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The Lupyan reading introduces the paradox of the universal triangle and shows through four experiments—drawing, speeded recognition, unspeeded visual judgements, and inference—that people’s representations of triangles are graded and context specific.  During each of these tasks, the kind of triangle evoked was not some universal pure abstraction, but rather the shape of the triangles varied depending on the task.  This illustrates how our thoughts about triangles tend to be about particular instances of them versus a platonic form of one.  This series of experiments also demonstrated how the type of language used to prompt each person affected the kinds of triangles produced during each task despite the fact that the words that prompted each participant were formally equivalent (triangle versus three-sided polygon).  Lupyan argues that this difference in representation speaks not to the universal abstractness of the triangle but rather to the human mind’s ability to modulate representations of different triangles.  The Lupyan article works against a classical bottom-up approach to the study of the mind where the mind is viewed as a symbol-processing device with “conceptualization…implemented via activation of a requisite symbol” (pg. 18).  Instead, this article sees the mind from a top-down approach where the mind is capable of storing mental representations about the external world (like different triangles) via some sort of read/write memory mechanism.

On an entirely different topic, the Rickford article talks about the unequal partnership that has historically existed between the academic field of sociolinguistics and the African American speech community.  Rickford argues that the American quantitative sociolinguistics have drawn heavily from this community including the development of variable rules and frameworks for the analysis of tense aspect markers, social class, style, and narratives.  Rickford argues that the academic community has not reciprocated that which it has taken from over the years—insufficient induction of African Americans into the sociolinguistics community, a lack of representation of African Americans in their writings, as well as the lack of involvement of African Americans in various roles in civil and academic service.  I think an equal partnership between these two communities is incredibly important from both an academic and social progress standpoint.  I feel as though the inclusion of rigorous academics from the communities being studied could lead to more enrichening and nuanced developments in their field.  There are certainly benefits in having a seemingly objective foreigner study a specific language—they can better describe the language objectively as an outsider looking in.  However, the inclusion of members in the targeted language community (in my case native Tagalog speakers in the study of Tagalog) can provide unique insights into the particular language that may be difficult to see for foreign observers.