As per a conversation yesterday about whether reality is subjective or objective on a friends wall - a part of my argument was pointing out the shortcomings of thinking in terms of mechanisms and categories (so-called objectivity or scientific method) when there can be no true objectivity (i.e., a theory free of subjective bias), and when quantum physics fairly insists we orient scientific inquiry instead toward events and relationships (that is, to really get this stuff, we must evaluate reality as interrelational phenomena of which we are a part). One of my points regarding the assumption that objectivity (and the extrapolation of truth from that objectivity) is valid, was that whatever language we speak exacts a profound effect on how/what we think. And that got me thinking about *that*, so Ive been catching up on papers on the subject: Fascinating evidence that the structure of ones native language influences not only a persons social orientation, thought habits, and preferences; it also influences *non*-lingual functions such as color perception, spatial orientation, time assessment, and how we process basic environmental cues. Years ago, I read an article about how native Chinese speakers - whose language relies on tonal inflection as much as words - can differentiate intonations that English speakers can not hear; while all babies are born with that sensitivity, some languages (like Chinese) keep it in play, while other languages do not. A baby in an English-speaking environment loses the ability within its first year of life, as the ability is not necessary to its communication/survival. Another article I read (again, years ago) discussed how some Asian languages better accommodated a certain intellectual comfort with quantum physics - that what a native English speaker finds weird about QM is not so disquieting or difficult to grasp to a native speaker of some Asian languages. Truly, our language influences us in ways we dont often ponder - creating the very premises of our evaluations of reality! As an article in the New York Times states: The NYT article also discusses geographic orientation and recall as influenced by language, in this case, among an Australian tribe, the Guugu Yimithirr: It has been demonstrated that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. The bottom line is this: it appears that the structure of language obliges us to think about and interact with the world in a certain way, down to details many of us assume are universal, objective realities for all of us... and they are *not* universal nor objective, but quite *subjective*. ;) A few papers on this subject below: nature/scientificamerican/journal/v304/n2/full/scientificamerican0211-62.html cell/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613%2804%2900020-8?cc=y?cc=y ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19716754 pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/faces/viewItemOverviewPage.jsp?itemId=escidoc:1555664
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 16:23:46 +0000
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