[FRIAM] ethnography and information systems

[Prof David West]

McWhorter's book The Language Hoax,  

https://www.amazon.com/Language-Hoax-John-H-McWhorter/dp/0190468890/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2BA5K37IW5TDI&dchild=1&keywords=the+language+hoax+why+the+world+looks+the+same+in+any+language&qid=1596907103&sprefix=the+language+hoax%2Caps%2C293&sr=8-1 

clearly outlines the case against Whorf-Sapir. The problem — it demolishes a straw man not what Whorf-Sapir actually claimed. Interestingly, McWhorter often uses precisely what Whorf claimed in his arguments against Whorf. When I read the book I spent equal amounts of time laughing and being enraged.

davew



On Sat, Aug 8, 2020, at 11:00 AM, jon zingale wrote:
> When McWhorter came to the Lensic on one of his tours, he made a rhetorically
> powerful argument against the Whorfian hypothesis in natural languages. I
> now tend to side with him, even though I cannot really remember the
> structure of his argument. On the other hand, SteveS makes a great point
> regarding translations of programs between languages. Barry's comment also,
> for me, rings true. Perhaps, a kernel of the programmer's first language is
> to be found in all future writing. Computer languages, unlike Athena, do not
> come fully formed from the head. The state of the art continues to be under
> radical development and is not just engaged in an empty proliferation of
> simulacra. The work of logicians and philosophers, each with a stake in the
> development of human thinking itself, continue to help move the art forward.
> The ideas of Categorical logicians continue to develop languages like
> Haskell, and those (academic) ideas continue to direct and further refine
> the development of otherwise sprawling spaghetti monster languages like
> javascript (React, for instance). The work of homotopy type theorists
> continues to improve our understanding of automatic proof, the reasonability
> of mathematical objects, and refinement of philosophically useful notions
> like dependent typing (Agda, Coq, Isabelle). The interactions here are rich
> and not unidirectional. The ideas being developed are meaningful to the
> state-of-the-art and not just more FORTRAN. While it might be true that
> Alonzo Church gave us computation, there is still much to be discovered.
> 
> 
> 
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