Transcription
Have you ever noticed that anytime you ask a yes or no question, your intonation goes up? Is it raining? Is your dog friendly? And for any other question, your intonation goes down. What time is it? What's 2 + 2? You generally wouldn't say, "What's 2 plus two?" or "Is your dog friendly?" It's just one of my favorite illustrations of how language operates beneath the surface of conscious thought. And that's what this video is about: the weird relationship between how we think and how we use language.
Another rule that you were never taught but always follow is the Royal order of adjectives. If I told you I saw a black cute poodle, your brain would recognize my mistake immediately. What I should say is a cute black poodle. But why exactly? Well, it's because adjectives need to go in this very specific order. So in a sentence, that would be my one beautiful big old round black Canadian plastic racing poodle. Even though you'd never hear this many adjectives in a row, it still intuitively feels correct. Whereas if I said, "racing plastic Canadian black round old big beautiful one my poodle," you'd just be hearing a list of words.
The interesting thing about this rule is that it's not a prescribed grammatical rule; nobody decided this should be the correct order. It's actually our brains that want to put things in this order, and there is a logic to it. We naturally want a description to start with the most general or subjective information and move towards more specific and objective information. A beautiful blue sky is slightly less work for our brains than a blue beautiful sky, simply because knowing the speaker's feelings upfront helps us to paint a mental picture. So it would seem that the structure of language reflects the innate structure of human cognition, which makes sense. But there's a chicken and egg question here: Do we speak a certain way because we think a certain way, or do we think a certain way because we speak a certain way?
Some linguists argue that the structure and vocabulary of a language shape how its speakers actually perceive the world. This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Some languages actually don't have words for left and right; instead, they use cardinal directions: North, South, East, and West. So it just makes you wonder if the people who speak this language have a fundamentally different concept of spatial reality.
I think the coolest example of this is the Amara people, indigenous to the Andes. Whereas most languages look forward to the future with the past behind them, they do the reverse: the future is behind them, and the past is in front of them. And if you're thinking this conceptual metaphor makes less sense than the one you're used to, consider the fact that the past is known and therefore can be seen and understood, whereas the future is unknown and therefore unseen. And this reflects the general worldview of the Amara that the past is an important source of knowledge and wisdom. It's just a nice example of how even the apparently obvious assumptions made by language are kind of arbitrary if you really think about it.
Western philosophy has always been interested in language because it's the primary tool that we use to understand the world and to express thought. But one of the big challenges for philosophy is the Paradox of definition: the fact that there are no words that have an absolute, self-evident meaning. If you try to define something, you inevitably end up relying on other definitions, and this becomes an infinite regress. So what is reality? Well, it's everything that exists. Okay, what does it mean to exist? Well, it means to have objective being. What does being mean? It refers to something that's real, not imaginary or illusory. All right, what does imaginary mean? Something that exists in the mind, not in reality. So it just kind of takes you in circles because there's no foundation of objective meaning. If you've ever been frustrated reading philosophy, it's not only because the writing is dense and obscure; it's also because language itself is recursive in this way. Language seems to delimit the boundaries of human understanding, and this means a lot of philosophy is just kind of circular. This led the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to his famous formulation: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." In other words, some things are simply beyond the ability of language to express.
So the real question is: if somebody ever did discover the answer to the great mystery of existence, would it even be possible to express that answer in English or any other language, or would it have to be expressed using some more abstract system of representation?
Actually, the closest thing we have to objective meaning in language can be found in phonosemantics: the idea that some words might ultimately derive their meaning from sound and how they feel in your mouth when you say them. Words that express ideas relating to nasal sensation often start with the letters SN: so you get sniff, snort, sneeze, snore, snout, snarl. Try saying a word that starts with SN and pay attention to how your tongue blocks the air in your mouth to produce a nasal consonant. S; you actually have to kind of snarl to say the word snarl. You can also try this with words that start with GL. The GL sound is much lighter and more delicate, so it gives you words about smoothness, like glass, glide, gloss, glaze; or words about light: glow, gleam, glitter, glisten, and so on.
Some linguists believe that the words Mama and Baba were actually invented by babies. The easiest consonant sounds to make are M, B, P, and the easiest vowel sound to make is just "uh". So naturally, M is one of the first sounds babies tend to make, and they tend to vocalize when they want their mothers. So we've come to interpret the utterance "ma ma" as a word for mother. So then fathers get second place with the slightly more strenuous Baba or Papa, not the mama. This theory is supported by the fact that the M sound is found in the word for mother in many unrelated languages around the world. It's a good reminder that language is an embodied process as well as an intellectual one. It's also kind of funny that babies have given us a stronger foundation for objective meaning than any of the philosophers ever did.
While we're here, did you know that we don't really pronounce vowels in English? At least not as often as you might think. So check it out: try pronouncing America. You're not actually making an A or an I sound when you pronounce these syllables. The sound you're making is called "aw," a neutral vowel sound, and it's the most common vowel sound in English. Now, you generally do this on unstressed syllables, so when your tone goes up to stress the second syllable, you do articulate the letter E in this case: America. Kat B. You can really hear this difference in how you pronounce photograph as compared to photography. The irony here is that non-native speakers tend to pronounce English words with the correct vowel articulation, which, to native English ears, sounds like a foreign accent. And it just shows that letters and sounds don't even correspond as neatly as we tend to assume.
As if this wasn't confusing enough, there's also the problem of paradoxes. The simplest one being the Liar's Paradox: "This statement is false." The philosopher Bertrand Russell was very interested in this kind of paradox. He came up with one of his own, called the Barber's Paradox: "The barber shaves all those who do not shave themselves. But who shaves the barber?" If the barber shaves himself, then he shouldn't; but if he doesn't, then he should.
Now you can actually break down the logic of language into formulas, and this does, to some degree, eliminate some of the ambiguity of language. Consider this straightforward-looking statement: "The present King of France is bald." Seems totally fine, except there is no present King of France. So you could ask: Is the statement true? Is it false? Is it meaningless? And Bertrand Russell would reformulate this as: "There exists an X such that X is the present King of France, and for all individuals Y, if Y is the present King of France, then Y is identical to X, and X is bald." And yeah, despite sounding more complex, it actually does clarify the logic of the statement and makes it easier to discern its falseness.
This hearkens all the way back to Aristotle, friend of the channel, an inventor of the syllogism, in which a logical conclusion is deduced from two premises. So the classic example goes: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. So long as you keep the structure of the syllogism intact, you can swap the terms out, and the statement will always be logically valid. So: All dogs are animals. Poodles are dogs. Therefore, poodles are animals. And so long as the premises are both true, then the conclusion will necessarily also be true. This is called deductive reasoning.
Now, some syllogisms are logically invalid. Consider this one: All cats are mammals. All dogs are mammals. Therefore, all cats are dogs. This syllogism illustrates a logical fallacy: just because two things share a common category, that does not mean that they are the same thing. And Aristotle's point here is to show that an argument can be illogical even if its conclusion is true. So if I take this invalid syllogism and swap out the terms, I could say: All poodles are mammals. All dogs are mammals. Therefore, all poodles are dogs. And I do end up with a true conclusion, but that does not mean that my logic is valid.
If you think all of this is a bunch of intellectual babble with no real-world consequences, take a listen to what Bill Clinton had to say back in 1998 when he was asked during a legal deposition about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and his famous reply was: "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is." Oh, yes. And if you're thinking, "Hey, that's just Slick Willie up to his usual tricks," you're not wrong, but also he kind of has a point. "Is" does not have a precise meaning. I mean, yeah, you can say it's the present tense of the verb to be, but does it refer to this precise moment, like "it is 4:00," or does it refer to an eternal state of being, like "the sky is blue"? I mean, "is" can even indicate a future state, like "the meeting is at 3 P.M." So the word "is" does actually pose a problem for lawyers who might want to make an absolute determination about a state of being, and it provides a convenient linguistic escape hatch for politicians caught lying under oath. Maybe if Bertrand Russell was at the deposition, he could have asked Bill to confirm that there existed an X such that there was a relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky, and X occurred in the past. Yeah, try getting out of that one, Slick Willy.
Another group of people that cares a lot about the precision of language is insurers, who try their best to describe reality in such a way that minimizes their vulnerability to risk. And in one famous case, billions of dollars depended on the interpretation of one word: occurrence. The World Trade Center was insured for $3.5 billion per the occurrence of some catastrophe. So the tower leaseholders argued that each plane crash was a separate occurrence, warranting two separate insurance claims, while the insurer argued that it was one occurrence because it was a single coordinated attack. The English language, unfortunately, could not supply an absolute definition of the word "occurrence" that would have provided clarity on this question. So in the end, some insurers paid once, and some paid twice. And despite the immense financial and legal consequences of this dispute, there was never any resolution on the definition of the apparently simple word "occurrence." And I think that's a fitting conclusion to this video because, for all our efforts to understand language and map it onto our experience of reality and to derive meaning from it, the bottom line is that language is as elusive as consciousness itself, and it probably always will be. I do have a Patreon if you enjoyed this video and you want to support my work. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.