Language (General)

by dhw, Thursday, January 28, 2010, 11:10 (5411 days ago)

As we've seen time and time again, use of language is a highly subjective activity, and I'm opening this thread in the hope that it will make us a little more conscious of what we do with it.-One of the advantages of giving names to concepts is that they reassure us. The unknown becomes known. Illness makes us feel insecure, but at least when the doctor says it's, say, influenza, part of us can relax. The illness is identifiable, known, "official". The down side is that certain expressions can become so familiar that we take them for granted, as if we knew what was being described. Alternatively, they can cover up hollow arguments because as linguistic concepts they SEEM to denote a reality, or they may represent a meaningful argument but be used to cover one that's totally unrelated. -Here are a few examples of the way certain terms have been used in our own forum or on relevant websites. You might like to add some of your own.-Natural selection: this means that the best adapted organisms survive and the least adapted die out. It's often used as if it denoted a creative force that caused the innovations without which evolution could not take place. It doesn't cause them, and this use of the term glosses over major problems within the theory. 
The word "natural" itself is often used deceptively. It takes attention away from the mystery of certain processes, and while theists or agnostics may talk sceptically of "random" or "chance" or "accidental", the materialist prefers to talk of "natural" as if that reduced the degree of unlikelihood.-Intelligent design: a meaningful expression often used to cover up irrational arguments (though this too is a subjective use of words by me). In fact you can't mention it now without taking on board various biblical references that are totally irrelevant to the words themselves. (Incidentally, we've seen the opposite argument several times: that the universe/evolution is exactly as we would imagine it if there were no God. One side subjectively sees the universe/evolution as having been designed, and the other subjectively sees it as unplanned.)-God-of-the-Gaps: this derogatory (but nicely alliterative) expression helps to disguise the fact that ALL theories entail filling in gaps. It's true that the absence of an explanation for, say, the origin of life supplies no evidence for the existence of God. However, it supplies no evidence for ANY theory. But do we talk of Chance-of-the-Gaps, or Materialism-of-the-Gaps? The people who use the expression don't realize that it applies just as much to their own theories as to the God theory.-Personal incredulity: on all the disputed topics, people's conclusions are a matter of belief. If you say, "I don't believe chance is capable of assembling DNA", the dismissal of this as "personal incredulity" means nothing more than what you've just said: you don't believe it. The implication of the expression is that you're being subjective, and so your belief is somehow untenable, whereas the person using it has a more objective basis for his beliefs. He usually hasn't.-Evidence: frequently used with reference to whatever supports the speaker's case. Anything that contradicts this is dismissed as "subjective" or "anecdotal" or "untested". But we all have our own individual criteria for what constitutes evidence, and there is no universal law. -Dark matter/energy: About 95% of the universe is a complete mystery to us. Giving whatever is out there a scientific-sounding name helps us to gloss over our ignorance. We need such terms, but we also need to be aware that they don't actually tell us anything.-God/Allah/Yahweh/Brahma/Amma etc.: you can't use the name without loading attributes onto it, and whichever name you accept makes the others alien, with an automatic erection of barriers between believers. This is more culture than language, but the principle is the same: we try to give an identity to something unknown. That makes it more manageable without necessarily giving it any grounds in reality. -Science: a word that's constantly misused. For many people, it has connotations of objectivity, truth, reliability; for a materialist it's almost an absolute, in that if a claim can't be backed by science, it has no value or validity. But science is practised by scientists, and scientists are no more and no less human than the rest of us. Scientific findings may well be objective and truthful and reliable (if they weren't, we wouldn't entrust our lives to them), but the findings are often open to interpretation, and interpretation of science is not science. And beliefs based on interpretations of science are not science either.-So familiar are we with linguistic terms that most people don't even realize that the familiarity can mask something beyond our comprehension. I'd say that everything related to the mind comes into this category: consciousness, the subconscious, imagination, ideas, will, reason, memory...The words disguise the mystery of how they function. We have a name for each faculty, and it's as if that is already an explanation. It's not. It's just a name.-I'm aware that in this post, as elsewhere, I'm as guilty as anyone of using subjective language. We all do it, and we can't help doing it. But that needn't stop us from keeping a watchful eye on ourselves as well as on others.