IN THE BEGINNING: The Art of Slowing Down and Thinking Things Through (Chapter 1, Part 1)
This will be a 6 part series. As I post each part, I'll update this article to have hyperlinks to the following parts.
1. Talking about Thinking (you are here!)
2. The Evolution (or Transformation) of Language
5. Mathematics and Symbolic Logic Are Languages Too
6. Why Thinking Through Language is the First Topic of This Work
Preamble
The world is an extremely complicated place with a lot of challenging problems. One underlying problem with how we are troubleshooting all of our difficulties is our inability to recognize that we are in a constant state of “in medias res” – of beginning in the middle of things. If we view any given problem as a building with many stories, people are getting into fisticuffs on the 5th or 6th floor without ever having talked about or acknowledged the existence of the floors below them or, perhaps more importantly, the foundation of the building. Our disagreement doesn’t actually exist on the 6th floor, but is more fundamental, and if we understood what our disagreement was actually about, we might be able to come to a workable solution much sooner, much easier, and with a greater positive end result.
This problem does not confine itself to the merely political, either. Often times, as we progress through life, we do so with the fiction that we are entering into a new field or new line of work “at the bottom” and working our way up. As you might expect me to say, however, that is not remotely the case. And as we create more and more advanced fields of study and work, we are ignoring broader areas of knowledge and skill which might be able to synthesize and mediate between all of these new discoveries we are making. We are undervaluing the ability to communicate in a broad number of disciplines and don’t often recognize how our lack of foundations is contributing to the overall scope of our problems.
So many unstated assumptions underlie so much of what we think we know about the world, that often times we aren’t even talking to each other, but rather at or over or around each other. It’s time to slow down and soberly think through our world views, to better understand what we believe and why we believe it. Having done so, we might more clearly understand and be able to communicate with people who disagree with us, without instinctively wanting to punch them in the face. Moreover, a disagreement borne of understanding is a fundamentally different sort of disagreement from that which is most common today – disagreements borne of ignorance, misunderstanding, misinformation, fear, and hatred.
It is no coincidence that the title of this work is lifted from the very beginning of the book of Genesis, the foundation of the world’s most populous religions – Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Do not mistake my intentions with this work, however. While metaphysical concerns will be addressed – as they tend to be part of the foundation of a person’s worldview – this work will not be exclusively concerned with such a discussion. Nor will it attempt to make a strong case for any particular religion or worldview, but rather I am setting out to examine the ways in which our assumptions (both known and perhaps unknown to us) form our opinions about all matters of life.
Aside from this preamble, where should a work called “In The Beginning” actually start? With a discussion of language, of course!
Language is Reality
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
A. Talking About Thinking
The objective of philosophy, in the broadest and most fundamental sense, is concerned with thinking. But this begs the obvious question – what is thinking? H. Reed Geertsen, a professor at the University of Utah, asked his students this simple question with varying results:
I recently asked some college honor students to define thinking. After pondering the question, a student majoring in sociology said, “It consists of reflecting on some idea or insight and exploring its logical connections and implications for making sense out of something.” In response to the same question, an English major responded: “It’s the ability to write a convincing argument in support of a particular point of view.” According to a premedical student majoring in biology, “Thinking is the ability to use information for analyzing data in order to solve some problem.” A philosophy major said without hesitation, “It’s a critical openness to new ideas as one explores their logical foundations.” And a student whose major is undecided said “It’s what I’m trying to do in response to your darn question.”
It seems that a precise definition eludes consensus; indeed, as American writer and television producer J. Michael Straczynski once famously remarked, “The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.” The purpose of this section, then, is to more closely examine the link between language and thought, and put forth the argument that language essentially dictates reality in a very interesting way.
I think we take for granted just how fundamental our language abilities are in shaping our views of the world. In the discipline of human communication, scholars have outlined a general model of what any particular communication moment looks like, which I have included a model of below:
One small element not labeled in this model is the idea of communication contexts and environments – we can think of the yellow oval as the red communicator’s personal environment, the light blue oval as the blue communicator’s personal environment, and the entire area of the conversation (noise included) as the entire shared context of this unique communication moment. Another missing element is the idea of communication “mediums” – this would refer to the medium of face to face conversation, or the medium of reading a text, and could also refer to what language is being used in the communication process. This model – with a bit of imagination – can be applied not only to conversations between people, but other types of communications – such as what happens when someone reads an instant message, or an email, or an essay, or a book, with attendant implications (such as whether the author of those written works is alive or is able to be communicated with directly and quickly or so on). First, let’s imagine a scenario in which two people are communicating face to face.
Our communicators are modeled in the image above as a red silhouette and a blue silhouette. In a normal conversation, each person will switch between the role of sending messages and receiving messages. To quickly elaborate on the idea of communication environments and contexts, what we are referring to is whatever each communicator is bringing to any given moment. The two share a unique communication context that will never again exist, but has an impact on how each participant both encodes and decodes messages within that specific interaction. Each communicator’s environment (the yellow and light blue ovals) contribute to the overall context – for example, this would include things like events which happened throughout each communicator’s life. Depending on the topic and nature of the conversation, the events of the day might have more of an impact on the moment (such as if one person is overly tired from work) or important life events might have more of an impact (such as one’s career path or marital status). All of this is to say that even if you have the same two people talking about the same subject in the same place (let’s say, two friends at their favorite bar discussing the local sports team), the communication context won’t always be the same because each person’s environment could be different (perhaps on one occasion, one of the friends is celebrating a birthday; perhaps on another occasion, one person had an extremely difficult day at work).
The noise labeled in this model refers to any forces which might be distracting from the process at hand. In the case of talking to a friend at a bar, noise could include but would not be limited to actual environmental noise, such as any loud music that might be playing, or the noise of other conversations in that location. Noise can also include things like a distracting inner- dialogue that interferes with a person’s ability to concentrate on either speaking (encoding) or listening (decoding).
A communication channel might not be intuitive at first glance to anyone who has not studied or thought about communication this way, but what a channel refers to is basically the medium in which information is passed. In a face-to-face conversation, we are able to use the virtually all of the possible channels which are available to us, and a widely cited factoid about communication is that 90% of it is nonverbal. This means we are communicating through channels such as body language, posture, tone of voice, eye contact, physical touch, as well as the words that we speak and hear. Some of this communication serves the purpose of what is called “feedforward” – hopefully prepping the listener/decoder for information that is about to come – and some of it serves as immediate “feedback” – allowing the speaker/encoder to get a sense of whether the listener has grasped the message the speaker was attempting to convey. Importantly, this dynamic is significantly diminished in any context in which communicators are not face to face – even a video call is slightly diminished (as physical touch is no longer an option), phone calls are diminished further (as there is no visual body language to analyze) and any text-based communication (text messages, emails, online forums, physical letters, or reading the published work of someone with whom you have no real ability to interact with) suffer the most loss in this sense.
The point I am driving at by discussing this model is that, by far, the most important element in human communication is the process of decoding. This importance only increases the further removed the decoder is from the speaker – for example, what a person understands or interprets from a text is much more important than what is actually written in the text. I like to refer to this phenomenon by saying that we decode our own realities. If there is any significant bias in us that prevents us from fully listening to or considering the messages which are coming our way, then we are going to construct our realities around those biases. This is the basis for the idea of confirmation bias – “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.” While it is important to choose our words carefully and learn how to express ourselves well – that is, to be effective encoders – the fact of the matter is that the only thing which truly has an effect on any of us is the process of decoding. If, for example, a person is convinced that I am of a particular ideology – let’s say they’re convinced I’m a Republican – then this will hugely influence how that person parses and interprets what I am trying to communicate to them. A person who also identifies as a Republican and generally favors Republican is apt to be much more charitable, whereas a person who identifies as opposed to Republicans is apt to be much more critical. Understanding this communication process and how it applies to nearly all aspects of our lives – from talking to our friends in the flesh, to reading a book on our own time, or even to observing “facts” about nature – is one of the fundamental processes many people take for granted but which contributes significantly to how we agree and disagree about a wide variety of topics.
You might well be wondering at this point why I opened this section with a discussion about thinking, and then focused entirely on the processes involved with speaking and listening or reading. That is because most people’s thoughts are fundamentally framed in language. The other mode in which people think is in images (I personally am not a strongly visual thinker), but even that process is muddied by our language faculties, because the we frequently tie the things that we see to words we already know. Hence, the very way in which we think is intrinsically tied to our ability with language, and language is not exactly an impartial mediator of objective reality. Anyone familiar with the process of translating a work from one language to another is also aware that there are just some ideas and concepts which are, as they say, “lost in translation.” The notion that any of us are capable of inherently grasping objective reality without first having slowed down and examined the ways in which our language assumptions may have influenced our interpretations is a seductive but dangerous fiction.