triangles and linguist guilt

Lupyan’s article is about the problem of abstraction and power of category labels. He uses four tasks (drawing, speeded recognition, unspeeded visual judgments, and inference), comparing the use of the phrase “three sided polygon” with the label “triangle”. In all four tasks, the use of the category label (triangle) showed a pronounced difference both in the production and recognition of geometric shapes. The clear context dependence in these experiments demonstrates that the classical view of triangles existing as cognitive abstractions is flawed. While this article was the harder of the two for me to read, I thought that Lupyan’s methodology of exploring objects of the mind through linguistic methods was interesting and is relevant for problems of metaphysics such as the nature of abstract objects.

The Rickford article was far more interesting to me, as it addressed a real, pertinent issue in the world and proposed actionable solutions. The basic premise of the article is that, though linguistics have been using the African American community as an invaluable resource in their research pursuits, they haven’t done much to repay this favor back to those communities. He talks about the countably few African Americans in linguistics faculty positions, the shortage of African American representation as linguistics students, the selective inclusion of negative representations of African American writings and speech in linguistic study, overrepresentation in the prison system, lack of and resources in elementary education. He proses two lines of improvement: giving back in ways related to linguistics (legal representation, language education) and otherwise (volunteering, applying for grants for communities).

It’s hard for me to speak to what affect, if any, this article has had on the field linguistics, but, as is true of almost every academic department at Stanford, my field of study (neuroscience) suffers from a similar lack of African American representation. It’s funny to me that Rickford motivates giving back to African American communities by showing, in detail, how linguists have been the direct benefactors of African American communities while failing to acknowledge that in the United States, an incredibly significant contributor to our success in the global economy was the exploitation of Africans during slavery. So, while it is true that linguists have more recently/directly benefited from these communities, I see them as no more/less responsible than anyone else of reasonable means to give back to these underserved and underprivileged communities.