Over the past few years I've noticed a very interesting phenomenon working in my life. I'll tell a story to explain:


Does my friend the linguist have a more variegated visual experience as a consequence of his broader vocabulary?
Does my friend the linguist have a more variegated visual experience as a consequence of his broader vocabulary?
A PHILOSOPHER IS saved from mediocrity either through skepticism or mysticism, the two forms of despair in front of knowledge. Mysticism is an escape from knowledge, and skepticism is knowledge without hope. In either instance, the world is not a solution. --E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints
WITH A LITTLE more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future. --H.D. Thoreau, Walden
THOSE WHO KNOW don't tell and those who tell don't know. --Zen ProverbTHAT WHICH YOU worship, then, even though you do not know it, is what I now proclaim to you. --Christian Proverb
SOMEONE FLATTERS YOU, says how nice you are, how beautiful you are, how very intelligent. Or, how stupid you are. Now can you listen to what he's saying--that you are stupid or very clever or very this or very that? Can you listen without accumulation? That is, without accumulating the insult or the flattery? Because, if you listen with accumulation then he becomes your enemy or your friend. Therefore, that listening and how you listen creates the image. And that image separates. And that image is the cause of conflict. --J. Krishnamurti
9 comments:
welcome back. you're back on the sidebar. it's a little sad that i can't put on the purdue blogs list. but we move on don't we.
What? -- no thoughts about linguistics and perception? Typical "scientist."
OK. Try this. Type Ecru into Google™ image search. Which of those is the right colour? You probably tried that already.
But let's take your claim to the extreme. Let's say that I pick a random color from the RGB spectrum on my image editor. I have no idea what that specific shade is called. I can still see it can't I?
Our labels are not rigid. I have a word "beige" that's pretty close to "ecru" in my mind. In fact I would never argue that they are necessarily different. But I can talk about a dark beige or a light beige and that productivity of flexibility in a shade isn't born of the term that I use. Someone without a word for colour still has functioning cones in their retina.
But this isn't to say that labels don't help us categorize. In fact I'd say that your corgi example makes a nice point about attention and labels. Once I learned about brands of guitars I started recognizing features that helped me to recognize what my favourite musicians were playing. But I didn't gain an ability to see a new pattern -- just a tendency to note it and hold on to it.
Wishydig's mention of pattern recognition is key here.
In complexity theory patterns can only be recognized when a certain tipping point is reached: the noise that eludes definition is de-fined, brought under the auspices of categorization to become sensible. In perception, that might be the noise of tonal differences in color that suddenly taken on distinction: beige looks different from ecru.
Language is another complex system that works in tandem with perception and attention - particularly the latter. Richard Lanham suggsts that language structures our attention to help us cope with the flood of information - from stimuli and from the mass amounts of data we encounter in our current economy. Our attention might get re-structured, then, through the rise of a new word in our vocabulary that labels a pattern that was always there but which we did not recognize (e.g. "corgi").
Since perception is always interpretive, maybe it's not our whole mind that is imprisoned by language, but our attention.
"[Language] structures our attention" -- I like that. That's sort of what I was thinking... so, then, the mind enclosed in language IS sort of in prison.
But I wonder, is it a prison of our own making? -- wouldn't the overload of stimuli, if it were not moderated by the (perceptive?) filter of language, overwhelm us? Would experience be like a constant LSD trip if we didn't have language to order it?
There's a long tradition in mysticism that relies on self-imposed silence as a path to... well, whatever one strives toward spiritually.
Language appears to be a necessary prison - in the sense of being a required constraint on our attention for exactly the reason you say: we'd be overwhelmed by non-sense and communication would be impossible. (Maybe it's my rhetorical bias, but I still say the purpose of language is communication, despite postmodern pretensions otherwise.)
I guess I'm really just paraphrasing a Foucauldian idea, though. Interesting that Weil used the term "prison." Language operates as a disciplinary force, a system that enables even as it constrains. Thus I would say: could we even escape such a prison? Would my mind be a "mind" in any sensible way outside of language?
I do have to throw my own bug into this, though, by suggesting that this prison is not of our own making, but evolves of its own accord through us. Language exceeds willful human agency to determine its evolution as a symbolic system. We can make up neologisms, but for them to become part of any linguistic system requires a much more unpredictable process of adoption and adaptation.
That's not to say there aren't wardens in this prison. I believe we English PhDs all fit that role neatly - along with all those lay grammarians out there.
"so, then, the mind enclosed in language IS sort of in prison."
Well the mind enclosed in anything in sort of in prison. The question then is, IS the mind enclosed in language?
You'll have to make a better case than it helps us with categorization so we are at its mercy.
My jury is still out on this one: does language help us give order to ideas which allows us to make connections or does language limit our understanding of a dynamic knowledge by (falsely?) convincing us that it captures a stable nature of knowledge.
"That's not to say there aren't wardens in this prison. I believe we English PhDs all fit that role neatly - along with all those lay grammarians out there."
Funny. Any warden with a track record like these would be fired for having no idea where the inmates are. But that's assuming we even know who the inmates are and what the bars are. A lot of English PhDs are pretty good about accepting language as it is -- most lay grammarians have no idea what they're talking about. They've memorized Strunk and White and they think it's a good description of effective language.
But neither group has really done anything to shape or contain language. It's those darn kids that make language what it is.
But perhaps it's worth remembering to make a distinction between writing and language.
Michael once said (I think): The purpose of language is to understand children. And I've never heard a better definition.
I did. Wow. You actually pay attention to MySpace questionnaires.
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