IN THE BEGINNING: The Art of Slowing Down and Thinking Things Through (Chapter 1, Part 6)
This is the final part 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
5. Mathematics and Symbolic Logic Are Languages Too
6. Why Thinking Through Language is the First Topic of This Work (you are here!)
F. Why Thinking Through Language is the First Topic of this Work
While we tend to think that language helps us describe reality, we often neglect the ways in which it shapes reality for us. The extent to which it either describes or shapes reality for any given person, I hypothesize, is dependent upon how thoughtful and careful that person is in their use of and interpretation of language. Returning to Moorman, Blanton and McLaughlin’s work cited earlier in our discussion of language ideologies, they make a point fundamental to my whole endeavor of breaking down and examining language in this chapter:
As we noted earlier, no language, as the product of a given culture and history, can claim to have unmediated access to the real. Making such a simple assertion implies a kind of cultural arrogance, forgetful as it is of the multiplicity of languages and of the linguistic reality that each provides a variety of ways to structure the real. Language is a mediational tool which enables the construction of cultural reality. Such terms as real, authentic, and genuine, especially when they are repeated without much critical self-awareness, give the impression that successful language use provides access to The Truth itself.”
We are living in a time where the current President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, is famous (or infamous, depending on your own perspective) for criticizing the media establishment as largely being “fake news.” Such language belies an assumption that language is even capable of approaching unmediated access to “real” or “genuine” things. This is an assumption that many of us take for granted. Many of the things which we believe are “factual,” for whatever reason we might believe them to be so, lead us into feeling as if we’re bashing our head against a brick wall when talking to someone with whom we have a disagreement. Often, we feel as if they are not acknowledging facts – not acknowledging “reality” itself – but we’ve failed to give due consideration as to whether our own sense of reality is biasing us in any significant way. Compounded with the idea that we may not regard people with whom we disagree with any level of good will – that is to say, an actual and sincere idea to understand their point of view instead of just prove them wrong or prove ourselves correct – perhaps we can begin to get a clearer sense of why our current clime feels so polarized and partisan. It has gotten so bad that it is not uncommon to ostracize friends and family over political disagreements (or sometimes even more trivial disagreements, such as conversations concerning entertainment media or what should otherwise be harmless pass-times); something I personally think is egregious and not at all indicative of a healthy society.
Opening our minds to the concepts of how we think, how we perceive and how we structure our own realities just as often if not more often than we describe reality as it exists will lead us to many interesting places. While there can be great utility to holding on to rigid definitions, there is also an inherent danger, as one contemporary critic of symbolic logic, F.C.S Schiller, articulated in the work, “The Principles of Symbolic Logic:”
But Formal Logic has perversely chosen to build on the fiction that the meaning of terms is (or ought to be) fixed, and to talk about propositions rather than judgments. So the proposition becomes a helpless formula, totally incapable of reproducing the feature of living thought. It has acquired its meanings from past uses; but these do not protect it against ‘willful modifications’ at the hands of masters of language like Humpty Dumpty, who make words mean what they please…Is not the whole history of philosophy one long illustration of philosophic audacity in manipulating language, and does not experience show that philosophers frequently get away with their arbitrary modifications of ‘ the’ meaning of words and ‘propositions?’ I can not admit, therefore, that…symbolic logic [is] in any way relevant to the procedures of our actual thinking.
An important implication of this argument is that words/ideas/concepts may be defined by past uses, but this provides no protection from willful and, most dangerously, malicious manipulations in the service of advancing an agenda. While tackling specific language ideologies in the context of what they look like in our modern world will be a topic of later discussion, consider for a moment the ways in which these types of manipulations end up shaping world views. For example, Christianity has its own unique vision of eternal punishment in the concept of hell – a concept borne of language manipulation. The original Jewish scriptures make no mention of a place of eternal damnation (nor of eternal bliss), referring to the afterlife instead with the Hebrew word “Sheol,” which, loosely translated, means “the grave” or “the abode of the dead.” Connotations of eternal damnation were slowly added over time, and when “Sheol” was originally translated into Greek, the word “Hades” most closely approximated its meaning. “Hades” translated into the English “hell,” which in its original usage did not have connotations of eternal damnation and suffering, but slowly over time the meaning of the word was manipulated to carry those connotations, and now millions of people who consider themselves Bible believers attest to the reality of something which was constructed entirely through the manipulation of language.
H. Reed Geersteen – the academic I quoted at the beginning of this chapter – explains why clarity of thought is so crucial:
What makes higher-level thinking so important? To begin with, we live in a world of unprecedented change and expansion in information. New information continues to multiply as old information becomes obsolete…Constant and accelerating shifts in information mean that all members of society need greater skill in assessing and evaluating knowledge.
Woolard & Schieffelin, who we have heard from throughout this chapter, write about topics of the day in 1994 that are still points of contention in 2018:
Many populations around the world, in multifarious ways, posit fundamental linkages among such apparently diverse cultural categories as language, spelling, grammar, nation, gender, simplicity, intentionality, authenticity, knowledge, development, power, and tradition…A wealth of public problems hinge on language ideology. Examples from the headlines of United States newspapers include bilingual policy and the official English movement; questions about free speech and harassment; the meaning of multiculturalism in schools and texts; the exclusion of jurors who might rely on their own native-speaker understanding of non-English testimony; and the question of journalists; responsibilities and the truthful representation of direct speech. Coming to grips with such public issues means coming to grips with the nature and working of language ideology.
Indeed, an understanding of language ideologies may be a critical pre-requisite to attaining true intellectual freedom. As we heard from Nowak when looking at his work earlier, it’s entirely feasible to imagine that certain people/groups/interests are invested in an “arms race” towards ever increasing complexity and ambiguity. As Nowak’s work demonstrates, this is more than just an issue of social justice – if the fitness of our language continues to deteriorate and we can no longer efficiently and effectively communicate with one another, we will be at an evolutionary disadvantage. How much danger we are in is up for debate, though it certainly warrants consideration.
At the same time, however, we have to be cautions about mitigating the dangers of ambiguity and complexity by strictly imposing a rigid system of “standard” language, which often lends itself to ideological interpretations and implications. In particular, figurative speech is especially prone to ideological manipulations. Moorman, Blanton and McLaughlin use the term “rhetoric” to “refer to the effort to persuade or argue forcefully for a position. More specifically, following a tradition that goes back to antiquity, we use it to refer to…figures of speech.” Continuing in this train of thought, they make a point which is one of the themes of my entire work with this project:
We argue, though, that the figurative language of a text does more than persuade. Read critically, it also reveals the deepest assumptions that underlie the text’s arguments. All arguments proceed from a set of assumptions held by the persons making the arguments. These assumptions are what can be taken for granted, the unquestioned ‘truths’ that underlie the explicit claims evident in the text.
While we may not always be dealing with “texts” per se (such as when we are getting into a conversation at work, at the bar, or at a family gathering), the notion still applies; unstated assumptions are taken for granted and are often at the actual root of our disagreements. If we took more time to think about these assumptions, and to state them, we might find much more healthy ways to disagree and to sort out solutions to our societal problems. A wise philosophy professor I had the extreme privilege of studying under once remarked that philosophy was the business of questioning assumptions. If so, philosophy is infinitely more relevant today than people give it credit for.
At the end of all this discussion, we are still left with the question I posed at the beginning – what is thinking, and perhaps we might also now ask what is the proper way to go about thinking? Thinking is clearly and inexorably entwined with our language faculties. Perhaps we shouldn’t suggest that there is a “proper” way to employ these faculties, but we could discuss our use of language in terms of accuracy (particularly in regards to describing objective reality, rather than structuring our own realities) and effectiveness (particularly in terms of our ability to communicate with each other). Cognizance of the communication medium and respect for differing abilities among speakers/listeners to comprehend messages encoded in that medium, coupled with deliberate communicative goodwill towards people we might disagree with are paramount to understanding and commonality. Indeed, Lippi-Green reminds us that “A…crucial concept is that the burden of communication is shared, on every level, by both participants.”
Perhaps, one day, humans will evolve an entirely new system to replace symbolic thought/language, but until that day we are compelled to live with what we have. A rigorous review and critical evaluation of the mediums we choose to communicate in, and all the associated implications, seems likely to reduce unnecessary conflict and perhaps even be fundamental to promoting and encouraging lasting and authentic peace.
We should be careful in understanding that language isn’t, in reality, rigid – that people the same worlds to mean entirely different things all the time – and that the important part in speaking to other people is an attempt to grasp and understand whatever the underlying phenomenon being discussed are, not necessarily the particular words being used. If person A understands, for example, feminism to mean X but person B understands it to mean Y, it’s not as important to establish whether feminism is “actually” X or Y, but rather to just understand what X means and what Y means and continue the conversation from there. The same could be said for many ideologically loaded terms, from “Christianity” to “liberal” to “conservative” to “atheist” to “anarchy” and so on. We no longer live in a world where we can get everybody to use the same definitions for words in all contexts and so we don’t need to get lost in a debate about whether people are accurately using terms; rather, we should strive to clarify what the other person actually means by particular terms (especially when the context of an interchange begins to imply that people might have different notions about what important terms mean) and then engage with the ideas behind those terms, rather than getting caught up worrying about whether terms are used accurately or not. I understand the temptation – imprecise use of language is an annoyance of mine, but it’s also an inevitability we should all learn to cope with. The best we can do is try to carefully define our own terms for other people, and pay attention to others’ definitions when they are provided, and discuss the actual ideas rather than fuss over the words.
Having now grasped the fundamental role that language plays in the human experience, we can move on to another foundational topic which has been sprinkled throughout our preceding conversation. That topic is the theory and limits of knowledge, or as it is known in philosophy, epistemology.