The Compositionality of Language explained
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- čas přidán 28. 06. 2023
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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.
![[柴犬ASMR]曼玉Manyu&小白Bai 毛发护理Spa asmr](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0TsXQ7z2Dh4/mqdefault.jpg)
Jokes on you I said that exact sentence yesterday
Jokes on you, i said that exact sentence 1 minute before you, i was first😎
That's correct I was there
They're both wrong he mentioned a Senata not the Rio!
Pretty sure it's in Genesis. And God Said: ........
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
Please, never stop doing these. Much respect for what you do!
Man is amazing.
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
Same mechanical structure with some identical words, yet totally different meanings.
😊
Main thing is not mechanical structure.It's rather the compositions( words) which have definite associations in our minds
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
The same goes for all other items and words...
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.
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is so passé.
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.
And yes, language is super cool. Go out and study linguistics and philologies! :D
"Green wild dragon" is grammatical, just not conventional.
Unless survey is a kind of meat, like pork.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 : )
order is crucial! e.g. person woman man camera TV
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.
@@uchuy4070yes, in some languages you can say the words in any order and the meaning of the sentence will not change.
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.
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.
What if she said it would itch, and make you smelly so that nobody wanted to be your friend? 🤔
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.
I've seen many of your vids and I'm about 3 times your age. You're good at what you do, bro
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
Yes. I thought it was strange he felt confident about making that blanket statement about other species.
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.
Oh man I was excited for the philosophy of language classes!!! Thank you so much!!!
What’s funny is we all lowkey know this but hearing you talk about it makes you realize.
Ooo! I'm looking forward to this series!
Thank you for posting new videos! The provide much value to education process after the main job.
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.
Great video
You make it look so easy...
love this. please make more content!!! can you do anything on stoicism?
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!
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.
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!
Gematria.
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.
This is the/a key aspect to acquiring a new language. Chunk language into comprehensible ideas.
Nothing can beat the sentence... "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."
Love your videos. Moooreeeee
Perhaps the greatest miracle of language is that it's a reversal of the transcendence of distal to proximinal stimulus.
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”
Bravo!
"Hold the news reader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."
-- Stephen Fry
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
Don’t know if you talk about it, would love to see you explaining emergence theories and systems in a broader way
Brevity. I LOVE It.
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.
Yes this is true. Study into some Etymology will show this aswell.
Jeffrey's brain should be preserved and studied. Obviously highly intelligent without ever showing anything resembling wisdom.
In the era of LLM (Large Language Model), this precisely makes sense to me
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.
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. 😜
Concerning Language, Fry and Laurie did a Bit covering much of this.
Still waiting on the rest of the lectures on the Phil. if Language.:)
Hey, since you’re getting into philosophy of language I would love if you explored the continental side of things, especially Derrida.
why derrida?
@@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?
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!”
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..
There's so much you need to learn, my dear colleague... Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. Let that sink in.
do you feel better now?
@@arasharfa Do you?
Hope you cover Wittgenstein in detail
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
I’ve thought the same thing for so long 😭 it explains why I love this channel so much smh
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.
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?
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.
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.
Succinct (2:42) and fantastic lesson!
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.
How are you writing from behind the board?
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.
Ordinary language has some hints or fragments of compositionality, but, in general, ordinary language does not have thorough compositionality.
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.
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.
Jeffrey: *says the weird phrase*
me: I'm too high, I didn't understand shit
Jeff: and you did! you understood what it means!
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.
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. 😉
Cool.
❤... from india
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I agree with the latter half though, nothing has imposed limits on us and thus there are no limits to human quality
@@finndaniels9139 Are you attempting to claim that explanation is an illusion?
@@patmoran5339 I’ll be honest I don’t understand what your comment means
But how do you prove there is no other species that has compositional language?
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.
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?
I thought this was why Kia Rios were the best selling car of the late 1600s.
This basically means that words happen to have meanings
Do you write facing you and then flip the video afterward so it’s facing us
Can you do one video in which you write in mirror script so we can see you like you are and not you "reflexion"?
Sir can you make a video about William Lane Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument?
Does dr Kaplan do theological arguments?
Outside of the context of pure philosophy, ie in the study of Descartes.
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?
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).
Thank you. My best greetings from Cracow. 💚
I didn't know what scurvy or a kia rio is 😅
Hmm, I guess this is pretty similar to Hockett's design feature of productivity.
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
Multidimensional code
If this was true then people would have no difficulty with VOCABULARY!! I know all English alphabets😊
But how do you prove there is no other species that has compositional language?
Can you think the meaning of that sentence without reciting the sentence?
The impact of the story is lost on a rewatch.
Are you writing on that screen backwards?
I think this gentleman's videos, but not this one. Maybe I'm missing something. Like duh, that's how language works.
can you make a philosopher tier list video?? it would be a banger for sure
I find that completely obvious. (Not saying It in a bad way)
English has compositionality of sentences. German has compositionality of words. :)
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?🤔
"Phatic Expression" perhaps
programming language for the human brain
Post more
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.”
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.
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.”
Whaaat??? Sentences are composed of words??😮😮😮
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.
comments on youtube saved so many lives already
My calculator can perform arithmetical operations that have never been calculated before too.
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.
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."
When whales communicate I'll bet they don't need compositionality . I reckon every time they communicate they're understood. They don't catch up later and say "Oh I thought you meant...." or "what in God's name were you blabbering on about last week?" Unless they're boops and beeoops ricochet off canyon walls and submarines and that gets them into all sorts of problems.
I didn't know what scurvy, a kia rio or polkadot means 😅
I'm not a Native speaker though.