While language does not strictly determine what can be perceived and thought, it significantly shapes both. Words affect perception, serving as a kind of filter. For instance, words like ‘blue’ and ‘green’ arbitrarily sharpen finer gradations of perceived colour in the visible spectrum. In the Inuktitut language, there are more than fifty terms for ‘snow.’ In many Indigenous languages, there is no word for ‘death’—indeed, hardly any nouns at all. In English, seventy percent of words are nouns, demonstrating an obsession with objects more than relationships. The structure of a language itself can affect how events are remembered. For example, the ‘imperfect case’ in French suggests ongoing action over time, perhaps including the present, while the passé simple indicates distance from a definite event long ago. While language extends cognition, it also constrains it. While it enables us to share meaning, it often leads to misunderstanding or failure to communicate.
As opposed to a strictly continuous flow of sound, speech is chunked into discrete phonemes (syllables) forming words. Writing makes this even more explicit with definite visual symbols, which may represent the discrete spoken sounds (alphabet) or may directly represent concepts (hieroglyph or Chinese character). Either way, except in the case of proper names, symbols represent categories rather than specific examples. The symbol consisting of the letters d-o-g refers to a range of creatures and possible experiences, not to a specific animal or encounter. On the other hand, it will elicit a different image, association, or memory for each person, depending on their personal history. While English speaking people may understand that dog represents a concept (a zoological genus), their individual understanding of that concept will be flavored by their personal experience. The past experience the word refers to, and evokes in the present, will differ. A domain of meanings—which are implicit, private, and unique to individuals—must be distinguished from the domain of explicit symbols (such as words) that we publicly share and trade.
The domain of meanings can be thought of as a dense continuous “space” with many dimensions. It encodes structure extracted from the world by means of sensorimotor interaction (experience). Similar experiences, or notions derived from them, may occupy common regions in meaning space, so that gradations of color, for example, would cluster together—with blues quite near greens—while varieties of canine would be located somewhere else. In contrast, the domain of symbols is discontinuous and sparse, consisting of discrete symbols; it can only partially map to the domain of meanings. Since words represent concepts or categories (not individual things), they inevitably collapse many possible distinctions within the domain of meaning into one concept or category, represented by the word or symbol. Categories impose sharp distinctions in meaning space where there were none (is it blue or green?). In effect, the implicit domain of meanings is quantized and compartmentalized in the explicit domain of symbols. Words are vague because they are handles on regions of meaning space rather than mapping to specific points. Because each person has their own quite specific personal referents in the domain of meaning (memories or associations), these may not correspond to another’s referents in that same region. This means that each person unconsciously treats the category as a though it were a single point, rather than a region, in the domain of meaning. What is assumed to be a common understanding of a general notion is actually personal, specific, and highly idiosyncratic.
Things similar in the domain of meaning may be covered by several different words, even within one language, while things grouped linguistically may be perceptually far apart. Boundaries are arbitrarily imposed in the domain of meaning, so that natural gradients become binary categories: either/or instead of shades between. While these effects shape individual thought processes, they can also cause problems in communication between individuals or groups. If we are trying to agree on a municipal policy in regard to management of dogs, for example, our opinions may be strongly influenced by direct personal experiences or memories in regard to specific dogs. We may think we are talking about a neutral category—an abstraction—when in fact we are talking about individual charged points in meaning space. Dog lovers and dog haters may literally not be talking about the same dogs. We can each point to the same word, but not to the same animal it refers to. This problem arises all the more for ill-defined abstractions such as ‘intelligence’, ‘democracy’, or ‘freedom’, which occupy nebulous regions of meaning space. The words are tangible symbols we can mutually acknowledge. And this may obscure the fact that they don’t point to the same meaning for each of us, while giving the false impression that they do.
On the other hand, language does not just involve loss of information through its selective mapping. It also generates new information—for example, in the imaginative possibilities of story-telling and fiction writing. Words have a life of their own; they can represent a thing that doesn’t actually exist, but seems to simply because there is a word for it. By the same token, language offers the possibility of deception: lying, or manipulating opinion through the ambiguity of words. Even the internal reasoning we know as logic must have originated in efforts to convince others.
Words (and other symbols, such as in math) are objects of attention in their own right. They can be manipulated to create novel points or regions in meaning space. Making new distinctions alters perceptual discrimination. While loose language can lead to misunderstanding, precise language can lead to intersubjective agreement. Precise definitions we agree upon (in terms that themselves can be made precise) allow us to create formal systems in which to manipulate new abstractions with no previous referents in meaning space. (For example: ‘quantum state vector’, ‘optimization function’, or ‘futures market’.) However, while formalization is empowering in that way, the idealization involved also excludes information that can turn out to be relevant, even crucial. The price paid for precision is a narrowing of the domain of meaning to a tight region, from which whatever is not well-defined is excluded. The concept may not correspond to anything real, even if (as in science) it is supposed to. But because we can express it, it seems to have its own substance. This creates the misleading impression that everything can be expressed in algorithms and that reality is what we can successfully talk about.
The challenge of communication is to know that we are “on the same page”—that is, actually referring to the same meanings with the words we use in common. It’s possible to approach that state of alignment through ongoing dialogue—when that is the intention. On the other hand, like the intention to deceive, the intention to dispute or to be “right” keeps us on separate pages or in separate regions of meaning space. There are some practical strategies to align meaning when the will is there, largely by asking key questions. In good faith, we can try to locate each other’s referents in meaning space by asking for clear cases of what to include and what to exclude. For example: ‘When do you consider a dog “stray” or “running loose” and when not?’ Or: ‘At what wavelength does blue seem green for you?’
When discussing abstractions—for example, intelligence—we can try to establish each other’s referents or paradigms. (For example: is intelligence mastery at chess, problem solving ability, social skills, cleverness, thinking outside the box?) What are the dimensions of intelligence and how might they be measured? (For example: creativity, IQ score, leadership, financial or social success?) How does ‘intelligence’ compare to nearby regions of meaning space indicated by ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’? What are borderline cases—such as someone who seems smart but uses poor judgment? This sort of mutual query can establish the “page,” at least roughly.
Even politically polarized views can be brought closer to a common ground with intention and discipline. Partisan conflict often reflects different weightings along dimensions in meaning space. Terms like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ compress multiple dimensions into a single label. But that conflation can be unpacked by respectful mutual interrogation. Liberals and conservatives may understand terms quite differently. But they also may find some common ground through a process of spelling out where they stand in regard to specific dimensions, trade-offs, and thresholds. ‘Democracy’, for example, might be resolved into distinct issues, with varying agreement: fair elections, voter access, majority rule versus minority rights, role of the judiciary, etc. ‘Freedom’ could mean economic opportunity, property rights, security, freedom of speech, freedom from government interference or from control by corporations. These aspects can be considered separately, so that debate about a question is considered in terms of each dimension, point by point. This provides a basis for at least partial agreement, with the possibility to reach a practical compromise even in the face of unresolved philosophical differences.
The possibility of agreement rests on understanding the properties of language, especially the divergence in meaning space that confounds the use of words. More importantly, it depends on the shared intention to find common ground, to converge. Like any tool, the proper use of language to convey meaning requires the intention to understand and to be understood, which can only be achieved by trying earnestly to get to know the mentality of the other. It presumes not only the literal truth, but above all the intention to grasp the spirit behind it.
For example, white settlers may have assumed that the treaties they signed with Natives on this continent were effectively between two human political groups as they conceived them. The Natives, on the other hand, were implicitly signing on behalf of the land they occupied, representing all its creatures into the far future, their “relations.” The settlers hardly grasped the full of extent of what they were being assumed to agree to. The Natives didn’t grasp that the settlers had a completely different understanding of “the land” and their obligations toward it, not to mention a different understanding of time, of the natural world, and of good faith in respecting the spirit of an agreement as opposed to the letter. That misunderstanding had tragic consequences because the colonial settlers made no effort to understand the Native worldview. If they had truly understood and embraced it, the world might already be blessed with an attitude toward the Earth that permits our long-term survival. Unfortunately, the same lethal mistake continues to be repeated every time one nation, one ethnic group, or one individual fails to understand another because little effort was made to go beyond the superficial level of words to find common ground in meaning space.