Sorry if this will be confused; I am reading Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, and seems to me that one of the main ideas in the book is that our perception of the world gets encoded in the language, and then the usage of the old-style language is an obstacle for the new improved models of the world.
For example, when the words don’t exactly correspond to the territory, but they are in everyone’s vocabulary. No matter how much we learned about the Solar system, we still talk about how “Sun rises”. Despite having separate words for “time” and “space”, to understand relativity one has to understand that they are not separate; that there is actually a “space-time”. People debate whether some behavior is caused by genes or caused by environment, while in fact it is a result of some specific genes in some specific environment.
So… maybe we should update our language to represent correctly our current scientific knowledge? And maybe that would remove a few unconscious obstacles, and thus make us all a bit more rational? (Don’t ask me how to do that specifically. I haven’t finished reading the book yet.)
And it’s not just the individual words, but also the way of typically using them, which reflects some implicit assumptions. If I understand Korzybski’s argument correctly, the “Aristotelian” way of using language is having nouns which represent some kind of essence, and then attaching various attributes to these nouns. The newer, “non-Aristotelian” way of using language describes structures, relationships between the parts.
As an example, imagine an ancient myth, where the creator of the world first created e.g. the grass, and only afterwards decided to give the grass a green color. In the language of nouns and adjectives this makes perfect sense: there was a noun, and later it received an adjective. In the language of science, it’s like: WTF?! did the original ‘colorless’ grass contain chloroplasts or didn’t it? Even if we try to go along with the story, adding chloroplasts is not merely a change of adjective: it means radically changing the functionality of the plant. -- An important part of rational thinking is seeing the world as a mechanism of gears, instead of a set of black-box essences that mysteriously get assigned some adjectives.
This reminds me of how some people try to pretend knowledge in some area by learning a few keywords, and then using them in a wrong way. They have the correct “nouns” and “adjectives”, but they lack the “structure”.
FYI eliezer recommended language in thought and action over Science and Sanity.
So… maybe we should update our language to represent correctly our current scientific knowledge? And maybe that would remove a few unconscious obstacles, and thus make us all a bit more rational? (Don’t ask me how to do that specifically. I haven’t finished reading the book yet.)
The whorfian hypothesis states that our perception of reality is determined by our thought processes, which are influenced by the language we use. In this way language shapes our reality and tells us how to think about and respond to that reality. Generally, the Whorfian hypothesis is seen as too extreme and it makes more sense to talk about the question of linguistic relativity in terms of degree instead of absoluteness or determinism. But, the hypothesis is not totally wrong either. Language plays a role in shaping our thoughts and in modifying our perception. So, I suppose changing the language might help. The thing with language, though, is that it is many ways a product of the people who use it. Through use it evolves and changes. So, I think you have it the wrong way around. Controlling or tampering with the language that people use is going to be very hard, but once you change people’s paradigms then this will flow into the language and it will change naturally .
On a related note, I would suspect that quantum theory would be easier for people to comprehend if we had a more native american world view. There is book called Blackfoot Physics around this idea.
Thanks, I already forgot that debate. Now it makes much more sense after I’ve seen the book!
Re: whorfian hypothesis—I guess the important thing when debating the impact of language on perception is to be specific about which parts of the language impact which parts of perception. For example, if the language instead of one word for “blue” uses two different words for “light blue” and “dark blue”, it may make the people perceive things about colors differently (i.e. where a person from one culture would insist that two objects have ‘the same color’, a person from another culture would insist they have ‘two different colors’), but ultimately the effect is limited to thinking about colors in some part of color spectrum. But this specific mapping of language differences to perception differences is usually ignored, and people just give a few language differences, often trivial, and then claim that any change of perception can happen.
Sorry if this will be confused; I am reading Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, and seems to me that one of the main ideas in the book is that our perception of the world gets encoded in the language, and then the usage of the old-style language is an obstacle for the new improved models of the world.
For example, when the words don’t exactly correspond to the territory, but they are in everyone’s vocabulary. No matter how much we learned about the Solar system, we still talk about how “Sun rises”. Despite having separate words for “time” and “space”, to understand relativity one has to understand that they are not separate; that there is actually a “space-time”. People debate whether some behavior is caused by genes or caused by environment, while in fact it is a result of some specific genes in some specific environment.
So… maybe we should update our language to represent correctly our current scientific knowledge? And maybe that would remove a few unconscious obstacles, and thus make us all a bit more rational? (Don’t ask me how to do that specifically. I haven’t finished reading the book yet.)
And it’s not just the individual words, but also the way of typically using them, which reflects some implicit assumptions. If I understand Korzybski’s argument correctly, the “Aristotelian” way of using language is having nouns which represent some kind of essence, and then attaching various attributes to these nouns. The newer, “non-Aristotelian” way of using language describes structures, relationships between the parts.
As an example, imagine an ancient myth, where the creator of the world first created e.g. the grass, and only afterwards decided to give the grass a green color. In the language of nouns and adjectives this makes perfect sense: there was a noun, and later it received an adjective. In the language of science, it’s like: WTF?! did the original ‘colorless’ grass contain chloroplasts or didn’t it? Even if we try to go along with the story, adding chloroplasts is not merely a change of adjective: it means radically changing the functionality of the plant. -- An important part of rational thinking is seeing the world as a mechanism of gears, instead of a set of black-box essences that mysteriously get assigned some adjectives.
This reminds me of how some people try to pretend knowledge in some area by learning a few keywords, and then using them in a wrong way. They have the correct “nouns” and “adjectives”, but they lack the “structure”.
FYI eliezer recommended language in thought and action over Science and Sanity.
The whorfian hypothesis states that our perception of reality is determined by our thought processes, which are influenced by the language we use. In this way language shapes our reality and tells us how to think about and respond to that reality. Generally, the Whorfian hypothesis is seen as too extreme and it makes more sense to talk about the question of linguistic relativity in terms of degree instead of absoluteness or determinism. But, the hypothesis is not totally wrong either. Language plays a role in shaping our thoughts and in modifying our perception. So, I suppose changing the language might help. The thing with language, though, is that it is many ways a product of the people who use it. Through use it evolves and changes. So, I think you have it the wrong way around. Controlling or tampering with the language that people use is going to be very hard, but once you change people’s paradigms then this will flow into the language and it will change naturally .
On a related note, I would suspect that quantum theory would be easier for people to comprehend if we had a more native american world view. There is book called Blackfoot Physics around this idea.
Thanks, I already forgot that debate. Now it makes much more sense after I’ve seen the book!
Re: whorfian hypothesis—I guess the important thing when debating the impact of language on perception is to be specific about which parts of the language impact which parts of perception. For example, if the language instead of one word for “blue” uses two different words for “light blue” and “dark blue”, it may make the people perceive things about colors differently (i.e. where a person from one culture would insist that two objects have ‘the same color’, a person from another culture would insist they have ‘two different colors’), but ultimately the effect is limited to thinking about colors in some part of color spectrum. But this specific mapping of language differences to perception differences is usually ignored, and people just give a few language differences, often trivial, and then claim that any change of perception can happen.