IN THE BEGINNING: The Art of Slowing Down and Thinking Things Through (Chapter 1, Part 3)
This is the third of a six-part series. Below is a table of contents I'll update as each part is posted to Minds.
2. The Evolution (or Transformation) of Language
3. Language Assumptions (you are here!)
5. Mathematics and Symbolic Logic Are Languages Too
6. Why Thinking Through Language is the First Topic of This Work
C. Language Assumptions
The way Nowak opens his aforementioned work is telling about what we take for granted in terms of language abilities. “Everyone who reads this paper knows on the order of 50,000 words of his primary language. These words are stored in the ‘mental lexicon’ together with one or several meanings, and some information about how they relate to other words and how they fit into sentences.” Language is a fundamental fact of human existence that often goes unexamined, especially in heated disagreements. We all have a sort of mental dictionary we tote around, and during communication, it is all too natural, and frequent, to assume that the definition our listener has in mind for a word we use when we are encoding matches the definition that our listener uses when they begin decoding our message. While the conflicts that arise from this process are often minimal, there are times where such conflicts have important consequences. Imagine a scenario where a friendly person closes an exchange by saying “I love you,” intended as a sort of endearing goodbye. This person’s intended interpretation of the word is casual, and can be supported by more than one of the many definitions found in any number of dictionaries – as of this writing, Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary has 16 different definitions for the noun “love” listed online. Intending a casual meaning for “love” in a communication moment where the listener associates the word with more gravitas, there is bound to be a miscommunication; perhaps the listener actually does possess hidden yet amorous feelings for the speaker and interprets this parting phrase as reciprocation for deeper feelings. Or twist the scenario a bit, and perhaps the speaker did intend for a more serious interpretation of the word “love,” and yet for whatever reason the listener writes it off as a more casual usage, and now the speaker is prone to experience disappointment and the negative impacts of communication loss.
Expanding upon the concept of language fitness as earlier described by Nowak, a language is more “fit” if the chances of the speaker and the listener having the same definition for a word (such as for the word love in the above example) are high. It follows that the higher the number of disparate definitions for the same word there are in a given language, the less fit that language becomes. English, at times, seems especially rife with words that have numerous and disparate meanings, often changing depending on context (or sometimes more nefariously, agenda). Consider words such as “socialist,” “communist,” “liberal,” “conservative,” “harassment,” “equality,” “oppression,” “family values,” “traditional,” “leftist,” “alt-right” or nearly any other politically charged word in the public sphere, with the idea that the person speaking the word could be talking about something entirely different from the person listening to the word, even though they are both considering the same word. As you might expect, this work will tackle political ideas at length later, but for now the point is to think about the ways in which even if we feel ourselves to have a solid understanding of a particular term, it is rarely the case that the people we are speaking with have the exact same understanding in mind.
Assuming that we have the same definition for a particular word as the people we are communicating with, however, is not the only facet of language and communication that is often taken for granted. The scholar Rosina Lippi-Green, in her work “Accent, Standard Language Ideology, and Discriminatory Pretext” establishes that the average person is both ignorant and arrogant when it comes to language, a rather dangerous combination:
In matters of language history, structure, function, and standardization, the average individual is, for the most part, simultaneously uninformed and highly opinionated. When asked directly about language use, most people will draw a very solid basic distinction of ‘standard’ (proper, correct) English vs. everything else.
That we posit the existence of something called language can itself be considered an assumption, which, furthermore, has an impact on how human societies are organized. Scholars Kathryn A. Woolard and Bambi B. Schieffelin, in their work “Language Ideology,” make this point well:
Beliefs about what is or is not a real language, and underlying these beliefs, the notion that there are distinctly identifiable languages that can be isolated, named, and counted, enter into strategies of social domination. Such beliefs…have contributed to profound decisions about, for example, the civility or even the humanity of subjects of colonial domination. They also qualify speech varieties from certain institutional uses and their speakers from access to domains of privilege.
McWhorter, you might recall, was essentially arguing the same point, and echoes this idea in his text by writing:
Now that we’ve come this far, would it beg the reader’s forbearance if I revealed that, in the true sense, there is not even really such a thing as “a language” at all? It’s the nature of language change that makes the concept of “a language” logically impossible…
The way in which we think about language often impacts perceptions as fundamental as how we define ourselves. Returning to Woolard & Schieffelin’s work, they write: “Language socialization studies have demonstrated connections among folk theories of language acquisition, linguistic practices, and key cultural ideas about personhood.” Moreover, thoughts regarding language, particularly in Western nations like the United States, underpin assumptions regarding the nature of reality itself, as these scholars continue to explain: “In the vernacular belief system of Western culture, language standards are not recognized as human artifacts, but are naturalized by metaphors such as that of the free market.”
This stands in contrast to a more reasoned and self-examined perspective, informed by a more comprehensive understanding of language, its functions, and its evolution. Noting the importance of rhetoric, and especially of the what rhetoric can reveal about the internal beliefs and perceptions of the person employing it, Gary B. Moorman, William E. Blanton and Thomas McLaughlin write (in the article, “The Rhetoric of Whole Language”):
Deconstructive rhetorical analysis is based on the premise that all claims to transcendent truths are radically undercut by the fact they are made within a given language and culture which impose limits on the thought and perception of individuals making the claim. We do not have unmediated access to a truth; rather, our view of the world is a function of a set of culturally constructed assumptions which shape our perception of the truth…Deconstructive critics also assert, though, that rhetoric is always open to multiple interpretations which are themselves a function of the interpreters; own beliefs and values. Any deconstructive reading is offered as one among many possible interpretations.
A key thought here is the notion that not only is language ineffective for establishing perfectly objective observations of reality from the perspective of the speaker/encoder, it also depends upon the interpretations of the listener/decoder. Thus, miscommunication can result either from poorly phrased speaking or from various deficiencies in the listener. For example, while a speaker’s poor accent can increase the odds of communication loss, a listener’s desire to understand the speaker is perhaps even more important, as Lippi-Green explains in another section of her work:
…Accent…is most likely to pose a barrier to effective communication when two elements are lacking. The first is a basic level in communicative competence on the part of the speaker…The second element, even more important but far more difficult to assess, is the listener’s good will. Without the good will, the speaker’s…degree of communicative competence is irrelevant. Prejudiced listeners cannot hear what a person has to say, because accent, as a mirror of social identity and a litmus test for exclusion, is more important.
Lippi-Green’s work was composed in 1994, when I would have only been at most 6 years old. In our current time, identity politics is ascendant, and a simple accent isn’t the only barrier to contend with when it comes to listening to a speaker with good will. The salient point to take away from Lippi-Green’s analysis is the idea that “prejudiced listeners cannot hear what a person has to say.” How many times are people dismissed in conversation simply by virtue of who we perceive them to be? For example, if we perceive of someone as “alt-right” or as a “neo-Nazi,” (which is often done without truly giving the person a chance at being heard – rather, we take the opinions of others as facts in such matters) how much “good will” do we have towards them in terms of listening to what they have to say? People often thought to be on the “far right” of the political spectrum tend to seemingly dismiss the perspectives of women and minorities out of hand, demonstrating a lack of good will to hear a speaker who matches those criteria; similarly, there’s been a rise in public awareness of the tendency to dismiss men (particularly white men) from certain conversations. Barack Obama, former President of the United States, even had to make this point in the summer of 2018 at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in South Africa, saying:
And to make democracy work…we have to keep teaching our children and ourselves – and this is really hard – to engage with people not only who look different, but who hold different views. This is hard. Most of us prefer to surround ourselves with opinions that validate what we already believe. You notice, the people who you think are smart, are the people who agree with you? Funny how that works . But democracy demands that we’re able also to get inside the reality of people who are different than us, so we can understand their point of view. Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe, they’ll change ours! And you can’t do this if you just, out-of-hand, disregard what your opponents have to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you – because they’re white, or because they’re male – that somehow, there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling. That somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters…. So those who traffic in absolutes when it comes to policy, whether it’s on the left or the right, they make democracy unworkable. You can’t expect to get 100% of what you want all the time. Sometimes you have to compromise. That doesn’t mean abandoning your principles, but instead it means holding on to those principles and then having the confidence that they’re going to stand up to a serious democratic debate.
I’ve emphasized here the most salient parts in the context of our current discussion. The first highlighted bit references that important distinction I tried to make clear in the beginning; when Obama encourages us to “get inside the reality of people who are different from us,” this is acknowledgement of the validity of the idea that reality is constructed in the decoding process of communication, and that people can have wildly different realities even though we are ostensibly living in the same culture, in the same (sometimes general, sometimes specific) geographic location at the same point in time. The second highlighted quote supports the point I was making above about good will on the part of listeners – that we can’t just dismiss people simply because we’ve identified them to be part of a group we don’t want to listen to. Whether that’s because of what you might call demographic information (age, sex, gender, ethnicity, and so on) or whether that’s because of ideological affiliation (they’re leftists, they’re alt-right, they’re Christians, they’re atheists, and so on) we should do strive to treat people with respect and dignity. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist and professor in the department of psychology at Harvard University, got into hot water for suggesting that people in the “alt-right” movement are highly intelligent and quite literate, but perhaps stuck in the throes of ideological thinking and could be reasoned with. Yet is this really such an unacceptable idea to argue?
Language itself contributes significantly to the building and sustaining of ideological zealotry. While I intend to examine the content of certain ideologies later in this work, for now I want to look at the ways in which language structures, spreads and perpetuates these systems of thinking and perceiving the world.