Spatial Concepts in Non-Literate Societies: Language and Practice in Eipo and Dene Chipewyan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the linguistic representation of spatial concepts in two little known and unrelated languages with a non-written tradition.It explores the degree to which environmental experience and spatial orientation is reflected in language, i.e., it is in line with anthropological linguistic approaches placing language in its social and cultural context, and its cultural practices. 1As such, spatial knowledge is not only encoded in concepts or categories, but is embodied in the lived histories of human beings, and their cultural and linguistic practices. 2 The unrelated cultures under survey present interesting environmental terrains: one is an alpine region (Eipo), the other comprises vast prairies (Dene).The mental and perceptual course-maintaining processes in these cultures rely on cognitive maps. 3 We assume very fundamentally that Homo sapiens, like all other animals, is equipped with biological, especially neurobiological dispositions enabling orientation in space and thereby ensuring survival and, ultimately, reproduction.As has been argued in Chapter 1 of this book, the ability of cognitive mapping is part of this biological disposition.Cognitive maps are structures of spatial reasoning; they are processes of unconscious inference. 4 We understand cognitive maps as establishing a relation between the 'real world' cues (such as objects and places) and their mental equivalents.This will give us the opportunity to relate environmental conditions to structures of spatial cognition as they are reflected in linguistic and enactive presentations.This chapter deviates from the descriptions of landscape features in the sense that it adopts cognitive maps that are referred to in navigation techniques of orientation, i.e., navigating without instruments.We argue that this kind of navigation is based on dynamic cognitive maps and mental triangulation.This enables the navigators to have a spatial conception of their position at any time.It is argued here that this is of special importance not only for piloting but also for orienting oneself on land.We show this for the alpine regions of the Eipo and the vast prairies extensions of the Dene in Alberta.We adopt the premise that 5
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".