How Language Connects Mind, World, and Reality

The Chinese characters for not only ‘meaning’ but for ‘connotation, denotation, import, gist, substance, significance, signification, implication, suggestion, consequence, worth, nuance, association, subtext, sense’ — and more!

Posted by Keith Tidman

‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, observed the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his 1922 book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. To that point, we might ask: How does language relate to the world? And, more particularly, does language shape human experience — our shared reality and our individual reality? Built into these questions is another — about how language connects mind and world, and in doing so arbitrates our experience of what’s around us.

At a fundamental level, words and ideas describe the world through things (people, horses, pomegranates), properties (purple, octagon, scratchy surface), relations (the moon is 384,000 kilometres from Earth, the flu virus infects millions of people globally, the calamari sits on her mezze plate), and abstractions (thought, value, meaning, belief). That is, language serves to create and aggregate knowledge, understanding, and experience. That’s broadly how we know what we know about reality. But language — the sounds made as people talk and the inscriptions made as they write — is more than just, say, a meta-tool for informational exchanges.

That is, people issue commands, share jokes, welcome visitors, pledge allegiances, pose questions, admonish, lie, explain feelings, threaten, share stories, exaggerate, sing, and so on. Body language (a suddenly raised eyebrow, perhaps) and tone (gruffness or ecstasy, perhaps) add an important layer. An observation by Willard Van Orman Quine, the 20th-century American philosopher, that ‘Language is a social art’, rightly captures this function of language in our lives. There’s a complex harmonising between what we infer and internalize about purported reality and the various kinds of things, properties, and relations that actually exist.

Language thus shapes our thoughts and changes how we think. The relation between thought (mind) and language is synergistic — that is, the combined effect of language and thought is greater than their separate effects. In this manner, a Chickasaw speaker, a Tagalog speaker, an Urdu speaker, a Russian speaker, and an English speaker perceive reality differently — the fundamental building blocks of which are words. As the British philosopher J.L. Austin noted:

‘Going back into the history of a word . . . we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done’.

The tie, we might say, between language and perceptions (‘pictures’ and ‘models’) — both concrete and abstract — of how reality, in all its nuance and complexity, plays out.

Correspondingly, the many subtle differences across the world’s roughly 7,000 languages — across vocabularies and other linguistic elements — frame and constrain the way we experience the world. That is, languages differ enough to lead to singularly dissimilar views of reality. Word choice, meaning (both denotation and connotation), syntax, metaphors, grammar, gender, figures of speech, correlation and causality, intent and expectation, and context all influence our perception of the world.

It is thus understandable, amidst this mix of languages’ ingredients, for the German-American philosopher Rudolf Carnap, writing in the mid-20th century,  to have counseled, ‘Let us . . . be tolerant in permitting linguistic forms’. Whether despite or because of this mix, language directly influences culture, which in turn bears on how we talk and what we talk about. Cultural norms influence this process. Yet, notwithstanding the power of perceptions, there is a world independent of language — empirically knowable — even if external reality may not be independent of observation and measurement. Galaxies and microbes exist.

As one illustration where language intervenes upon reality, it has been pointed out that the Native American language Nootka has actions as its principal classification of words. Emphasis is on verbs that describe reality not as physical objects (where subjects act upon objects) but as transitory occurrences — like ‘a meal occurs’ — or longer lived — like ‘shelter occurs’. The result ‘delineates’ the Nootka notion of reality, distinguishing it from others’. It is in the context of this rather expansive view of language that Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, is surely right in saying:

‘A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language’.

Extending this theme, of tying together usage and perspective, in some languages there is no front, back, left, and right; instead, there is north, south, east, or west of something — a geographical kind of view of place. Two languages with just such a sense of location and cardinal direction are Guugu Yimithirr, which is an aboriginal language from Australia, and Sambali, spoken in a province of the Philippines. Another example entails agency for an accidental action: ‘Sebastian, the lead lab scientist, dropped the test tube’ (agency pinpointed, as in English) versus ‘The test tube dropped’ (agency hidden, as in Japanese). These rich differences among languages have implications that ripple across society, affecting, for example, values, norms, law, economics, and political policy.

We might argue that the plasticity of language — and the consequential differences in how language, over time, shapes our understanding of reality — affects how the mind distinguishes between fact and fiction. This observation hints at the subjectivity associated with postmodernism in defining the truth and falsity of perceived reality — at least in a linguistic context. In this view, a subjectively conscious reality — differing among the native speakers of diverse languages — and the external world do not intersect, or if they do, it is but imperfectly.

As such, purported knowledge, understanding, and belief are likely to be contested among partisan cultures, each embracing its own conventions regarding how the mind might describe the world. Writing in the mid-20th century, Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida pointed to this issue of defensively shielding one’s own language, saying:

‘No one gets angry at . . . someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather with someone who tampers with your own language’.

And yet, with Derrida’s cautionary words in mind, whose truth and falsity is it? And whose perspective is valid, or at least the most valid (that is, the least flawed)? Does it come down to simply a catalogue of rules for usage prescribed within each community speaking and writing a particular language? Perhaps J.L. Austin got it right in opining, ‘Sentences are not as such either true or false’.

Perhaps, too, it is as Humpty Dumpty famously declared in Lewis Carroll’s book, Through the Looking Glass, when he said:

 ‘When I use a word,  it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less’.

That’s not too far off from the latest thinking about language, actually. Why so? It’s not only that different languages seem to lead to a different knowledge, understanding, and experience of reality within the mind. Rather, the effects of language seem more granular than that: Users within each of the world’s thousands of languages have different understanding of reality than even their fellow native speakers of those languages.

There are thus two levels of reality in the mind’s eye: one based on shared languages, such as Norwegian, Khmer, and Maori. And one based on individuals within each language group whose personalised understanding and application of language uniquely and subtly differs from one person to another — quite apart from the differences in how, as individuals, we stamp our customs and norms on language.

The Land Rover Problem

By Thomas Scarborough

Imagine that I hold in my hand a single part of a 1958 Land Rover – say, a rear stub axle. Being an open-minded sort of person, I try to fit this part to any which motor parts I may find in the whole world. I continue to fit such parts together until I reach the complete termination of my plan. Not surprisingly, I end up with a 1958 Land Rover, complete in itself. Of course, I say to myself – being an enlightened man – that the appearence of a 1958 Land Rover might well have been pure chance. I therefore start all over again – only to end up with a 1958 Land Rover, again.

I shall call it The Land Rover Problem. It is, in my view, the biggest problem that the 21st century philosopher needs to overcome, before we may create a new metaphysic or total philosophy – a philosophy which describes not merely aspects of reality, but the whole of it. No matter where we start, and no matter how far our search reaches into all of reality, the end result is as pre-determined as the 1958 Land Rover. The problem lies in the method of starting with a single part – or in some cases, ending up with it. We might, after all, disassemble a 1958 Land Rover, to see which of its many parts remains in our hands in the end.

The philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard might have been the first to understand this, when he wrote in Either/Or that ‘people of experience maintain that it is very sensible to start from a principle.' Say, boredom. Thus he demonstrated how one (arbitrary) principle will explain the whole world. Just over a century later, the philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen wrote that we are 'thoroughly dominated by an unacknowledged metaphysics'. Even before we set out on a metaphysic, they wrote, we already have one. It is in the nature of the parts to deliver the result. More recently, the philosopher Jacques Derrida famously defined the problem as ‘a process of giving [reality] a centre or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin’.

How then shall we overcome this problem?

Basically, the trouble lies in the way that we attach the parts one to another – in philosophy, our concepts. We are stuck with a Land Rover model of philosophy. This applies both to moderns and to postmoderns, with the difference that postmoderns, while they do not have a way out, are more acutely aware of the problem: ultimately, no matter where we start, and no matter how far our search reaches into all of reality, our thoughts deliver relatively useless constructions – complete in themselves, yet like the 1958 Land Rover, giving us little indication as to their real scope or merit.

Logically, there is only one way of escape, and no other. Instead of constructing philosophies by attaching concept to concept, we may stand back, as it were, to view all the concepts in the world from a distance. Imagine that we scatter every conceivable motor part of every make and model – the 1958 Land Rover, the 1961 Beetle, the 2005 Mustang, the 2008 Roadster, and of many thousands of assemblages more, over a practically infinite expanse. If then we could recognise any patterns or insights here, in this expanse – call them meta-features – we may discover another way of seeing things.

What might we then see?

Of course, we would see that no assemblage is ultimate. The 1958 Land Rover, as an example, would merely be one possible construction among many. We would recognise, too, that if we were to build only a 1958 Land Rover, we would exclude every other assemblage – or to apply this to philosophy, every competing metaphysic. These are core insights of postmodernism. Yet we would see far more than this. Once we have grasped that we are dealing with an innumerable totality of parts – which is concepts – we shall no longer be satisfied with a self-centred or parochial view of the world, but shall think expansively and holistically. Nor shall we interpret our world from a narrow point of view: ethnic, religious, ideological, economic, or scientific, among many more. We shall reject the narrow view.

Further, instead of standing self-importantly beside a 1958 Land Rover, we shall see that our construction, in the context of an innumerable totality of parts – which is concepts – is very limited. A practical infinity of concepts lies beyond our power to explain, and beyond our control. This has obvious consequences. There will always be things without number which lie beyond our own arrangement of concepts, which set a limit to our powers. Therefore any ideas of progress, advancement, development, even utopia, open the door to hubris, and failure. Similarly, we shall recognise that, to overcome our finitude, we shall (impossibly) need infinite control. This drives totalising urges: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, and over-legislation, to give but a few examples – which have led to damaged lives and disasters without number.

Much more may be said, but the point is this: on the basis of the meta-features of the totality of parts, it is possible to reach definite conclusions about the most important things in life. There is a way forward for philosophy, if we will only abandon the Land Rover model, step back, view our world as an infinite expanse of concepts, and see what we may discern through this.