What is the epistemological nature of language?

[Goblinmonger]

To what extent does the language we use create our reality? Or, does our reality decide the language we use?

If we constantly refer to women as bitches and whores due to our love of hip-hop, do women actually become bitches and whores in our minds? Or, would we only refer to them as bitches and whores if we believed that in the first place?

[charles22]

1. From epistemology to hoes....interesting

[Goblinmonger]

4. Oh, hell yeah

It's my favorite example when talking about this.

On a side note: Is the plural of "ho" "hos" or "hoes"? I teach high school English and I have had this discussion with several people and I can't come to a clear answer. "Hoes" seems too confusing with the garden implement but "hos" just breaks way too many spelling rules.

[charles22]

5. Exactly my thought when typing.

As Wittgenstein would say, the meaning comes through it use, or context. Suppose the spelling might be "whoes".

[Goblinmonger]

7. That spelling looks Seussian.

"There were no whoes in hoville" :rofl:

[TechBear_Seattle]

8. I usually go with "hoes"

Seeing as a close male equivalent is called a "rake." :hi:

[Goblinmonger]

10. Learn something new everyday.

Had never heard that term. I looked it up on jargondatabase.com because I thought maybe it was a reaction to the use of "ho" but it actually quite an old term that is shortened from "rakehell."

Thanks for increasing my vocabulary by one (actually two if you count rake and rakehell as distinct) more word. :hi:

[TechBear_Seattle]

12. There was a comedian I heard long ago on farming terms used for sex

Hoe, rake, "ploughing the field", "sowing wild oats", commentary on donkeys, horses, cats, etc. It was pretty darn funny.

[JackintheGreen]

13. Grammatically, use apostrophes, so

'ho' comes from 'whore', then if we "correctly" add in the apostrophes to show omitted letters we are left with:

whore -- 'ho''
whores -- 'ho''s

but who wants to spell that:

Note that a simple change in apostrophes renders a new word

ho's' (from horse), as in "Hey there, Hos. Can you get the wimmin-folk rustle us up some grub?"

[crikkett]

21. ho's

I'm series.

[terip64]

2. Ask me Wednesday. Maybe even a week from Monday.

I can't think straight right now, never mind deep. ;)

[Poll_Blind]

3. Language conveys ideas. Ideas change reality.

  I don't think it's necessary to believe that women should be degraded prior to using terms like that on a regular basis. However, having reason to use them (say, while singing along with a favored song which uses those lyrics), introduces, familiarizes and promotes the idea behind the words.

  You speak an idea long enough, even if you don't believe it at first, and it becomes part of your reality.

  BTW, you should try listening to some Aesop Rock. Those guys know what the score is, very thoughtful rap. I don't think I've ever heard anything misogynistic in their lyrics.

PB

[Goblinmonger]

6. So you would be neo-marxist?

At least on this issue. Taken further in that vein, you can bring about social change by changing the language people use or controlling the actions that take (make fur no longer part of the culture and therefore bad by making it so that people won't wear fur if even for fear that they will get red paint tossed on their jacket).

[Poll_Blind]

14. I know very little of Marxian Dialectics but I would say that...

...that regularly using an intensely-restricted lexicon, one which contains mostly pejoratives, similarly-restrict (or atrophy) the intellectual process over time. The example I do understand enough to speak intelligently on is NewSpeak or it's ultimate fruition, ENGSOC, from 1984.

  The saying goes "You are what you eat.", which is to say "You are what you consume". Similarly, in my opinion, "You are what you speak." The emphasis here is on the restricted vocabulary with pejoratives and no balance (for instance a cultural lexicon which mostly refers to women as chattel-like objects) which eventually mold's the thinkers thoughts to fit the language. While it's arguably a chicken and egg quandary (did the lexicon change the speaker or did the speaker adopt the lexicon's ideas) I think there's an equally or more-arguable idea that any person who already has a replete lexicon who adopts another, more-limited one for whatever reason, will become, over time, similarly-limited in thought.

  And yes,I do believe that controlling the language controls the thoughts, eventually, of the speakers and a popular control of language could control the culture.

  Hope that made sense.

PB

[Goblinmonger]

15. That makes perfect sense.

And, at least in the field of communication, we would refer to that as a neo-marxian view.

I'm with you 100% in that post.

Interesting that you bring up the "You are what you eat" example to start of the bulk of your post. My vegetarianism started when I was in grad school (for communication) and one particularly late night of studying in the GTA office resulting is a discussion (after I pulled out a snack of animal crackers) as to whether eating was epistemic. I still think it was a funny discussion.

[cosmik debris]

17. Is that what the wingnuts have done with "liberal"? n/t

[Poll_Blind]

18. Yes, and by the way the demonization of that word is credited to...

...the shadiest Republican operative ever: Arthur J. Finkelstein. I had no idea who this guy was or that he even existed before I stumbled onto him on a search for cryptids, believe it or not. I'd put something like "only known photo of" into Google and his was one of the hits that came back. Apparently there's only one known photo of him, and he likes it that way. Keeps a very, very low profile.

  His clients are almost all literally notorious political figures.

  So I was searching for cryptids...for instance a Vietnamese (or is it Cambodian?) rainbow snake. What I turned up was a cryptid, too, it just wasn't the hard-to-spot snake I was looking for.

  Check out this beautiful snake, btw:



Xenopeltis unicolor



PB

[charles22]

9. Ok, on a more serious note:

My basic view of language would be conventionalist; that language has no inherent meaning other than the way it is used. Some linguists would be more technical, but whether language has some biological roots or not is of no interest to me.

[LynzM]

11. Hrm...

Not sure about a good answer to that question, but I bet there's a lot of debate out there about it. You might also try posting this in the Language & Linguistics forum, too :)

[TallahasseeGrannie]

16. Our words are windows to our...

souls? Or for present company, our hearts? But that really is only germane to what a stinker I would be to use that language, not the effect of the language.

So, yeah. Call me a bitch and a ho enough and that's what I become to you. The question is, whether if I hear it enough do I become one?

Conversely, I have found it useful with second grade boys (for some reason this seems the prime time for this strategy) to tell them they are incredibly bright, strong, helpful, responsible, etc. And even the nastiest little booger eventually at least somewhat lives up to my words. Words are my secret weapon in the classroom. And it is fun to use words they don't quite understand, but they know are good...for example, "Tyrone, since you are such a gentleman and a scholar and are obviously experiencing a surge of energy at the moment, will you please take this note to the secretary in the office?"

They will follow me anywhere.

[immoderate]

19. Whither reality?

I would differentiate the reality from "our," or more precisely, "one's" reality. We do not have reality, which is the objective view of "the world out there." Rather, we each possess a "world view" which is our internal model of reality that we use to navigate through our lives. This world view is created from information, passed through our senses, moderated by our perceptions, detailed by processes like intuition and thought.

Inasmuch as ideas are based on verbal information, complete with implications and nuances of language, this world view is very much influenced by vocabulary.

Again, we don't "know" reality. We can know what we think is reality, or we can think we know reality, but the two entities are too far removed to be in true correspondence. We understand the euphemism, as we do when we say we "feel the road" when driving a car.

Capacity for language is wired into the higher parts of our brain, and I would think that it is integrated into our conceptualizations.

In a sense, reality for us, is poetry.

--IMM

[NMMNG]

20. I believe it's both, though language creates reality

more than reality decides the language we use.


Note, for example, the different ways religious/political groups use language. Republicans and the Religious Right will describe homosexuals as deviants, perverts, sodomites, and such. They will say that homosexuals engage in a lifestyle and that it is a choice, a preference. In addition they teach that homosexuality is shameful and should be repressed if not punished. They also believe that homsexuals should be given no protections under the law.

Democrats and Religious Liberals, on the other hand, do not use those derogatory terms, and generally consider homosexuals to be born with their orientation. They teach that homosexuals are as natural as heterosexuals, and should be given full protection under the law from discrimination and hate crimes.

The ways the two groups use language have a profound influence on how homosexuals are treated by individuals, by groups, and how they are protected (or not) by the legal system.

[Igel]

22. Much was made of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,

which said that the words and idioms and expressions that we use limits and to some extent controls our thinking. So much was made of it that I even had a required revoltingly stupid education course called Social Foundations of Teaching, that basically indoctrinated a bunch of students into it. This education department class claimed this was state of the art linguistics, and universally acknowledged by linguists--something much disputed in the linguistics department at the same university.

The problem is that Whorf had no premise for just about all of his statements. His data was wrong. He misinterpreted the data that wasn't right, and the eisegesis continues to this day among his supporters. Social utopianism was the philosophy of choice among many academics in the '30s and '40s, and even into the '60s, and he fell for it.

Some Construction Grammar folk rather like Whorf. Langackerians (and presumably Lakoffians) have a tendency to buy into it, as well. It also finds widespread acceptance in advocacy departments: women's studies, ism-based literary theories, ethnic studies departments.

But the problem remains: The hypothesis has only ever received, at best, weak empirical support. The "weak empirical support" line is magnanimous: It's ad hoc, based on selected data from a number of languages and unsupported by most data in most languages. Moreover, it's supported by some unproven (possibly unprovable) abstract arguments. Advocacy-based approaches to language engineering have almost all failed; usually they succeed only when the speakers of the languages have already mostly accepted what the new vocable aims to instill, and the "proof" is post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking. The argument is that we can't express what we don't have words for. But new words are coined, and old expressions redefined, to say what people need to say. Usually the reason something that's never been said is hard to say is that they're original thoughts and ideas; if it's useful, the idea finds lexical support.

I think the Whorf hypothesis is pretty much wrong. It may have a valid assertion in that unsayable things are harder to express. But that's a far cry from the strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis.

[kiahzero]

23. Concepts can exist without language

If concepts could not exist without language to support them, there wouldn't be a sense where you want to express a concept to another person, and you cannot find the words to explain it. In your head, you know and understand the concept, but you are having difficulty translating that concept into language. Language does, however, limit the concepts that can be expressed to us: a language that does not have the terms necessary to describe a concept will prevent that concept from spreading among the users of the language.

Minor nitpick: wouldn't this question be about the ontological nature of language (language relative to the reality of things) rather than the epistemological nature of language (language relative to knowledge of things)?