Chapter 5. Language, Thought, and Concepts
Learning Objectives
- Understand the nature of language
- Understand the process and power of abstraction
- Understand how linguistic signs and symbols obtain meaning
- Understand the difference between semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic meaning
- Appreciate how language shapes our perception and experiences of the world
- Understand the power of concepts and their limitations
- Understand the role of scientific concepts and psychological constructs in shaping our worldviews
- Recognise the use of language as a rhetorical tool – especially the use of emotive and colloquial language.
New concepts to master
- Linguistics
- Semantic meaning
- Syntactic meaning
- Pragmatic meaning
- Reification
- Concepts
- Rhetorical
- Emotive language
- Colloquial language.
Chapter Orientation
Language deserves its own chapter in this book for many reasons. Language performs so many simultaneous functions in our lives and our thinking that go beyond just communication. We use language to communicate our status, specialist technical language polices class- or group-membership (people can tell I’m not a theoretical physicist by the types of terms I use), for entertainment (jokes, puns, musical lyrics, etc.), and to jostle for social position – social manoeuvring (you might show people you’re an authority on something by using obscure advanced language). Language positions us socially and is the primary device we use to manoeuvre through our interactions and relationships. Interactions are always transactional (there is always some exchange being made), and language is the means by which bargaining takes place. Primarily, the reason for a whole chapter on language is because it’s so central to thinking. Thinking and language are so intertwined that we simply couldn’t have one without the other.
Just because you can never get enough Wittgenstein, let’s allow him to set the tone for this chapter:
These inspirational quotes from one of the greatest of 20th century philosophers help us get a sense of the importance of language in understanding our world and our thinking. Wittgenstein was a cool character. His family was one of the wealthiest in all of Europe. He fought in the First World War and then turned his thinking to philosophical questions. After writing the only book of his life, a short 80-page pamphlet called the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921, he declared that he had solved all of the problems of philosophy, gave away his family fortune, then retired and went to work as a gardener in a monastery (this didn’t last though, and he came back to philosophy later in life).
Language is how we understand the world and ourselves. Words are the lyrics of our lives, and just like songs and poems, our lives have very little meaning and significance without the words we use to fill them. Language is the form of all of our thinking. In the same way a computer stores and processes information in binary units (that is, as 0s a