I have heard in particular that this is true of German. “German has no word for ‘mind’” is how I have heard it put.
As you are a native German speaker, could give us, as a case study in the phenomenon, an account of how one talks in German about the range of things that in English would be called mental phenomena? Google Translate suggests for “mind” the words der Geist, der Verstand, die Meining, der Sinn, die Gedanken, die Sinne, das Gemüt, das Denken, das Gedächtnis, and das Gehirn, but a dictionary, still less Google Translate, can’t tell me the nuances being expressed here. (However, the first two seem to be of similar breadth to “mind”, the others being more about specific faculties.) Are there differences in what can be easily said, or are English and German on this subject as interchangeable as rectangular and polar coordinates?
I have heard in particular that this is true of German. “German has no word for ‘mind’” is how I have heard it put.
While we are at the topic of German/Anglo differences I would start with what I learned in my first philosophy course. It was an extracurricular activity.
In it the teacher explained to us that the talk of schools of philosophical thought and that a philosopher is either being a member of school A or school B is one of those things that the Anglo’s like to do.
That’s particular annoying when American’s talk about Democrat and Republican political thought and suggest that you are either a Democrat or a Republican and that someone dictates your political beliefs.
German intellectual thought has the ideal of “Bildung”. Anna Wierzbicka tells me that “Bildung” is a particularly German construct. According to it you learn about different view points and then you develop a sophisticated opinion. Not having a sophisticated opinion is low class. In liberal social circles in the US a person who agrees with what the Democratic party does at every point in time would have a respectable political opinion. In German intellectual life that person would be seen as a credulous low status idiot you fails to develop a sophisticated opinion.
If you ask me a political question of: “Do you support A or B.” my response is to say: “Well, I neither want A or B. There are these reasons for A, these reasons for B. My opinion is that we should do C that solves those problems better and takes more concerns into account.” It’s not like A is the high status option and I can signal status by saying that I’m for A.
If we take the issue of hardcore materialism, then a statement like: “One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood.” wouldn’t be a statement that can be objectively true because it’s about teleology. The notion of function isn’t made up of atoms.
There’s little to be gained to proscribing to the hardcore materalist perspective and it makes a lot of practical sense to say that such as statement can be objectively true. That means gotten a more sophisticated view of the world. Not only statements that are about arrangements of atoms can be objectively true but also statements about the functions of organs. That move is high status in German intellecutal discourse but it might be low status in Anglo-discourse because it can be seen as being a traitor to the school of materalism.
Of course that doesn’t mean that no Anglo accepts that the statement can be objectively true, but on the margin German intellectual norms make it easier.
After Hegel you might say that thesis and antithesis come together to a synthesis instead of thesis or antithesis winning the argument.
Are there differences in what can be easily said, or are English and German on this subject as interchangeable as rectangular and polar coordinates?
You can translate “I change my mind” with “Ich ändere meine Meinung” but neither “Geist” nor “Verstand” would be appropriate in that context. The closed English word to Meinung would be opinion.
It’s likely possible to write a book about the difference between how German’s and Anglo’s talk about mental processes.
German intellectual thought has the ideal of “Bildung”. Anna Wierzbicka tells me that “Bildung” is a particularly German construct. According to it you learn about different view points and then you develop a sophisticated opinion. Not having a sophisticated opinion is low class. In liberal social circles in the US a person who agrees with what the Democratic party does at every point in time would have a respectable political opinion. In German intellectual life that person would be seen as a credulous low status idiot you fails to develop a sophisticated opinion.
I’ve actually been told, by someone with more social skills than myself, to stop articulating complex political opinions because it makes me seem indecisive and weak.
If we were just talking modern politics rather than philosophy, then, well, apologies for being tactless, but I would suspect that the difference is that in Germany, showing too much loyalty to a political party is a reminder of Nazism. The US hasn’t had similar authoritarianism, so there isn’t the aversion to excessive party loyalty. Moreover, if German culture has always rewarded more balanced, sophisticated political views, then I am surprised that fascism did take hold in Germany.
Moreover, if German culture has always rewarded more balanced, sophisticated political views, then I am surprised that fascism did take hold in Germany.
I haven’t said “balanced”. You pattern match against an existing context when I talk about a pattern that doesn’t exist in English in the same way.
Apart from that it’s true that Nazism was anti-intellectual while Bildung is a value of the intellectual class.
Nazism also didn’t win in the 30′s in a two sided conflict. The political sphere at that time wasn’t one-dimensional.
Anna Wierzbicka tells me that “Bildung” is a particularly German construct. According to it you learn about different view points and then you develop a sophisticated opinion.
Isn’t it “you learn about different viewpoints and then you invade Poland”? Do the Russians have a similar construct?
In English you have a whole cloud of related words: mind, brain, soul, I, self, consciousness, intelligence. I don’t think it’s much of a problem that German does not have perfect match for “mind”. The “mind-body-Problem” would be “Leib-Seele-Problem”, where “seele” would usually be translated as “soul”. The German wikipedia page for philosophy of mind does use the English word “mind” once to distinguish that meaning for “Geist” from a different concept from Hegel that I never heard about before (“Weltgeist”).
Then again I don’t have much need to discuss philosophy of mind with the people around me, so maybe that’s why I don’t feel the need for a German word is more like “mind”.
But I do have massive problems with talking about epistemological concepts in German. Help from other German speakers would be very welcome. I don’t know how to talk about “degrees of belief” in German. Or how to call those things that get updated when we learn new evidence (“beliefs” in English).
If you translate the noun “a belief” into German (“ein Glaube”) and back into English, it will always come out as “faith” (as in ” the Buddhist faith” or in “having faith in redemption”). A different candidate would be “Überzeugung”, but that literally means conviction (something you belief with absolute certainty). Hardly seems like a good word for talking about uncertainty. Wikipedia uses “Grad an Überzeugung” to translate “degrees of belief”, but gives the English in parentheses to make sure the meaning is clear. I don’t like it. “Eine Überzeugung” sounds wrong.
“Evidence” is another difficult one. The closest might be “Beweis”, but that means “proof”. Then there is “Evidenz”, but I’ve only ever seen that word used to translate “evidence based medicine”. The average German would be unlikely to know that word.
But I wonder if Less Wrong has given me a skewed view of the English language. Maybe the way LW uses “belief” wouldn’t feel so natural to the average native speaker. Maybe the average native speaker has quite a different notion of what “evidence” means.
Native English speaker, so I may be way off… but surely ‘beliefs’ would be ‘Verständnis’? And for ‘evidence’, wouldn’t you usually use a verb (‘to provide evidence’) instead of a noun, something like ‘unterstützen’?
“Verständnis” seems totally wrong to me. It’s from the verb “verstehen” (to understand, to comprehend). It usually means “understanding” (“meinem Verständnis nach” → “according to my understanding”). Maybe if you use it in a sentence?
I think “Vermutung” (and it’s synonyms) is pretty much what I was looking for. Maybe it’s even better than “belief” in some ways, since “belief” suggests a higher degree of confidence than “Vermutung” does.
“unterstützen” (to support something) seems right, thanks. But it’s useful to have nouns. Also “das unterstützt deine Behauptung nicht” is much wordier than “that’s not evidence”.
“Evidenz ist all das, was eine Vermutung unterstützt.”
I have heard in particular that this is true of German. “German has no word for ‘mind’” is how I have heard it put.
As you are a native German speaker, could give us, as a case study in the phenomenon, an account of how one talks in German about the range of things that in English would be called mental phenomena? Google Translate suggests for “mind” the words der Geist, der Verstand, die Meining, der Sinn, die Gedanken, die Sinne, das Gemüt, das Denken, das Gedächtnis, and das Gehirn, but a dictionary, still less Google Translate, can’t tell me the nuances being expressed here. (However, the first two seem to be of similar breadth to “mind”, the others being more about specific faculties.) Are there differences in what can be easily said, or are English and German on this subject as interchangeable as rectangular and polar coordinates?
While we are at the topic of German/Anglo differences I would start with what I learned in my first philosophy course. It was an extracurricular activity. In it the teacher explained to us that the talk of schools of philosophical thought and that a philosopher is either being a member of school A or school B is one of those things that the Anglo’s like to do.
That’s particular annoying when American’s talk about Democrat and Republican political thought and suggest that you are either a Democrat or a Republican and that someone dictates your political beliefs.
German intellectual thought has the ideal of “Bildung”. Anna Wierzbicka tells me that “Bildung” is a particularly German construct. According to it you learn about different view points and then you develop a sophisticated opinion. Not having a sophisticated opinion is low class. In liberal social circles in the US a person who agrees with what the Democratic party does at every point in time would have a respectable political opinion. In German intellectual life that person would be seen as a credulous low status idiot you fails to develop a sophisticated opinion.
If you ask me a political question of: “Do you support A or B.” my response is to say: “Well, I neither want A or B. There are these reasons for A, these reasons for B. My opinion is that we should do C that solves those problems better and takes more concerns into account.” It’s not like A is the high status option and I can signal status by saying that I’m for A.
If we take the issue of hardcore materialism, then a statement like: “One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood.” wouldn’t be a statement that can be objectively true because it’s about teleology. The notion of function isn’t made up of atoms.
There’s little to be gained to proscribing to the hardcore materalist perspective and it makes a lot of practical sense to say that such as statement can be objectively true. That means gotten a more sophisticated view of the world. Not only statements that are about arrangements of atoms can be objectively true but also statements about the functions of organs. That move is high status in German intellecutal discourse but it might be low status in Anglo-discourse because it can be seen as being a traitor to the school of materalism.
Of course that doesn’t mean that no Anglo accepts that the statement can be objectively true, but on the margin German intellectual norms make it easier. After Hegel you might say that thesis and antithesis come together to a synthesis instead of thesis or antithesis winning the argument.
You can translate “I change my mind” with “Ich ändere meine Meinung” but neither “Geist” nor “Verstand” would be appropriate in that context. The closed English word to Meinung would be opinion.
It’s likely possible to write a book about the difference between how German’s and Anglo’s talk about mental processes.
I’ve actually been told, by someone with more social skills than myself, to stop articulating complex political opinions because it makes me seem indecisive and weak.
If we were just talking modern politics rather than philosophy, then, well, apologies for being tactless, but I would suspect that the difference is that in Germany, showing too much loyalty to a political party is a reminder of Nazism. The US hasn’t had similar authoritarianism, so there isn’t the aversion to excessive party loyalty. Moreover, if German culture has always rewarded more balanced, sophisticated political views, then I am surprised that fascism did take hold in Germany.
I haven’t said “balanced”. You pattern match against an existing context when I talk about a pattern that doesn’t exist in English in the same way.
Apart from that it’s true that Nazism was anti-intellectual while Bildung is a value of the intellectual class. Nazism also didn’t win in the 30′s in a two sided conflict. The political sphere at that time wasn’t one-dimensional.
Isn’t it “you learn about different viewpoints and then you invade Poland”? Do the Russians have a similar construct?
X-D
As aI said Anna Wierzbicka considers it unique to the German language. She wouldn’t say that if the concept would exist the same way in Russian.
A different German speaker here.
In English you have a whole cloud of related words: mind, brain, soul, I, self, consciousness, intelligence. I don’t think it’s much of a problem that German does not have perfect match for “mind”. The “mind-body-Problem” would be “Leib-Seele-Problem”, where “seele” would usually be translated as “soul”. The German wikipedia page for philosophy of mind does use the English word “mind” once to distinguish that meaning for “Geist” from a different concept from Hegel that I never heard about before (“Weltgeist”).
Then again I don’t have much need to discuss philosophy of mind with the people around me, so maybe that’s why I don’t feel the need for a German word is more like “mind”.
But I do have massive problems with talking about epistemological concepts in German. Help from other German speakers would be very welcome. I don’t know how to talk about “degrees of belief” in German. Or how to call those things that get updated when we learn new evidence (“beliefs” in English).
If you translate the noun “a belief” into German (“ein Glaube”) and back into English, it will always come out as “faith” (as in ” the Buddhist faith” or in “having faith in redemption”). A different candidate would be “Überzeugung”, but that literally means conviction (something you belief with absolute certainty). Hardly seems like a good word for talking about uncertainty. Wikipedia uses “Grad an Überzeugung” to translate “degrees of belief”, but gives the English in parentheses to make sure the meaning is clear. I don’t like it. “Eine Überzeugung” sounds wrong.
“Evidence” is another difficult one. The closest might be “Beweis”, but that means “proof”. Then there is “Evidenz”, but I’ve only ever seen that word used to translate “evidence based medicine”. The average German would be unlikely to know that word.
But I wonder if Less Wrong has given me a skewed view of the English language. Maybe the way LW uses “belief” wouldn’t feel so natural to the average native speaker. Maybe the average native speaker has quite a different notion of what “evidence” means.
Native English speaker, so I may be way off… but surely ‘beliefs’ would be ‘Verständnis’? And for ‘evidence’, wouldn’t you usually use a verb (‘to provide evidence’) instead of a noun, something like ‘unterstützen’?
“Verständnis” seems totally wrong to me. It’s from the verb “verstehen” (to understand, to comprehend). It usually means “understanding” (“meinem Verständnis nach” → “according to my understanding”). Maybe if you use it in a sentence?
I think “Vermutung” (and it’s synonyms) is pretty much what I was looking for. Maybe it’s even better than “belief” in some ways, since “belief” suggests a higher degree of confidence than “Vermutung” does.
“unterstützen” (to support something) seems right, thanks. But it’s useful to have nouns. Also “das unterstützt deine Behauptung nicht” is much wordier than “that’s not evidence”.
“Evidenz ist all das, was eine Vermutung unterstützt.”
I don’t usually make a mental distinction between understanding and belief, but that is probably not common.