RE: Vision and Evolution (A Critique of Dawkins)
August 18, 2019 at 10:45 am
(This post was last modified: August 18, 2019 at 10:48 am by John 6IX Breezy.)
(August 18, 2019 at 12:16 am)Grandizer Wrote:
Physically speaking, English refers to the soundwaves that are manifested in such a way that they follow patterns in line with a specific language, generally speaking. These patterns are communicated intentionally and comprehended by a large membership of the human species. You have to teach the language as well. It's not instinct.
I don't know to what extent English exists physically; I'm tempted to say it exists only in the psychological environment of other minds. It seems impossible to prescribe a pattern that a soundwave must follow for it to qualify as a morpheme of the English language; it has to vary with pitch, length, intensity, tonality, and almost every other feature that can be possibly used as a criteria. This is due to how much people's voices can differ in tone, prosody, accent, etc. Not to mention English has to also account for its visual counterpart as well.
To further argue that English is purely psychological, consider the attached link below (Holdgraf, et al., 2016). The audio first plays an unintelligible sound, followed by a reference clip, and then replays the unintelligible sound again. Notice that the sound is not heard as English until after the listener is given the reference clip. This leads me to believe there is nothing in that soundwave that qualifies as English; English has to be constructed in the listeners mind, and it can do so even with an impoverished stimuli.
https://media.nature.com/original/nature...654-s4.wav
Reference: Holdgraf, C. R., de Heer, W., Pasley, B., Rieger, J., Crone, N., Lin, J. J., Theunissen, F. E. (2016). Rapid tuning shifts in human auditory cortex enhance speech intelligibility. Nature Communications, 1-15.
