The PTSD Lab

Category: Language

This is were we introduce the concepts of Ontology and Epistemology and talk about how the constraints encourage or force people into one direction or another, one set of activities or another.

  • Data – Different World-Building Grammars

    Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (1995)

    by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley

    One of my professors in grad school was incensed over this book. He saw it as labelling, stereotyping, and demeaning since it also had the capacity to slice across Race lines.

    What he missed, and what Hart & Risley clearly said, was that the socioeconomic factor was the only one that emerged as being statistically relevant.

    That said, the book provides substantial threads to support the development of the Episteme/Social Impact/Epistemology research vector.

    Meaningful Differences in Teleology

    Hart & Risley tracked families across socioeconomic strata and concluded that children enter school with dramatically different language environments, not just vocabularies.

    Their most famous claim:

    By age 3, children in professional families had heard vastly more words than children in welfare-dependent families.

    This became known (somewhat infamously) as the “30-million-word gap.”

    But the deeper claim — the one relevant to your “language as teleology” lens — wasn’t just quantity. It was functional ecology of language:

    • different ratios of directive vs exploratory speech
    • different kinds of questions vs commands
    • different narrative structures
    • different feedback patterns
    • different evaluative tones
    • different assumptions about agency

    In other words: not just more words — different world-building grammars.

    What the language is “doing,” in your terms

    Hart & Risley implicitly show that early language environments install:

    • different models of authority
    • different expectations about participation
    • different notions of what talk is for
    • different epistemic stances toward the world
    • different future affordances in institutional settings

    School language is optimized for one ecology. Children arriving from another are not “behind” so much as operating under a different teleology of speech.

    Important nuance (because the story got mythologized)

    Later work critiqued or refined the original claims:

    • the 30-million figure is likely overstated
    • cultural variation in communication styles matters
    • narrative richness and nonverbal communication weren’t captured well
    • deficit framing is problematic

    But the core observation — early linguistic environments differ systematically by socioeconomic context — has held up.

    Why this book matters to your broader thread

    It’s one of the clearest empirical demonstrations that:

    Language acquisition is not just about vocabulary size — it’s about induction into a specific social operating system.

    Children aren’t just learning words.
    They’re learning what words are for.

    And when they hit school, the system rewards one teleology and penalizes others.

    If you follow this line further, you run into adjacent work on:

    • “restricted vs elaborated codes” (Bernstein)
    • language socialization studies
    • classroom discourse norms
    • institutional talk vs home talk
    • narrative vs directive speech cultures

    —but this book is the canonical modern trigger for the debate.

    Human societies quietly assume language is neutral infrastructure. It isn’t. It’s more like gravity in a game engine: invisible until you try to jump in the wrong direction.

  • Data: The Making of a Language

    Ok. Stop here. First, a little nit: Of COURSE freer thinking requires an epistemic shift. sigh. Next, Influence only relocates in English. It does not relocate in Masri. In Masri, a new influence shows up and we notice that it’s shown up and we observe – active point here is that we OBSERVE – we don’t wait, we don’t ignore, we OBSERVE and frequently participate in what happens next.

    So This: Household → Church/Temple → State → School → Market → Media → Network systems is an English level of abstraction bordering on bullshit. These, like Fauconnier and Turner showed so elegantly, become blends of the different strands as they proceed through history.

    Unless you’re in a movie, power doesn’t shift from the Church on Monday to the State on Tuesday while you were sleeping.

    And when things are “perceived” through an academic lens to have relocated is when there is sufficient evidence to withstand attacks. Which means by the Marketing insight of adoption means that the perception occurs at no less than 40% of the lifetime of the phenomenon. I see that you said: Monopoly. That is an English, heavily US, interest. It is also constrained by the Epistemology of the English (US) language. Yeah?

    So please do this over. The first one isn’t useful because it uses English Epistemology instead of Masri Epistemology. Thank you very much.

    Got it. Re-doing it in Masri epistemology: no “relocation,” no discrete handoff fantasy, no monopoly talk. We track ظهور / emergence, ملاحظة / observation, مشاركة / participation, and مزج / blending of strands over long durations. We only call something “dominant” when it is visible in practice (institutionalized, routinized, defended), not when academics decide it “shifted.”

    Working frame (Masri)

    • New influence يظهر (shows up)
    • People يلحظوه (notice/observe)
    • People يجربوه / يتعاملوا معاه (try it / deal with it)
    • It يدخل في الموجود (enters what already exists)
    • It يعمل مزج (blends) with prior strands
    • Over generations, it may يتثبت (stabilize) into “normal”
    • Old strands don’t “move.” They تفضل موجودة (remain present), sometimes reduced, sometimes intensified, sometimes re-activated.

    Timeline of key appearances and blends (post ~10,000 BCE)

    1) ~10,000–3000 BCE — Agriculture as baseline strand

    What يظهر: settled land, storage, inheritance, household-as-production
    Observation: daily life becomes structured by seasonality + property continuity
    Blend outcome: elder value is anchored in land memory + household authority (not “information” in abstract)

    2) ~3300–2000 BCE — External memory appears (writing + accounting)

    What يظهر: record-keeping (grain, tax, debt), written contracts, legal memory outside persons
    Observation: people learn that “the tablet remembers” even when the elder is gone
    Blend outcome: elders remain socially central, but memory authority becomes shareable with scribes and archives
    (so: elder authority persists, but a parallel memory channel appears)

    3) ~2000–500 BCE — Formalized law + administrated hierarchy thickens

    What يظهر: codified legal systems, state taxation, bureaucracy
    Observation: obligations become enforceable by entities beyond kin
    Blend outcome: “family duty” becomes partly state-legible; kin norms are reinforced by legal scaffolding, not replaced

    4) ~800–200 BCE — Axial moral systems appear and interpenetrate

    What يظهر: durable moral vocabularies that travel (Greek ethics, Confucian duty, prophetic traditions, etc.)
    Observation: people use new moral language to justify old practices and to argue against them
    Blend outcome: elder care becomes not just practical but justifiable as virtue, piety, order, etc.
    (Not “the Church replaces the household.” Rather: a moral-justification layer thickens.)

    5) ~300–1200 CE — Institutional charity emerges as a supplementary channel

    What يظهر: hospitals, endowments, monasteries, waqf systems, almshouses
    Observation: some non-kin care becomes possible in cities and religious centers
    Blend outcome: family obligation remains primary, but exceptions become sustainable (especially for the poor, widows, the unattached)

    6) ~1450–1700 — Print + mass literacy begins (slow, uneven)

    What يظهر: cheap replication of text; vernacular reading; competing authorities
    Observation: you can hear another voice without leaving your village
    Blend outcome: elders lose exclusive control of narrative; new claims arrive through text and begin blending with household norms

    7) ~1760–1900 — Wage labor + urban migration (industrial strand) thickens

    What يظهر: cash wages, factories, cities, geographic separation
    Observation: young adults can survive without land + household
    Blend outcome: elder authority weakens because proximity weakens, not because “youth get enlightened.”
    Household strand remains, but now competes with employer time, urban anonymity, rent economics.

    8) 1889–1965 — Social insurance appears (pensions + health systems)

    Key dates (anchors):

    • 1889 Germany old-age insurance (first major national system)
    • 1908 UK old-age pensions
    • 1935 US Social Security
    • 1948 UK NHS
    • 1965 US Medicare/Medicaid

    What يظهر: old people can receive income/medical care not mediated by children
    Observation: the “intergenerational contract” becomes optional in practice for more households
    Blend outcome: elder care doesn’t vanish; it is re-parameterized:

    • Children’s support becomes supplement or choice rather than the only lifeline
    • “Duty” becomes negotiable because failure no longer guarantees visible death

    This is a major episteme inflection because survival becomes more system-mediated.

    9) ~1870–1950 (overlapping) — Compulsory schooling appears as a daily shaper

    What يظهر: standardized curriculum, age-grading, national language norms
    Observation: kids spend large parts of the day inside an institution with its own epistemic template
    Blend outcome: household narrative becomes one voice among several; children learn to “answer to” a non-kin authority routinely

    Again: not a shift Tuesday-to-Wednesday. A slow thickening.

    10) ~1920–1990 — Broadcast media strand thickens

    What يظهر: radio/film/TV producing shared imaginaries
    Observation: authority becomes audible/visible at scale; norms are demonstrated, repeated, made “obvious”
    Blend outcome: elders can’t gate what youth see; household becomes permeable
    (But elders sometimes reassert through media—so it’s a blend, not replacement.)

    11) ~1990–present — Network systems + algorithmic environments

    What يظهر: search, social feeds, peer swarms, rapid memetic mutation
    Observation: people see new norms emerge in real time; participation is immediate
    Blend outcome: authority becomes multi-sited; age as authority marker is less reliable because competence becomes domain-specific and rapidly updated

    Your adoption-curve point (40% of lifetime)

    Agreed as a constraint: “perceived dominance” lags.

    So in this frame:

    • appearance date = when strand begins functioning
    • perceived-as-normal date = when it’s routinized enough to survive attacks
    • dominance claims must be dated later than first appearance

    Example:

    Its “normalization” (in daily epistemic shaping) is later (2000s–2010s), varying by class and region.

    Internet appears as infrastructure in the 1990s

    Where multigenerational living fits (without “relocation”)

    Multigenerational living isn’t a strand that “moves.” It is a coupling mechanism that increases the weight of household templates.

    As it declines (historically: urban/industrial contexts, 19th–20th c.), three couplers weaken:

    1. co-presence (daily exposure)
    2. economic entanglement
    3. monitoring/shame network density

    When those weaken, other strands become more actionable—not because elders “lost value,” but because the couplers changed.

    Minimal restatement of your thesis in this frame

    Safe to say:

    “Freer thinking” is the experience of having multiple live templates in play, not a clean liberation event.

    As co-residence decreased (esp. 1760–1950 depending on place), the household’s capacity to enforce its template weakened.

    New strands (wage labor, schooling, pensions, media, networks) appeared, were observed, and blended into daily life.

  • Identity and Model Spaces

    Identity and Model Spaces

    One of the hardest things to understand if you haven’t poked about it already is that there are differences in how people do what’s called “making meaning.” This is the same as how people understand the world around them. While each individual uses their existing contexts, there is a difference between whether something is related to themselves or out in the world in general.

    When all things are evaluated in terms of what they mean to the Self, this is called Identity Space. It’s an important concept because when every input, every Event is evaluated in terms of how a person looks to people outside them, it can affect so many things. If one is successful, that can increase someone’s feeling of self-worth, even self-importance. If one is not, then with the Identity mode, this can lead to self-criticism, sadness, other bad stuff we don’t need to list.

    There’s another way. It’s called Model Space. Here, the Events are understood in terms of “themselves.” This means that when the software fails to do what it’s been planned to do, then it’s simply a matter of going in and fixing the code. If an outing has been planned and the weather has turned bad, this is simply a situation where new choices have to be conceived and considered. And it’s really the same with the software example: When things don’t work as planned, then we consider all the possibilities of where it goes off the rails. (I love that expression; it sounds something like: CRASH! Ooops!)

    So back to things going off the rails, which happens a lot in a lot of different places, ways, generally all over. Here’s a popular example.

    • You meet someone;
    • they ask for your phone number;
    • you start chatting;
    • they ghost you.

    In Identity Space, you look over what just happened and look for the story of The Coming Together. This is where two people come with their histories, expectations, experiences and make something new in the space they create together.

    And as everyone knows, this can go lots of ways.

    But the key here is to realize that everything that happens is not ‘your fault.’ Let’s be real here for a moment, though. Sometimes it IS your fault; frequently it’s mine, also, but usually I did it on purpose. Sometimes not, but usually.

    When you use the Model approach to making meaning, you are forced to ask questions. In Identity Space, there usually aren’t questions because Feeling has taken over. When Feeling is in charge, one needs to get out the tools to move into Model Space. One could ask: Why am I feeling like this? What were my expectations? How were my expectations not met? This is a meta language, an exploration of the details of what happened. The details, not the Event itself.

    Take the common complaint: Well we were chatting and then he just ghosted me.

    Ok. And then what happened?

    Option 1: I called my best girlfriend and told her what a creep he is and then we decided that there was something wrong with what I said or what I did and how embarrassing this whole thing was and, and, and… you kinda have to have been there once or twice.

    In Model Space, the questions don’t need the girlfriend, although it can help. Here, the thing we look at is what was it for him? Do we know? What did his communication tell us about how he was feeling, what he was thinking, how he was in general. How did I react to that? What did my body do without my thinking about it? What little signals did it give me that created my responses, my behaviors, in the exchange.

    And in Model Space, we learn from these, not exactly abstractly but at a distance. They don’t become part of who we are. They say off in the distance like a movie we are watching.

    Short story: In Identity Space, you are only either “good” or “bad.” In Model Space, things continue to flow. You can see different perspectives, different ways of telling the Story.

    One thing that’s important to know in today’s world is that the number of people with COVID-related PTSD is very high; the number of people with Politics-related PTSD hasn’t been measured yet but should come as no surprise that it’s going to be huge.

    There’s one other important process in play in the Spaces and that’s called Elaboration for our purposes here. In Identity Space, one Elaborates the facts – “makes meaning of the situation” – instantly. And the individual frequently reacts to that new State. This reaction creates a reaction in the other individual and can easily escalate.

    In Model Space, one observes and reserves judgment. The difference here is easy to see in this example. A person is talking and has a paragraph she wants to say to explain her point.

    In Identity Space, the person will interrupt with their own idea of what they want to say. It may or may not be related to the topic sentence in the paragraph being spoken. In Model Space, the person listens to the end of the paragraph and responds based on the full text of the paragraph rather than just one of the ideas, maybe even foundational.

    One more thing here, ways of making meaning are not either/or, this or that. English forces that distinction. In fact, people can slide between them, employing different skills from the Spaces to create new meanings and understandings. Frequently, there are efforts to engage this movement from one way of making meaning to another, but at the same time, there is too little support for the Model Space and too much for the emotion-laden Identity Space.