Random moment of pseudo-philosophical musing

[feralseraph]

I ended up on a kind of funny train of thought today. I was thinking about how so many of the lessons we learn from our parents (well, and most lessons in life really, but I was thinking about the parent thing specifically) are in a non-verbal manner. You know, the whole "lead by example" paradigm in the context of parent-child interactions.

Comments

[silmarilli]

Short answer: all the damn time. Just think of how many things people accept without question and rationalize this ex post facto with appeals to tradition. Longer answer: us linguists call this the 'poverty of stimulus' argument when applied to language, as our capacity to form novel constructions cannot seemingly arise from just the stuff we overhear as kids. And of course, this is a vast oversimplification of the multiple interlocking systems of memory encoding which themselves developing as this is going on. Also there is evidence to suggest our peers are at least as great if not greater an influence then our parents, so there's a bit of redundancy against individual fallibility in most places. Sorry, but I love a good pseudo-philosophical inquiry.