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Emily comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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Comments (385)
This is a rather confused use of some linguistic terminology. I think "a subject, a verb, and an object" is probably what was intended. (It's worth noting that in academic syntax these terms are somewhat deprecated and don't necessarily have useful meanings. I think the casual meanings are still clear enough in informal contexts like this though.)
Beyond the terminology issue, I'm unconvinced by the actual claim here. Arguments from linguistic usage often turn out to be very bad on scrutiny, and I'm not sure this one holds up too well. What about 'Quirrell secretly followed Harry.'? Seems like a much weaker assertion that Quirrell is causally affecting Harry in some way here. I expect there are more obvious examples - that one took me 10 seconds to come up with.
Quirrell is not causally affecting Harry, but Harry is causally affecting Quirrell.
I'm not saying that your point is necessarily wrong, just that your counterexample isn't really counter.
What about 'Quirrell resembles Harry.'?
Resemblance is evaluated in someone's brain, and causality is very much involved in that evaluation process.
Yep. With lots of transitive verbs, the (syntactic) direct object is that which undergoes a change (the patient) and the subject is that which causes it (the agent) -- but not with all of them.
And that's before you even stray outside the Anglo-centric perspective and consider ergative-absolutive oppositions...
BTW, I wonder whether (all other things being equal) speakers of ergative-absolutive languages tend to exhibit more consequentialist-like thinking and speakers of nominative-accusative more deontological-like thinking... Has anybody tested that?
I wonder if testing bilinguals would be the way to go on this, to mitigate a few confounds at least. You could present moral statements for evaluation in each of the languages and see if you got any kind of effect according to which language the statement was presented in.
Hmmm.
As a bilingual person myself (English/Afrikaans, though my Afrikaans is comparatively poor), I have to say that I'd probably treat moral statements in the different languages by mentally translating the Afrikaans to English and then deciding on the basis of the translation. However, here phrasing becomes important.
Consider, for example, the following two statements:
Are these two equally true? In the first case, legal execution of a convicted criminal is included, in the second case it is excluded. Such subtle differences in phrasing could very easily turn up between the two languages, as often a word in one language merely has a close approximation in the other (and not a direct translation).
Yes, they are---in as much as two false things are each zero true. What they aren't is equivalent. If you didn't included the absolute modifier "always" then it could perhaps make sense to evaluate "degree of truth".
You are correct; I have edited the grandparent to remove the word "always" from both statements.
Yeah, it's entirely possible that some effect like that would confound everything too much. Bilinguals with close to equal proficiency in both languages might be less inclined to do some sort of mental translation, though. (Still, the whole idea comes perilously close to wanting people to "think in" a particular one of their languages, which in my opinion doesn't necessarily make sense at all.)
That's a really interesting question. I've never heard of any research on it.
There are plenty of sentences that have a noun, a verb, and a subject without having an agent - anything in passive voice or any unaccusative will do the trick. I suspect the argument would be even better worded using semantic roles rather than syntactic categories, eg: "Causality exists when there is an event with an agent". This isn't a very interesting thing to say though, because "agent" is a casual semantic role and so relies on causality existing by definition. You literally cannot have an event with an agent unless there is causality.
Yes, agreed. Semantic roles make the claim much more valid (but also less interesting, it seems to me).
How about "Harry suspected Quirrel"?
That's "Quirrel caused suspicion in Harry's mind", or perhaps "Harry's model of Quirrel caused suspicion to be generated in Harry".
The causality isn't what you would expect from the syntax, going from subject to object, and it isn' implied by the syntax at all, it's in the semantics. Consider "Harry winked out of existence for no reason".
That implies the existence of some X and Y in the sentence "Harry suspected Quirrel of X because Y", e.g., "Harry suspected Quirrel of secretly being some variety of uplifted rodent because Harry had suffered organic brain damage that impaired his ability to think rationally." As long as Harry is (being modeled as) subject to causal influences, such a sentence can't escape implying causes.