[logicchop]

"an old misconception (with roots both in religion and classical philosophy)"

There is also a new misconception (with no real roots except egalitarianism taken too far) that everything is the same as everything else "to varying degrees." That isn't very interesting though. I live in the US. To "some varying degree" I live on the east coast; but that degree is nil because I live far west of the mississippi. Human language, use of tools, artistry etc. are so massively remote from the animal cases that it's worth labelling it a "distinction" and not a "difference."

[Karrot_Kream]

How is this relevant to the poster? This just feels like your own pet peeve tacked onto the parent comment. I don't think we really need to start the culture wars on an article looking at anthropological records and a post about historical misconceptions.

[wombatmobile]

> Human language, use of tools, artistry etc. are so massively remote from the animal cases

What do you mean by the term "massively remote"?

[zaat]

I'm unaware of any other animal with writing abilities. The differences between human and animal languages are widely discussed and the accuracy of the distinctions are contested, but in general the properties of being generative and recursive are considered to be unique to human language.

[wombatmobile]

> in general the properties of being generative and recursive are considered to be unique to human language.

For a scholar to make that claim, he or she would have to have studied the bulk of other languages. Since there are more than 70,000 species of vertebrates alone, none of whose language has been deciphered by humans, and we know that other types of animals e.g. honeybees rely on language to function, it is difficult to imagine any scholar qualified to make the claim.

Moreover, 99% of humans wouldn't even understand the statement, even after you'd explained what you mean by "generative" and "recursive". So I'm not sure what your statement is, other than yet another example of a human giving himself or herself a justification for the belief that humans are superior to animals, achieved through the mental gymnastic of a truism wrapped up in an academic paper.

[zaat]

> Moreover, 99% of humans wouldn't even understand the statement, even after you'd explained what you mean by "generative" and "recursive". So I'm not sure what your statement is, other than yet another example of a human giving himself or herself a justification for the belief that humans are superior to animals, achieved through the mental gymnastic of a truism wrapped up in an academic paper.

For a commenter to make that claim, he or she would have to study the bulk of humanity and assess their ability to grasp the concepts.

Moreover, humans have no need whatsoever to understand what generative or recursive language is in order to master the use of language with those properties. This is simply the characteristics of their natural language instinct.

Now if you believe that somehow you have better knowledge about linguistics than everybody in the field, you might try to read what base they provide for their claims, and than maybe try disprove it. Without doing even basic research about the field, claims of astrophysicists can sound way more far fetched.

[stanfordkid]

I don't know why recursive grammars would be considered abstruse on a forum populated by programmers.

[smhost]

> with no real roots except egalitarianism taken too far

This is a strange way of saying that it has roots in ancient philosophy. Every major ideology I can think of has forms of anti-anthropocentrism spanning from classical animal rights to silicon valley's post-humanist techno-utopian ideology.