tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4297242917419089261.post1644637628163897363..comments2024-03-09T01:05:10.754-08:00Comments on Babies Learning Language: Where does logical language come from? The social bootstrapping hypothesisMichael Frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00681533046507717821noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4297242917419089261.post-56049685991775759902018-08-22T13:41:33.501-07:002018-08-22T13:41:33.501-07:00Several folks including Roman Feiman have brought ...Several folks including Roman Feiman have brought up Fodorean issues. Just to respond briefly to this point: what I'm arguing is that children have a fully expressive representational system (in the sense that it contains the primitives to construct any computable function). But constructing operators like logical OR or NOT might be difficult because they would have to be constructed *out of* simpler social parts. For example, here's a caricature OR is "offer, but only with respect to the propositional truth of the arguments, not whether you can own them." That's a description of OR in a language that doesn't have it as a primitive; it's truth-functionally equivalent to OR but representationally more complex. Michael Frankhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00681533046507717821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4297242917419089261.post-52745202555933046032018-08-22T13:30:22.561-07:002018-08-22T13:30:22.561-07:00Thanks Tomer, sorry I missed this! I agree complet...Thanks Tomer, sorry I missed this! I agree completely about bargaining, though in my household it rarely contains the word "if." More like:<br /><br />Parent: "bedtime!"<br />Child: "five more minutes!"<br />Parent: "two more."<br />Child: "no three!"<br />Michael Frankhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00681533046507717821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4297242917419089261.post-91253764504036688222018-08-11T11:02:05.756-07:002018-08-11T11:02:05.756-07:00This is most interesting and there's a lot to ...This is most interesting and there's a lot to think about. <br /><br />One small thing which you've probably considered, and I know you didn't mean these particular social situations as the only ones: Asides from 'threat' as an initial social mapping for conditional-If, there's also 'bargaining/exchanging'.<br /><br />Bargaining certainly seems to make up a lot of parent-child speech (anecdotally), and is full of non-threatening conditionals like "If you finish your broccoli you can have dessert / if you give me the truck you can have the duck / if he's first on the slide I get the swing". This is close in spirit to the first conditional you outlined ("If you finish early..."), but I would call that one also bargaining -- exchange(X,Y). Maybe. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00256944681310329884noreply@blogger.com