That’s kinda spurious reasoning. By that standard, people who speak languages where evidentiality is considered so relevant it’s marked grammatically (like Turkish, or Apache, or Yukaghir) should on average be much more rational than people who don’t. Appeal to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is usually a quick ticket to confusion.
I did not mean to imply an appeal to Sapir-Whorf concepts. Disregarding every other factor, I do seem to be a rare exception among native French speakers in this culture. Whether I would also be a rare exception, a less rare exception, or an even more rare exception in some other language or some other culture, is a different matter, which is itself worth examining in its own separate right for its own reasons.
Other than that, I agree that what you’ve said does follow, and to the best of my knowledge isn’t currently supported by any public research and only has sporadic anecdotal evidence.
My objection to teaching only French is that it’s a well-known fact that knowing multiple languages helps immensely with various aspects of cognition and intelligence, and learning multiple languages during childhood has been shown to be an overwhelming net positive. It follows that forcing children to learn only one language has a net negative impact. This fact is perceived, agreed, and then waived by appeal to consequence: “If children learn English, they will only speak English [because all regional neighbors do], so less and less people will speak French, so our culture will die!”
Well, you’ve got to consider complicating factors, which makes this hard to measure. Those other countries aren’t very affluent compared to the USA and their educational system is probably worse, plus they don’t have access to the institutional infrastructure of knowledge like we do. Also, measuring rationality seems hard, etc. there’s tons of problems that always pop up when we try to evaluate things like this.
I mean, I think you’d probably be mostly right and that there’s not much difference in rationality between different language users, but for other reasons than the apparent average rationality of certain language-users.
That’s kinda spurious reasoning. By that standard, people who speak languages where evidentiality is considered so relevant it’s marked grammatically (like Turkish, or Apache, or Yukaghir) should on average be much more rational than people who don’t. Appeal to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is usually a quick ticket to confusion.
I did not mean to imply an appeal to Sapir-Whorf concepts. Disregarding every other factor, I do seem to be a rare exception among native French speakers in this culture. Whether I would also be a rare exception, a less rare exception, or an even more rare exception in some other language or some other culture, is a different matter, which is itself worth examining in its own separate right for its own reasons.
Other than that, I agree that what you’ve said does follow, and to the best of my knowledge isn’t currently supported by any public research and only has sporadic anecdotal evidence.
My objection to teaching only French is that it’s a well-known fact that knowing multiple languages helps immensely with various aspects of cognition and intelligence, and learning multiple languages during childhood has been shown to be an overwhelming net positive. It follows that forcing children to learn only one language has a net negative impact. This fact is perceived, agreed, and then waived by appeal to consequence: “If children learn English, they will only speak English [because all regional neighbors do], so less and less people will speak French, so our culture will die!”
And that’s what really makes me cringe.
Well, you’ve got to consider complicating factors, which makes this hard to measure. Those other countries aren’t very affluent compared to the USA and their educational system is probably worse, plus they don’t have access to the institutional infrastructure of knowledge like we do. Also, measuring rationality seems hard, etc. there’s tons of problems that always pop up when we try to evaluate things like this.
I mean, I think you’d probably be mostly right and that there’s not much difference in rationality between different language users, but for other reasons than the apparent average rationality of certain language-users.