sounds like the piraha people have little need for recursion, they actually are more reality-based than the investigators!

is it possible our western rational-analytic approach is a blunt tool, created more to make denial easier, than to seek 'objective' answers?

maybe the hidden premise we operate from, is that to survive in the complex, cognitively incoherent reality we have supported, we need to create virtual constructs that purportedly help us to explain a fundamentally inexplicable universe?

iow, perhaps the piraha are creating and reflecting their reality more honestly than we do, and possibly they even wonder what we fear so much, that we feel the need for linguistic universals to be so vital, and so traumatic when revealed for what it is, another illusion we ascribe magical powers to, just another....myth?

i bet these piraha have a lot less mental problems than we do!  sounds like they have more time to 'waste' on idle pursuits like chatting and laughing till the wee hours also...

the students are studying the teachers, wouldn't it be fascinating to hear their own private opinions on the motivations of the researchers?

no software, no crash!

great stuff kc....

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty