In Japan, it is widely believed that you don’t have direct knowledge of what other people are really thinking (and it’s very presumptuous to assume otherwise), and so it is uncommon to describe other people’s thoughts directly, such as “He likes ice cream” or “She’s angry”. Instead, it’s far more common to see things like “I heard that he likes ice cream” or “It seems like/It appears to be the case that she is angry” or “She is showing signs of wanting to go to the park.”
Edit (1/7): I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally true, but either way I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson. Feel free to substitute ‘Zorblaxia’ for ‘Japan’ above.
Yes, my Japanese teacher was very insistent about it, and IIRC would even take points off for talking about someones mental state with out the proper qualifiers.
This is good to know, and makes me wonder whether there’s a way to encourage this kind of thinking in other populations. My only thought so far has been “get yourself involved with the production of the most widely-used primary school language textbooks in your area.”
It’s not necessarily an advantageous habit. If a person tells you they like ice cream, and you’ve seen them eating ice cream regularly with every sign of enjoyment, you have as much evidence that they like ice cream as you have about countless other things that nobody bothers hanging qualifiers on even in Japanese. The sciences are full of things we can’t experience directly but can still establish with high confidence.
Rather than teaching people to privilege other people’s mental states as an unknowable quality, I think it makes more sense to encourage people to be aware of their degrees of certainty.
Rather than teaching people to privilege other people’s mental states as an unknowable quality, I think it makes more sense to encourage people to be aware of their degrees of certainty.
Increased awareness of degrees of certainty is more or less what I was thinking of encouraging. It hadn’t occurred to me to look for a deeper motive and try to address it directly. This was helpful, thank you.
You can look at this way of thinking as a social convention. Japanese people often care about signaling respect with language. Someone who direct speaks about the mental state of another can be seen as presumtious.
High status people in any social circle can influence it’s social customs. If people get put down for guessing other other’s mental states wrong without using qualifiers they are likely to use qualifiers the next time.
If you actually want to do this, E-Prime is an interesting. E-Prime calls for tabooing to be.
I meet a few people in NLP circles that valued to communicate in E-Prime.
TV Tropes is unreliable on Japanese culture. While it’s fond of Japanese media, connection demographics show that Japanese editors are disproportionately rare (even after taking the language barrier into account); almost all the contributors to a page like that are likely to be language students or English-speaking Japanophiles, few of whom have any substantial experience with the language or culture in the wild. This introduces quite a bit of noise; for example, the site’s had problems in the past with people reading meanings into Japanese words that don’t exist or that are much more specific than they are in the wild.
I don’t know myself whether the ancestor is accurate, but it’d be wise to take it with a grain of salt.
I have to say that’s fairly stupid (I’m talking about the claim which the quote is making and generalizing over a whole population; I am not doing argumentum ad hominem here).
I’ve seen many sorts of (fascinated) mythical claims on how the Japanese think/communicate/have sex/you name it differently and they’re all … well, purely mythical. Even if I, for the purposes of this argument, assume that beoShaffer is right about his/her Japanese teacher (and not just imagining or bending traits into supporting his/her pre-defined belief), it’s meaningless and does not validate the above claim. Just for the sake of illustration, the simplest explanation for such usages is some linguistic convention (which actually makes sense, since the page from which the quote is sourced is substantially talking about the Japanese Language).
Unless someone has some solid proof that it’s actually related to thinking rather than some other social/linguistic convention, this is meaningless (and stupid).
Well, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that language shapes thought and/or culture, and Whorfianism is any school of thought based on this hypothesis. I assume pop-Whorfianism is just Whorfian speculation by people who aren’t qualified in the field (and who tend to assume that the language/culture relationship is far more deterministic than it actually is).
Just-so stories about the relationships between language and culture. (The worst thing is that, while just-so stories about evolutionary psychology are generally immediately identified as sexist/classist/*ist drivel, just-so stories about language tend to be taken seriously no matter how ludicrous they are.)
With all respect that I’m generically required to give, I don’t care whether you care or not. The argument I made was handling what you posted/quoted, neither you as a person nor your motives to posting.
That is a hugely unfair assessment of my motives (unlike abody97′s comment which claims not to be about my motives, which I also doubt). People say untrue things all the time, e.g. when storytelling. The goal of storytelling is not to directly relate the truth of some particular experience, and I didn’t think the goal of posting rationality quotes was either, considering how many quotes these posts get from various works of fiction. I posted this quote for no reason other than to suggest an interesting rationality lesson, and calling that “bullshit” sneaks in unnecessary connotations.
Yes, but that quote is written in such a way that most readers¹ would assume it’s true (or at least that the writer believes it’s true); so it’s not like storytelling. And most readers¹ would find it interesting because they’d think it’s true; if I pulled some claim about $natural_language having $weird_feature directly out of my ass and concluded with “… Just kidding.”, I doubt many people¹ would find it that interesting.
OK, I admit I’m mostly Generalizing From One Example.
Would you be satisfied if I edited the original post to read something like “note: I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally true, but I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson either way. Feel free to substitute ‘Zorblaxians’ for ‘Japanese’”?
-- TVTropes
Edit (1/7): I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally true, but either way I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson. Feel free to substitute ‘Zorblaxia’ for ‘Japan’ above.
Interesting; is this true?
Yes, my Japanese teacher was very insistent about it, and IIRC would even take points off for talking about someones mental state with out the proper qualifiers.
I think you’re missing a word here :P
Fixed.
This is good to know, and makes me wonder whether there’s a way to encourage this kind of thinking in other populations. My only thought so far has been “get yourself involved with the production of the most widely-used primary school language textbooks in your area.”
Thoughts?
It’s not necessarily an advantageous habit. If a person tells you they like ice cream, and you’ve seen them eating ice cream regularly with every sign of enjoyment, you have as much evidence that they like ice cream as you have about countless other things that nobody bothers hanging qualifiers on even in Japanese. The sciences are full of things we can’t experience directly but can still establish with high confidence.
Rather than teaching people to privilege other people’s mental states as an unknowable quality, I think it makes more sense to encourage people to be aware of their degrees of certainty.
Increased awareness of degrees of certainty is more or less what I was thinking of encouraging. It hadn’t occurred to me to look for a deeper motive and try to address it directly. This was helpful, thank you.
You can look at this way of thinking as a social convention. Japanese people often care about signaling respect with language. Someone who direct speaks about the mental state of another can be seen as presumtious.
High status people in any social circle can influence it’s social customs. If people get put down for guessing other other’s mental states wrong without using qualifiers they are likely to use qualifiers the next time.
If you actually want to do this, E-Prime is an interesting. E-Prime calls for tabooing to be.
I meet a few people in NLP circles that valued to communicate in E-Prime.
Specific source: Useful Notes: Japanese Language on TV Tropes
TV Tropes is unreliable on Japanese culture. While it’s fond of Japanese media, connection demographics show that Japanese editors are disproportionately rare (even after taking the language barrier into account); almost all the contributors to a page like that are likely to be language students or English-speaking Japanophiles, few of whom have any substantial experience with the language or culture in the wild. This introduces quite a bit of noise; for example, the site’s had problems in the past with people reading meanings into Japanese words that don’t exist or that are much more specific than they are in the wild.
I don’t know myself whether the ancestor is accurate, but it’d be wise to take it with a grain of salt.
I have to say that’s fairly stupid (I’m talking about the claim which the quote is making and generalizing over a whole population; I am not doing argumentum ad hominem here).
I’ve seen many sorts of (fascinated) mythical claims on how the Japanese think/communicate/have sex/you name it differently and they’re all … well, purely mythical. Even if I, for the purposes of this argument, assume that beoShaffer is right about his/her Japanese teacher (and not just imagining or bending traits into supporting his/her pre-defined belief), it’s meaningless and does not validate the above claim. Just for the sake of illustration, the simplest explanation for such usages is some linguistic convention (which actually makes sense, since the page from which the quote is sourced is substantially talking about the Japanese Language).
Unless someone has some solid proof that it’s actually related to thinking rather than some other social/linguistic convention, this is meaningless (and stupid).
Agreed. Pop-whorfianism is usually silly.
I’m not familiar with this term and your link did not clarify as much as I had hoped. Could you give a clearer definition?
Well, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that language shapes thought and/or culture, and Whorfianism is any school of thought based on this hypothesis. I assume pop-Whorfianism is just Whorfian speculation by people who aren’t qualified in the field (and who tend to assume that the language/culture relationship is far more deterministic than it actually is).
Thanks.
Just-so stories about the relationships between language and culture. (The worst thing is that, while just-so stories about evolutionary psychology are generally immediately identified as sexist/classist/*ist drivel, just-so stories about language tend to be taken seriously no matter how ludicrous they are.)
I don’t care whether it’s actually true or not; either way it still holds an interesting rationality lesson and that’s why I posted it.
With all respect that I’m generically required to give, I don’t care whether you care or not. The argument I made was handling what you posted/quoted, neither you as a person nor your motives to posting.
I think the technical term for that is “bullshit”.
That is a hugely unfair assessment of my motives (unlike abody97′s comment which claims not to be about my motives, which I also doubt). People say untrue things all the time, e.g. when storytelling. The goal of storytelling is not to directly relate the truth of some particular experience, and I didn’t think the goal of posting rationality quotes was either, considering how many quotes these posts get from various works of fiction. I posted this quote for no reason other than to suggest an interesting rationality lesson, and calling that “bullshit” sneaks in unnecessary connotations.
Yes, but that quote is written in such a way that most readers¹ would assume it’s true (or at least that the writer believes it’s true); so it’s not like storytelling. And most readers¹ would find it interesting because they’d think it’s true; if I pulled some claim about $natural_language having $weird_feature directly out of my ass and concluded with “… Just kidding.”, I doubt many people¹ would find it that interesting.
OK, I admit I’m mostly Generalizing From One Example.
Would you be satisfied if I edited the original post to read something like “note: I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally true, but I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson either way. Feel free to substitute ‘Zorblaxians’ for ‘Japanese’”?
Yes.
Have you considered replacing it with “[country]” or similar, then noting at the bottom what page it came from?
I added a link, but I would prefer to suggest a fake name over a generic name.