Do we need language to communicate?

 

(philosophy group question 6th March 2006 - for fuller version go to 'philosophy' and select: 'Do we need language to communicate')

The easy answer to this is that any means of communication can be regarded as language. Waving a pint mug in the air probably means that you want a refill. We can convey our emotions with looks. It is unlikely, however that gestures can convey the intricacies of relativity theory. Words, or symbols, are necessary for anything complicated.

But philosophers have argued that our thinking is constrained by our language. I understand that the Inuit have 30 odd words for snow and its conditions, whereas we only have one. We cannot easily therefore describe the snow lying on the pavements in the Midlands with great accuracy. Equally, it seems that the Japanese have more words for shades of blue than Westerners do - and they are better at discriminating between those shades than we are. Which is cause and which effect is not easy to determine.

However many philosophers go further (Wittgenstein et al). For them whatever we say is unreliable as our culture produces sub-layers of meaning which affect the extent to which we can express the truth. Of course, if what we say is unreliable then the proposition that it is unreliable is itself unreliable and so we have a paradox - a sure sign in philosophy that something has gone wrong.

And even more, if language determines how we think then the differences which exist between different languages should coincide with different ways of thinking about things. And so they do, but In my experience, only to a minor extent. These differences derive mainly from the history or culture of the people speaking the language. Phrases in current use may allude to that history or culture to give an extra layer of meaning which a foreigner would perhaps not pick up on. Scientists of different nationalities, however, manage to work together efficiently and agree on the results of experiments and the reliability of theories and so the differences in the ways we think cannot be all that great.

And having listened to French politicians, although their language is often more flowery than that of their English brethren, they still say just as little of any substance!

I cannot therefore believe that language creates such an all-pervasive distortion of the truth. It is simply not feasible. If nothing else, evolutionary pressure would surely by now have altered things for us - if we cannot arrive at the truth, then we put ourselves at a major evolutionary disadvantage. We need to know what is actually going on around us and not live in some make-believe world. Words may be slippery creatures but ultimately we can be their masters .

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