Language Bias
This story outlines an argument about human language's failure to capture multispecies subjectivities
Language
- Language
- Relationships
- Language reflects subjectivity
Narratives
- Stories
- Bias in Language
- Limited by subjectivity
- Environmental History
Perception
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Colour words demonstrates bias towards human perception
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- Environmental factors influence evolution of colour sense
- Colour
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approaches.sensing.vision.colour.perception (Private)
- Colour sense is a function of perception
- Responses to colour differs across species
- Human
- Humans perceive band of wavelengths
- relationships.senses.colour.bee (Private)
- Bee
- Bees respond and perceive colour differently
Examples
- Language about Colour
- Colour language reflects sociocultural and economic trends of human societies
- Variation between cultures reflects environmental conditions
- Natural Language Processing
- Natural language processing parametricises language
- Text analysis can not access meaning
- Bias in Language
- Illustrating bias using the Historical Thesaurus
- Colour Words
- Colours in Gormenghast demonstrate limitations of text analysis
- Colour Timeline
- stories.narrative (Private)
Remedies
An example from popular culture typifies the challenges of interspecies communication.
This example features an episode from the popular television show Star Trek: The Next Generation where two species, humans and the fictional Tamarians, communicate despite vast differences in their languages.1 The Tamarians communicate entirely through allegorical references to their mythology, e.g., "Temba, his arms wide" for an intent to gift something. Captain Jean-Luc Picard, a human, establishes communication by slowly recognising the Tamarian language structure.
Footnotes
Winrich Kolbe, "Darmok," Star Trek: The Next Generation (US: Paramount Pictures, September 28, 1991).˄
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- Design and fiction can represent desired states
- *Darmok* is an example of speculative fiction inspiring real-world research
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- Semantic networks link words, concepts, and context
Start anchor conceptnet not found
ConceptNet, a semantic network using multiple databases, demonstrates the richness of data generated by digital tools.
- Language
- Authors, historians, anthropologists, and ecologists highlight the loss of words describing landscapes, plants, and animals. They propose re-introducing lost words and developing new terms that capture new subjective experiences of nature and place
- Environmental History
- Narratives exploring nonhuman subjectivities, expressed using human language
Related
- Multispecies Place
- Many Relationships construct subjective places, including colour
- The remedies suggested here are also applicable to these phenomena, although data sources may differ
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