Stanford neuroscientist Lera Boroditsky has an interesting article on how the languages we speak shape the way we think. She notes that the consensus in her field is that “people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.” This idea isn’t new (though the wide acceptance of it may be). In 1929, the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf introduced the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which popularized the idea that language is used not only to express our thoughts but help to shape them too. As Sapir wrote in The Status of Linguistics as a Science:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
In linguistics, this explanation for the way that language relates to thought is known as a mould theory since it “represents language as a mould in terms of which thought categories are cast.” In his book Toward a More Natural Science, Leon Kass, former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, provides a striking example:
Consider the views of life and the world reflected in the following different expressions to describe the process of generating new life. Ancient Israel, impressed with the phenomenon of transmission of life from father to son, used a word we translate as ‘begetting’ or ‘siring.’ The Greeks, impressed with the springing forth of new life in the cyclical processes of generation and decay, called it genesis, from a root meaning ‘to come into being.’ . . . The premodern Christian English-speaking world, impressed with the world as a given by a Creator, used the term ‘pro-creation.’ We, impressed with the machine and the gross national product (our own work of creation), employ a metaphor of the factory, ‘re-production.’
When you stop to consider the differences between such phrases as “methods of procreation” and “reproductive technology” it begins to become clear why social conservatives are losing ground in the fight to preserve the concept of human dignity. Any attempt to argue that embryonic human life is deserving of a particular moral status is undercut when we are using such phrases as ‘blastocysts produced by the technological advances of in vitro fertilization.” The language of the factory and of human dignity is as incompatible as would be the interchangeability of machine and life. Such degradation of language only leads to linguistic confusion and muddy thinking.
We are, of course, aware of the inherent power—particularly the political power—of words. For decades, both sides of the culture war over have abortion have attempted to ensure that their preferred terms— pro-life, abortion rights, etc.—seep into the media’s vernacular. While they are certainly overvalued, these words still retain their political usefulness as the struggle over their usages attest. But we cannot stop there. The preservation of human dignity requires us to fight for the hearts and souls of our fellow man and in order to do so, we must first reclaim the linguistic high ground. As the Southern conservative Richard Weaver famously expressed, ideas have consequences. If we are to have a significant impact on our culture we would do well to recognize that words have consequences too.
June 30th, 2009 | 8:08 am
Josef Pieper’s “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power” is another valuable resource. I find the ubiquitous “kids” particularly painful (not to mention “moms”, dads”) instead of “mother”, “father”, and “children”. The older words are rooted in the ages and provide content for the way we think about these things. The way we speak does indeed matter.
June 30th, 2009 | 9:14 am
A well-made point, although any linguists in the audience will immediately begin snarling and forming battle lines over the ever-controversial Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
Personally, I would refer us to the Analects of Confucius, Book 13, Verse 3, concerning “zhengming,” the Rectification of Names.
““If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”
The reference is here: http://www.analects-ink.com/mission/Confucius_Rectification.html
Having no knowledge of classical Chinese, I cannot comment as to the quality of the translation, as other versions have many slight differences as to sense.
June 30th, 2009 | 9:44 am
Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass), George Orwell (Animal Farm and 1984), and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (“Defining Deviancy Down”, American Scholar, Winter 1003), and many others have long recognized that not only do words matter, but that their meanings can be bent to good or ill effect.
Sometimes this bending is deliberate and sometimes it results from the imprecision of intellectual laziness. How words are defined can transform behaviors, previously considered deviant, into socially accepted and even celebrated norms.
Consider the contemporary usage of “choice.” Because the ones whose very lives are at stake have no vote in the choice, it is a perverse usage persistently cultivated with the aim of making palatable an intrinsically evil act.
There are many other examples of course:
• The meaning of marriage is in danger of becoming so distorted that the Defense of Marriage Act, Proposition 8 in California, and other legal actions have been become necessary to defend its long recognized definition—a definition that spans virtually every moral system throughout history.
• “Inclusive” has become a trump-all virtue and its antonym, “exclusive”, a universal pejorative. The terms and their variants are used promiscuously to silence those seeking to maintain traditional behavioral norms.
• “Divisive” is another argument-stopper. If you can’t offer a rational argument, just accuse your opponent of being divisive. But, a question: what’s wrong with being divisive? To our eternal salvation, Christ was divisive. So were many of the saints. So were the founders of our nation. So were the abolitionists. So were the civil rights marchers. Again, in contemporary usage the word “divisive” is often used as a cudgel against those who don’t share the progressive (another word whose meaning has been distorted) viewpoint.
• “Tolerance” is the overarching principle to excuse all manner of deviance and sin. The evolution of “tolerance” has been pernicious but subtle. For example, tolerance is now held by many to be a Christian virtue. It is not and, although it is often a good working principle, its invocation does not trump every other argument. Unlike the true virtues—think Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance—tolerance is contingent, never an end itself.
As Pope Benedict XVI (then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) proposes in his book, Truth and Tolerance—Christian Belief and World Religions: “Truth and love are identical. This sentence—if the whole of its demand is understood—is the surest guarantee of tolerance; of an association with truth, whose only weapon is itself and, thereby, love.” Moral tolerance implies the absence of objective truth, leading to moral relativism and, ultimately, to sin.
June 30th, 2009 | 10:00 am
Another wonderful essay to read regarding language: Orwells’s Politics and the English Language
http://www.george-orwell.org/Politics_and_the_English_Language/0.html
June 30th, 2009 | 11:26 pm
You’re right, Paul! Time to begin sneering. (They’re not even linguists, they’re anthropologists! Grumble, grumble.)
I’m a linguist, and I would like to point out that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is concerned with the defining characteristics of languages– their grammars. So while vocabulary is interesting, and we love to analyze it, grammar is what really shapes thought, and what has a profound effect on culture. Imagine teaching history in a language that has no past tense, for example. Or consider that the equivalent of “Good job!” in Russian has no feminine form, and think about the role of women in Russian society. Grammar’s what makes the difference, not the availability of certain words. After all, languages add foreign borrowings all the time, but their speakers don’t adapt their worldviews nearly so readily.
Of course, the recent trend of political “correctness” does influence the way people think, by obscuring what people really mean. But as much of that is accomplished with grammar as with vocabulary. Fetus and blastocyst are nouns, mere things. “Unborn child” has a verb form in it, and more of a sense of action and potential. It’s hard to separate grammar and vocabulary, since it’s nearly impossible to use one without the other.
(Proof that this isn’t just linguistic pretension: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis)
(And a side note– linguists don’t generally mind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But it is almost always quoted with that pesky ellipsis in the middle, making it ambiguous and leading people to misunderstand the point.)
July 1st, 2009 | 1:03 pm
[...] I mentioned yesterday, when it comes to issues of bioethics the “degradation of language only leads to linguistic [...]
July 1st, 2009 | 5:07 pm
The difference between “begotten” and “made.”
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