Words&Dirt

“When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed.  At the moment all Will’s choices existed at once.  But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing.  He had to choose, after all.”

––The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman, loc. 237

“Each of the radical theories about language and thought refutes one of the others in a game of rock-paper-scissors. Differences among languages, the point of pride for Linguistic Determinism, is a headache for Extreme Nativism, which assumes that concepts are innate, hence universal.  The precision of word senses, which Extreme Nativism uses to discredit definitions, casts doubt on Radical Pragmatics, which assumes that one’s knowledge of a word is highly malleable.  And polysemy, which motivates Radical Pragmatics, spells trouble for Linguistic Determinism, because it shows that thoughts must be much finer-grained than words.

The theory of conceptual semantics, which proposes that word senses are mentally represented as expressions in a richer and more abstract language of thought, stands at the center of this circle, compatible with all of the complications.  Words meanings can vary across languages because children assemble and fine-tune them from more elementary concepts.  They can be precise because the concepts zero in on some aspects of reality and slough off the rest.  And they can support our reasoning because they represent lawful aspects of reality––space, time, causality, objects, intentions, and logic––rather than the system of noises that developed in a community to allow them to communicate.  Conceptual semantics fits, too, with our commensense notion that words are not the same as thoughts, and indeed, that much of human wisdom consists of not mistaking one for the other.  ‘Words are wise men’s counters,’ wrote Hobbes; ‘they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.'”

––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 150-1