Can you direct me to material informing your take that our language skills are only slightly better. I am under the impression that chimpanzees don’t have language.
And the qualitative thing is “universality”. Once you jump to universality, you can’t jump higher. Not all language systems are universal, but a universal language system is maximally powerful. Better systems can be more expressive, but not more powerful. They can’t express something that another universal language system is fundamentally incapable of expressing.
(Though I’m again under the impression that chimps don’t even have non universal but powerful language systems. Humans didn’t start out with universal language, and innovated our way there.)
There’s no evidence that any language is universal.
Languages allow the formation of an infinite number of sentences based on a finite vocabulary and set of syntactical rules, but it doesn’t follow that they can express “everything”. If you feel your language does not allow you to. express ayour thoughts , then you can extend your language...as far as your thought
If your language can’t express a concept that you also can ’t conceive, how would you know?
The situation is analogous to number systems. There are ways of writing numerals that don’t allow you to write arbitrarily large numerals, and ways that do. So the ways that do are universal … in a sense. They don’t require actual infinities , like a UTM. On the other hand, the argument only demonstrates universality in a limited sense: a number system that can write any integer , cannot necessarily write fractions or complex numbers, or whatever. So what is the ultimately universal system? No one knows. Integers have been extended to real numbers, surreal numbers, and so on. No one knows where the outer limit is.
Can you direct me to material informing your take that our language skills are only slightly better. I am under the impression that chimpanzees don’t have language.
And the qualitative thing is “universality”. Once you jump to universality, you can’t jump higher. Not all language systems are universal, but a universal language system is maximally powerful. Better systems can be more expressive, but not more powerful. They can’t express something that another universal language system is fundamentally incapable of expressing.
(Though I’m again under the impression that chimps don’t even have non universal but powerful language systems. Humans didn’t start out with universal language, and innovated our way there.)
There’s no evidence that any language is universal.
Languages allow the formation of an infinite number of sentences based on a finite vocabulary and set of syntactical rules, but it doesn’t follow that they can express “everything”. If you feel your language does not allow you to. express ayour thoughts , then you can extend your language...as far as your thought If your language can’t express a concept that you also can ’t conceive, how would you know?
The situation is analogous to number systems. There are ways of writing numerals that don’t allow you to write arbitrarily large numerals, and ways that do. So the ways that do are universal … in a sense. They don’t require actual infinities , like a UTM. On the other hand, the argument only demonstrates universality in a limited sense: a number system that can write any integer , cannot necessarily write fractions or complex numbers, or whatever. So what is the ultimately universal system? No one knows. Integers have been extended to real numbers, surreal numbers, and so on. No one knows where the outer limit is.
I think these kinds of arguments are bad/weak in general
If you could actually conceive the concept, the language could express it
Any agent that conceived the concept could express it within the language
I am not going to update unless you say why.
Again, you need an argument.