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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, Dan Everett managed a few good years of self-promotion via his Piraha/"I have disproved Chomsky" thing but it really hasn't amounted to much. IE, 14 years later, Everett's claims about the Piraha remain unproven and pretty much hinge on him being the primary translator of it. Notice that wikipedia descriptions of Piraha are essentially descriptions of what Everett says about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language

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I would go further than that and claim that most mainstream linguists have accepted the Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodriguez reanalysis of Everett's data:

* https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000411

* http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/Nevins_Pesetsky_Rodri...

I saw him give a talk about Pirahã and recursion in 2007 or 2008, and his argument depended entirely on data that he collected and translated.

Pointing that out made him really defensive; understandable, perhaps, but recursion has been found in literally every other language in the world. You can't be that surprised when people have serious reservations an argument that hinges on the validity of a tiny data set from a language that only you understand.

I stopped paying attention after that, though. Maybe there's other people doing work on it now.

Yeah. Possibly a black swan knowledge (every swan is white until a black one is found much later) but can't be accepted as valid until someone else verified it.

Doesn't matter if some specific language lacks recursion. UG refers to a capacity of the human mind: if it happens to be the case that there is some language which does not feature recursion, that does not show that humans do not have that capacity. Just like how if there was a person somewhere who had grown up in isolation and never learned a language wouldn't show anything about UG.

But don't you see how you've just made the hypothesis unfalsifiable?

Do you also think the claims that dogs can talk or that humans can fly are unfalsifiable?

All we are discussing is a biological system, and biological systems are things that may be investigated.

so from that wikipedia page:

"Chomsky has replied that he considers recursion to be an innate cognitive capacity that is available for use in language but that the capacity may or may not manifest itself in any one particular language"

which makes me wonder - do they show an innate understanding of the concepts when it is discussed with them.

How would you discuss it with them if indeed it is true that it isn't expressible in their language?

The langauge could lack recursion but still be powerful enough to express what recursion is (just like English doesnt have pitch accent, but you can discuss pitch accent in Emglish).

Alternatively, someone who speaks Piraha natively could learn English and discuss about this concept in English.

You could describe it using a stack.

Apparently they asked Everett to teach them basic numeracy skills (counting to 10, 1+1=2, etc) and were unable to grasp it even with months of study.

Could he teach it to the children? If not it would start to seem like an argument that members of the tribe lacked mental faculties that the rest of humanity display (unless severely disabled) and for me would really call his claims into doubt without a lot of research from multiple sources.

I mean, this is the whole point of linguistic determinism, the concept under discussion here. These folks believe that our ability to think in recursive terms (as is necessary when dealing with numbers) is acquired through language.

I don't really believe it, and most linguists haven't since the early 20th century, but that's the claim he made.

A young missionary spends several decades living among and learning the language of a remote Amazon tribe.

He finds that his interest in languages and linguistics exceeds that of spreading Christianity and makes a career change.

Then, either

A) He realizes that he’s the only one who speaks this language and concocts a scheme to seek fame and fortune by falsely claiming it contradicts the leading theory of linguistics because no one can prove him wrong. Mwahaha!

B) As he learns about linguistic theories, he realizes that the language he learned as a missionary contradicts the leading theory of linguistics. This is academically interesting, so he writes a paper and gives talks describing what he found.

While A is certainly possible, it seems B is more likely.

C) His desire to prove something new leads him to overstate / overemphasise / mislead himself on degrees of difference.

Yep, a somewhat related example is how statistical analysis of Mendel's seed data [1] revealed that some bias crept in because its too perfect. In Mendel's case he was right about the genetics of inheritance (and the bias likely unconscious), which goes to show even when we're dedicated to the truth our capacity for self-deception exists.

[1] http://blog.thegrandlocus.com/2016/04/did-mendel-fake-his-re...

Is there a term for this sort of fallacious argument? It's based on "either this person is a liar or what they're saying must be true". The third, not mentioned possibility, is that a person can fool themselves.

And if you're talking the scientific investigation of complex phenomena like language, fooling one's self is common. Indeed, unless a researcher is using tremendous care, their chance of at least partly fooling themselves is very high.

Scientific processes and checks and balances exist because of this. That Everett essentially ignored these and primarily argued his case in the press leads me being very dubious of him. But this still doesn't he's a "liar", that he believes what he claims is plausible but doesn't change anything else.

It is known as a false dichotomy, and it is extremely common.

A true dichotomy would be more along the lines of: he is right or he is wrong.

Of course all possibilities subdivide, if he is wrong he is knowingly wrong and a liar or he made mistakes and too grandiose claims. Even if he is right, he could be right for the wrong reasons: his conclusions could be unsupported by his premises & evidence but still correct.

It's like the "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" argument used by the likes of C.S. Lewis to argue that Jesus Christ is, in fact, the son of God or otherwise just terrible all-around.

I remember growing up as an Evangelical Christian, I felt this argument was pretty decent. But eventually I came to realize that the argument hinges on the assumption that you can't be both a 'lunatic' in one part of your life, and functional or even an admirable person in other parts of your life.

Which of course is a silly assumption. The world is filled with genius crackpots, do-gooders who sucked in other parts of life, or people who are highly successful in one area and utter failures in other areas.

Yes, that Lewis argument immediately came to mind.

It's notable also the way Lewis cites honest people attesting to miracles, with again the false dichotomy that either the miracles happened as they described or the people were liars, when we have already a multitude of examples of honest, intelligent people thinking they've seen something that they haven't.

Yeah, I hear ya... of course there are degrees of in-between. In the article and the comments here, however, the tone of the criticisms of this guy and his ideas (e.g. "managed a few good years of self-promotion") seem weirdly personal and harsh.

That may be my bias as a very casual reader who isn't particularly invested in linguistic theories. (I certainly like Chomsky's social/political criticisms.)

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