## Metadata - Author: [[N.J. Enfield]] - Full Title: Language vs. Reality - Category: #books ## Highlights - words and other bits of language are none other than highly practiced solutions to coordination games - When deciding how to behave, a person might naturally use language in thinking. In so doing, she may effectively discard, or fail to notice, important information that happens not to feature in a linguistic rendering of the state of affairs at hand. It is not that people are incapable of thinking about reality in alternative ways and not that we can’t think without language. It is that we are creatures of habit. If language is our most practiced resource for socially situated behavior, it should be no surprise that language instills deep cognitive habits: habits of attention and disattention, habits of reasoning or failing to reason. - Whorf avidly promoted the study of lesser-known languages, such as those of Native America, because each language provides an opportunity to broaden our understanding in one more way. Nobody is “free to describe nature with absolute impartiality,” Whorf argued. But the person who would come closest “would be a linguist familiar with very many widely different linguistic systems.” - The linguist Roman Jakobson defined six basic types of function that a piece of linguistic behavior can have—not just the referential function but also the functions he termed emotive (expressing feelings), poetic (focusing on structure or form in language), conative (influencing the hearer), phatic (opening up a channel between people), and metalingual (using language to talk about language). - People have long been captivated by the idea that people with different languages are “not equivalent as observers.”43 But equally, people with different languages are not equivalent as agents. The mind, including the parts of it that are built through language, is a purpose-made tool kit for social action, just as a body is a tool kit for physical action. And because languages are so differently structured, each one is like the body plan of a different species, affording its users different ranges of possibilities within certain common constraints. - It is clearly reasonable to assume that if something is useful to a group of people, those people will likely have a word to refer to it. This is because they will need a label for solving recurrent problems of social coordination around the thing. - There is a tyranny of perspective, which is largely invisible to us. Not only must you take a perspective whenever you talk about something; you must direct attention away from other perspectives, putting them, at least momentarily, out of view. - When you are handed a map made of language, remember that it is not the territory. Someone drew it. Someone chose what to include and what to omit. Someone is directing your attention to certain details and away from all manner of others. Only by being mindful of this can we decide whether we are happy to accept that map and the terms that it sets on us. Yes, language is collaborative and cooperative, even when it is competitive. But there is always someone who decides what game is being played. - Words like violence and terrorist can have major real-world consequences insofar as legal systems can coordinate around them in applying the force of law. This is why they shift in step with changes in our moral and political landscapes. They are, simultaneously, both mercurial maps of an ever-changing world and instructions for effecting (or resisting) that change. Language is good for creating these maps and instructions. but there are no guarantees that this power will be used for good. - Words set our coordinates and give us citable reasons for action. They provide us with inventories of diverse framings of the parts of reality that interest us. While this diversity may confound or overwhelm the truth-seeking scientist, it enables the action-defending lawyer to pick and choose as befits the goals of the moment, especially when it comes to constructing rationalizations and justifications. When we want the world to be a certain way, we tend not to seek evidence that may challenge this. We look for reasons why things should stay the way we want. This explains why public discourse, rather than being a market for ideas, is mostly a market for justifications. - If you’re telling me something, it should be news. It wouldn’t be a conversation if I just kept saying the same things. One of the strongest principles that has been discovered about language use by philosophers and psychologists of language is the cooperative maxim in communication: Be relevant.11 In part, this means: Don’t tell people things that they already know. At each point, what you say should be informative. - One reason we read fiction, said literary critic Harold Bloom, is “because we cannot know enough people.”27 If stories are simulations, language itself is the raw material that makes such simulation possible. As the linguist Nick Evans points out, different languages are different resources for constructing our life-experience simulations. Building on Bloom’s idea, Evans writes, “We study other languages because we cannot live enough lives.”28 - Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is. —George Steiner (1975) - As the mathematician Friedrich Waismann said, language is the knife we use to cut out facts. And like any knife, as I hope this book has shown, language is both destroyer and creator. We do not coordinate around reality but around versions of reality hewn by words. The result is awkward for the scientist but convenient for the lawyer. - When dictators label others with words that apply to themselves, these aren’t acts of “mere projection,” says Kasparov. “They are a tactic to lower the moral bar for all,” ultimately conveying “that there is no good or evil, no truth, just power.” - Words should never be our trusted measure of reality because words won’t stay still. We have a duty to heed reality, always at a step removed from the thinkable verbal descriptions of it. Reality must be our ultimate mooring. - when we consent to coordinate around the maps that are handed to us, we are agreeing to a set of accepted reasons for action. - We shop for words not because they contain ideas, but because they contain stories about ideas. Often we are not seeking statements as facts to help us figure out what we should believe. Usually we already know what we believe. What we seek are statements to justify those beliefs—the lawyer’s way.