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army1987 comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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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.