The power of language to shape our reality
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” observed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. We might ask, accordingly, how does language shape reality, arbitrating human experience of the world surrounding us?
Words and ideas describe the world through things (people, pomegranates), properties (purple, scratchy surface), relations (the moon is 384,000 kilometers from Earth) and abstractions (thought, value, meaning, belief ). Language creates and aggregates knowledge, understanding and experience. That’s how we grasp reality. But language — what people say and write — is more than a handy tool for exchanges of information.
People also 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 raised eyebrow) and tone (gruffness) add layers. As philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine observed, “language is a social art.” There’s a harmonizing between what we infer and internalize about reality and the mix of things, properties and relations.
Language thus shapes our thoughts. 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, speakers of Chickasaw, Tagalog, Urdu, Russian, English and other languages perceive reality differently from one another.
As thinker 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”; there is a tie between language and perceptions (“pictures” and “models”) of how reality, in its complexity, plays out.
Correspondingly, the many differences across the world’s 7,000 languages — across vocabularies and linguistic elements — frame how we experience the world. Languages differ enough to lead to dissimilar views of reality. Word choice, meaning, syntax, metaphors, grammar, gender, figures of speech,
causality and context all influence our perception of the world.
It is thus understandable for the theorist Rudolf Carnap to counsel, “Let us … be tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.” Language directly influences culture, which in turn influences how we talk and what we say. Cultural norms also influence this process.
Yet, notwithstanding the power of perceptions, there is a world independent of language — knowable through experience — even if external reality is not divorced from observation and measurement. Yes, galaxies and microbes exist.
It is in an expansive view of language that linguist Noam Chomsky is 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.”
We might argue that the plasticity of language — and the differences in how language shapes our understanding of reality — affects how the mind distinguishes fact and fiction. This observation hints at the subjectivity associated with defining truth and falsity. In this view, a subjectively conscious reality, differing among the native speakers of diverse languages, and the external world do not perfectly intersect.
As such, knowledge, understanding and belief are contested among cultures, each embracing its own conventions regarding how the mind describes the world. Philosopher Jacques Derrida pointed to this issue of 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 caution in mind, whose truth and falsity is it? And whose perspective is the most valid? Does it come down to a catalog of rules for usage prescribed within each community speaking and writing a language? Perhaps J.L. Austin got it right: “Sentences are not as such either true or false.”
Perhaps, too, it is as Humpty Dumpty 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 from the latest thinking about language. Why so? It’s not only that different languages lead to different knowledge, understanding and experience of reality. The effects of language are more granular: Users within each language have a different understanding of reality than even their fellow 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 whose personalized understanding and application of language differs from one person to another.