PSY 2105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Thout, Ethics (Spinoza), Disting
11 Dec 2015
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Explorer goes to an island and meets villagers there. Explorer hears word gavagai from the people when rabbit appears. Can generate an infinite number of examples of what that word could translate to, not necessarily related to the rabbit. Humans produce and understand sentences they"re never heard. To understand language, you need to be able to learn and produce things that you"ve never heard before. Language acquisition device: neural system that is activated by particulars heard/spoken: something innate in humans. Video: if ancestral humans didn"t have language at first, implied that animals don"t have language . Everyone has same capacity to learn any language (if you raise a child in a different environment, they can learn the language in that environment) The way we observe frogs and how they interact, we think they"re all very similar if. Martians looked at humans they may think that our languages are all very similar as well (superficial observation)
