled by a mental system of shared customs, traditions, values, ideas and material products of a particular group of people. Culture and language , or symbolic communication , are unique and exclusive characteristics of human beings, the species Homo sapiens . No other animal species has them, despite the exaggerated claims of some primatologists for chimps and gorillas. What is symbolic communication ? What is a symbol or symbolic sign in the technical linguistic and anthropological sense ? It using something to represent something it is not. Almost all words are symbolic signs. Here is my name : CHARLES BROWN. Those marks on the paper are not me; But they are used to represent me. This is using something to represent something that it is not. The technical term is that there is an arbitrary relation between the sign and the thing signified. The opposite of a symbolic sign is an indexical sign . The relationship between an indexical sign and what it signifies is not arbitrary (conventional, traditional) but necessary. The classical example is smoke and fire. Smoke is an indexical sign of fire. The fact that a symbolic sign is not what it signifies , gives humans the power to talk , communicate with each other about things and the experiences of people that are not immediately present but DISPLACED IN TIME OR SPACE from them ! And cultural/linguistic learning is learning from the experience of other people, including learning from people who are now dead, learning about experiences that are not ours ; are _displaced_ from our immediate senses. So, signing or symboling , in the forms of both language and culture, is our species’ unique activity. And, importantly , also, most of human _learning_ is through symbols, culture, not so much by imitating, like other species. Not by "monkey-see, monkey do" imitation. Most of our learning ( as opposed to inborn or genetically based knowledge) is through culture, not from experience. . Just to further explain the concept of arbitrariness, it refers to the relationship between the signifier and the signified. So, if the sounds d-o-g are used to refer to things that are dogs, we see that those sounds do not "imitate" or are not naturally related to dogs. The arbitrariness of a sign refers to the fact that in a sign something is used to represent something that it is not. Two _different_ things are arbitrarily identified, treated as the _same_. I have theorized that the reason culture became our unique characteristic is that once some hominin discovered them way, way back when, they were highly adaptive because they allowed past generations to pass on their experience to future generations across the "death barrier" . Why ? Because a symbol represents something by something it is not ( the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified) so that living generation can learn from a symbol about the experience of dead generations, when it could not learn from directly observing and imitating the dead, since the dead aren't able to demonstrate things to be learned, obviously, because they are dead. But since a symbol uses something, a signifier, to represent something that it is not, the signified, because of this _arbitrary_ ( non-imitative) relation, the dead ancestor's "demonstration" can be learned by the living descendent through the signifier, through the thing (word or cultural object) that is _not_ the dead ancestor. Cultural learning allows us to learn from the experience of many, many...many of our ancestors. This was its main adaptive advantage when our species originated in founding culture. Culture also allowed learning more from other living members of the species. Human children could learn a lot more from their parents than other species, who were restricted to teaching their young by demonstration and imitation. Other species have to "give a picture" or demonstration of what they are teaching. They can show, but not tell. That a signifier is not what it signifies means it communicates by a non-picture or non-imitation of what it represents. Culturally inherited adaptations give human species high Darwinian fitness, because cultural adaptations are caused by the adaptive problem that they solve . 1) Symbolic thinking allows imagination and invention of tools and organized activities that adapt to survival problems. 2) Symbolic communication also allows inheritance of inventions. These 2 capacities of Culture and language, symbolic communication, provided the human species with an enormous adaptive and Darwinian selective advantage compared to other animal species in the hundreds of thousands of years that the human species came to be and inhabit the whole globe, again to a greater extent than other animal species. This is because it made humans extremely interconnected both with living other humans, so that human labor and methods of physical survival are very _social_, not individualistic; and perhaps more importantly, connected to dead generations of the species through , again, language and culture, as in ancestor veneration : myths, legends, stories, customs, historical accounts of past generations' experiences. Two (or a thousand ) heads are better than one in the struggles for survival and snuggles for reproduction . By sharing the experiences , discoveries, knowledge of many generations past and those of fellow living people, humans had and have a big Darwinian or natural selective advantage especially in the stone age in prehistoric times over the course of 100's of thousands of years and, starting going back about 2.5 million of years with the species Homo habilis . Again , this enormous social networking within living generations and between living and dead generations is encapsulated in the concepts of culture and language and symbolic communication , the _differentia specifica_ of the human species.

    @charlesbrown1365@charlesbrown136510 ай бұрын
  • Hey, since you’re getting into philosophy of language I would love if you explored the continental side of things, especially Derrida.

    @Karamazov9@Karamazov910 ай бұрын
    • why derrida?

      @nni9310@nni931010 ай бұрын
    • @@nni9310 Because I’ve really been enjoying his work and I think that it has a lot of value, but a lot of people find it inaccessible, partially because the nature of his work is complex and partially because Spivak’s translation of Grammatologie is somewhat obtuse. Why not Derrida?

      @Karamazov9@Karamazov910 ай бұрын
  • I get it, despite not previously knowing what a Kia Rio was....which fact illustrates the point even more strongly ...but...and I do realise that this isn't the central point..I'd seriously question whether we have enough knowledge of whale or say, elephant or raven communication, to be able to state categorically that they don't share ,at least to some extent, the same ability..

    @tamjammy4461@tamjammy446110 ай бұрын
  • This reminds me of an old George Carlin bit about things you never hear. “Do what you want to the girl, but leave me alone!”

    @jack.p@jack.p10 ай бұрын
  • Close your eyes, listen to this video, and try to decide if it is Jeffrey Kaplan, or Michael from Vsauce. Only way I can tell the difference is the Vsauce song isn’t playing in the background

    @danr9183@danr918310 ай бұрын
    • I’ve thought the same thing for so long 😭 it explains why I love this channel so much smh

      @aplila@aplila9 ай бұрын
  • I believe this observation is much more important than most might assume. I believe this is a good example of why human beings are completely different from all other animals. The basic philosophical question is "How do we humans replicate meaning?" I contend that we are able to replicate meaning because we are "Creative Universal Explainers." We "CUEs" constantly create new knowledge and sometimes this knowledge can bring us closer to the truth. The qualifier "sometimes" is necessary because all of our thoughts are fallible. That is, we are not gods (who are seen by believers in the supernatural as being perfect) because there is no perfection,. there is only better or worse. Fortunately, there is no limit on progress and innovation in any field of human endeavor if we consider optimism as required and continue to choose to make such progress.

    @patmoran5339@patmoran533910 ай бұрын
    • I don’t think it separates us from animals, I believe it’s just we are incredibly more complex. But essentially at its core, language is just stipulation and then function. A gorilla that converses with another gorilla about a banana, maybe as simple as holding up a banana and grunting - is essentially doing the same thing just at a much less complex stage. Give that same gorilla more brainpower and a long time and I don’t see why it would be special for the extent of the stipulated facts to expand to the complexities of language systems

      @finndaniels9139@finndaniels913910 ай бұрын
    • I agree with the latter half though, nothing has imposed limits on us and thus there are no limits to human quality

      @finndaniels9139@finndaniels913910 ай бұрын
    • @@finndaniels9139 Are you attempting to claim that explanation is an illusion?

      @patmoran5339@patmoran533910 ай бұрын
    • @@patmoran5339 I’ll be honest I don’t understand what your comment means

      @finndaniels9139@finndaniels913910 ай бұрын
    • But how do you prove there is no other species that has compositional language?

      @antoniusnies-komponistpian2172@antoniusnies-komponistpian217210 ай бұрын
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    @Adeola90316@Adeola903169 ай бұрын
  • Compositionality is obviously not the only fundamental of the reality of language. Rather because language arises from cognition one might ask how language arises from the brain. Compositionality rests upon restricting our understanding to writing scripts rather than what is language. What is obvious is that are in our heads.

    @doylesaylor@doylesaylor2 ай бұрын
  • Lately, I've looked at how constructivisms could explain how we make our worldviews. This sentence comes along, and we test it against our constructs and worldview. When the sentence doesn't align with our worldview, then we must call it false. When the sentence aligns with our worldview, then we can say it is true and perhaps further explain how the purple polkadotted Kia Rio cures scurvy. Of course, it is a bit of anti-realism to believe that the Kia Rio and singing "Happy Birthday" could cure scurvy, but if it aligns with one's worldview, then perhaps they've got more important things to worry about than how to cure scurvy. 😉

    @Paraselene_Tao@Paraselene_Tao10 ай бұрын
  • Cool.

    @Mothball_man@Mothball_man10 ай бұрын
  • The thing is that you don't even have to hear all the sentence to know it is false. The end of the sentence added nothing to the truth of falsity of the sentence and once the first two parts, the part about the best cure for scurvy and the part about driving around in a Kia Rio, regardless of the colour or pattern, it would be obvious the statement had to be false. So, it is interesting that humans don't require all of the information contained in the sentence and can predict that the last part of the sentence is unimportant when deciding whether the statement is true or not.

    @noelpucarua2843@noelpucarua284310 ай бұрын
  • Can you do one video in which you write in mirror script so we can see you like you are and not you "reflexion"?

    @derpj7105@derpj71057 ай бұрын
  • Multidimensional code

    @tictoc5443@tictoc544310 ай бұрын
  • Is compositionality an absolute, or is it a gradient? In other words, is human compositionality simply more complex than other animals, or do other animals not possess compositionality?

    @randystone3263@randystone326310 ай бұрын
  • Very interesting video! But if you allow me to compartmentalize, I will say: “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.”

    @TeoTura@TeoTura8 ай бұрын
  • Whaaat??? Sentences are composed of words??😮😮😮

    @renelovemetal@renelovemetal8 ай бұрын
  • Can you think the meaning of that sentence without reciting the sentence?

    @RMF49@RMF496 ай бұрын
  • I knew that a Kia was a brand of car, but oddly enough I thought “Akiario” was some fancy term for the effects of a psychedelic drug.

    @Mysteriousmachine1@Mysteriousmachine110 ай бұрын
  • But how do you prove there is no other species that has compositional language?

    @antoniusnies-komponistpian2172@antoniusnies-komponistpian217210 ай бұрын
  • Now try a sentence that includes an ambiguous word. Nearly all adjectives and adverbs and many verbs are ambiguous because they're shorthands that actually refer to a relative comparison to an unspecified alternative. For example, "a Kia Rio is big" is ambiguous because the speaker's threshold between "big" and "not big" is unknown, but the meaning of "a Kia Rio is bigger than a breadbox" is very clear because the "bigger than" relative comparison is specified.

    @brothermine2292@brothermine229210 ай бұрын
  • Chomsky has been giving interviews about AIs and he talks about that when he shatter the dreams of sci-fi fans who believe we're entering the Jetsons age. He says IAs teach us nothing about real languages because they are also very good at impossible languages, ones with malformed or inexistent structures, and if you get both possible and impossible conclusions from your research, that research is not worthy.

    @crisoliveira2644@crisoliveira264410 ай бұрын
  • Sir can you make a video about William Lane Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument?

    @joeharrycanson5967@joeharrycanson596710 ай бұрын
    • Does dr Kaplan do theological arguments? Outside of the context of pure philosophy, ie in the study of Descartes.

      @finndaniels9139@finndaniels913910 ай бұрын
  • English has compositionality of sentences. German has compositionality of words. :)

    @calum.macleod@calum.macleod8 ай бұрын
  • Are you writing on that screen backwards?

    @indyjones1970@indyjones197025 күн бұрын
  • Thank you. My best greetings from Cracow. 💚

    @lidiakucmierz6147@lidiakucmierz61472 ай бұрын
  • Cool! Now think about the complexity of doing stand-up comedy. Yeah, compositionality is found here, but there can also be mind-bending twisted logic and seriously difficult rhetoric. May be something you'll want to incorporate into you lessons.

    @rickemmet1104@rickemmet110410 ай бұрын
  • Hmm, I guess this is pretty similar to Hockett's design feature of productivity.

    @exe2543@exe254310 ай бұрын
  • The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs > ( every letter in the alphabet ) do that again but make it shorter i can do it again but change it by saying foxes

    @johnruck@johnruck8 ай бұрын
  • There's so much you need to learn, my dear colleague... Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. Let that sink in.

    @stephmaccormick3195@stephmaccormick319510 ай бұрын
    • do you feel better now?

      @arasharfa@arasharfa3 ай бұрын
    • @@arasharfa Do you?

      @stephmaccormick3195@stephmaccormick31953 ай бұрын
  • Why did you turn the comments of on your Pete Singer video? Seems there would be as much to learn from the reaction than the video. Turning them back on would allow people to contribute and prevent and intelligence famine.

    @Slammo@Slammo9 ай бұрын
    • comments on youtube saved so many lives already

      @dbass4973@dbass49739 ай бұрын
  • Noam chompsky calls this "the poverty of the input" and he's relating it to "the "Riches of the output". Think about it like this it's almost a 100% guaranteed that Shakespeare was never exposed to anything like the things he wrote as far as language ghis writings were so intricate and unique that there's no conceivable way Anyone around him ever came close to speaking as eloquently as he wrote.

    @zachmorgan6982@zachmorgan698210 ай бұрын
  • For the life of me, I can’t figure out what your writing on. Glass and then flip the camera so we can read it? Some tech analyzes you handwriting & writes it up there? I’ve watched so many of your amazing videos but always get stuck wondering what the surface is you writing on.

    @crypto_yes@crypto_yes10 ай бұрын
  • I thought this was why Kia Rios were the best selling car of the late 1600s.

    @illinialumni@illinialumni10 ай бұрын
  • what is understanding?

    @mrosskne@mrosskne10 ай бұрын
  • I didn't know what scurvy or a kia rio is 😅

    @renanalves3955@renanalves395510 ай бұрын
  • Hmmm… linguistic meaning isn’t always the sum of its parts: the meaning of *spick and span* is certainly not the meaning of “spick,” “and,” “span.”

    @josephhilferty7776@josephhilferty777610 ай бұрын
  • Jeffrey: *says the weird phrase* me: I'm too high, I didn't understand shit Jeff: and you did! you understood what it means!

    @tricanico@tricanico10 ай бұрын
  • This basically means that words happen to have meanings

    @kabeermirza5662@kabeermirza566210 ай бұрын
  • There‘s technically no conclusive evidence against such a treatment, so saying „it‘s false“ is a bit of a stretch, but we‘ll let it slide (this time).

    @dantescalona@dantescalona10 ай бұрын
  • I feel like this has more to do with brains than languages. You could construct languagesbthatbdon't have that property. And in fact, babies don't understand at all until they learn a language. What's more is that the way individuals fill in the blank varies. We still misunderstand well formed propositions if their words are unfamiliar.

    @morgengabe1@morgengabe110 ай бұрын
  • Meh. I think what's 100x MORE interesting (and similar) is digital data. It takes actors, cameramen, and millions of dollars to make a movie...which, today, is ultimately just a bunch of ones and zeros aligned in the right order. But what if you could predict the combination of ones and zeros? You should be able to bypass all the hard work of filming the movie and take a shortcut straight to the final product. Well that's exactly what you are doing when you COPY a DVD. You already KNOW what the combination of ones and zeros are and you just have to copy them. That data is then used to tell any television/computer/etc to display the exact pictures and sounds that were captured by a camera a long time ago. And there's a combination of ones and zeros out there that can describe anything that ever has or ever can happen.

    @TheEgg185@TheEgg1857 ай бұрын
  • The impact of the story is lost on a rewatch.

    @for_fox_aches@for_fox_aches10 ай бұрын
  • If this was true then people would have no difficulty with VOCABULARY!! I know all English alphabets😊

    @itutixnoti8623@itutixnoti86239 ай бұрын
  • can you make a philosopher tier list video?? it would be a banger for sure

    @thorin2330@thorin233010 ай бұрын
  • I find that completely obvious. (Not saying It in a bad way)

    @mariodiaz3976@mariodiaz39768 ай бұрын
  • programming language for the human brain

    @alacastersoi8265@alacastersoi826510 ай бұрын
  • I didn't know what scurvy, a kia rio or polkadot means 😅 I'm not a Native speaker though.

    @antoniusnies-komponistpian2172@antoniusnies-komponistpian217210 ай бұрын
  • isnt that articulatability?

    @Xayuap@Xayuap10 ай бұрын
  • I disagree that the scurvy sentence is false. It is nonsense, and therefore cannot be either true or false. This is a common philosophical mistake: to think that every grammatically correct sentence MUST have a truth value. “This sentence is false” is an obvious example, as is also provided by Lewis Carrol.

    @jamesmaxwell3434@jamesmaxwell34349 ай бұрын
  • I think this gentleman's videos, but not this one. Maybe I'm missing something. Like duh, that's how language works.

    @TheEgg185@TheEgg1857 ай бұрын
  • Isn't the "human exclusivity" debunked by many many examples. Just this morning, I was catching "Billy the Cat" talk to its "cat mom" by pressing buttons: "Mom... Bad... Smell."

    @themore-you-know@themore-you-know10 ай бұрын
  • Language is so crazy that you can explain a concept like compositionality to someone who knows nothing about such things, and they can understand it. In less than 3 minutes. On the other hand, millions of people can utter a phrase like "It is what it is" a million times a day, and yet it never has any meaning. It's just grammatically correct filler. Is there a word for that?🤔

    @MemphiStig@MemphiStig10 ай бұрын
    • "Phatic Expression" perhaps

      @SeeMyDolphin@SeeMyDolphin10 ай бұрын
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