Language and Thinking

[aliantha]

Were we talking about morality? I thought we were talking about language and thinking.

[rusmeister]

Were we talking about morality? I thought we were talking about language and thinking.

If we attempt to define morality, then we are thinking. If we are thinking, is our thought influenced by the language we use to express ideas? It certainly is. Thus, our understandings of things like morality can become more consistent with moral law, or less, depending on what language we use. If everyone speaks of committing "the sin of sodom", what will people think of homosexuality? If we say "they are gay", what do we think of it? Surely language influences how we view morality.

[aliantha]

Well, yeah. But there's a lot more to think about than morality, rus. I'm a little bit baffled by how, every time you enter a conversation, we end up talking about the same stuff.

[Vraith]

Were we talking about morality? I thought we were talking about language and thinking.

If we attempt to define morality, then we are thinking. If we are thinking, is our thought influenced by the language we use to express ideas? It certainly is. Thus, our understandings of things like morality can become more consistent with moral law, or less, depending on what language we use. If everyone speaks of committing "the sin of sodom", what will people think of homosexuality? If we say "they are gay", what do we think of it? Surely language influences how we view morality.

I think you are mistaken. It is a two way, dynamic flow, not a simple matter of definition and line drawing.
If I believed what you believe, then I would use your term "the sin of Sodom."
I happen not to believe it, for a number or reasons that need to be communicated via language, but which are so whether I can talk about them or not...a wolf is a wolf, whether I'm a man who can speak or a sheep that can only bleet. So I use other terms, "they are gay."
No one but me determines the language I choose to use. If a word doesn't exist for something I think, I use other ones to describe/define it and/or I invent one that does...and that's exactly where/how language originated.

[rusmeister]

Were we talking about morality? I thought we were talking about language and thinking.

If we attempt to define morality, then we are thinking. If we are thinking, is our thought influenced by the language we use to express ideas? It certainly is. Thus, our understandings of things like morality can become more consistent with moral law, or less, depending on what language we use. If everyone speaks of committing "the sin of sodom", what will people think of homosexuality? If we say "they are gay", what do we think of it? Surely language influences how we view morality.

I think you are mistaken. It is a two way, dynamic flow, not a simple matter of definition and line drawing.
If I believed what you believe, then I would use your term "the sin of Sodom."
I happen not to believe it, for a number or reasons that need to be communicated via language, but which are so whether I can talk about them or not...a wolf is a wolf, whether I'm a man who can speak or a sheep that can only bleet. So I use other terms, "they are gay."
No one but me determines the language I choose to use. If a word doesn't exist for something I think, I use other ones to describe/define it and/or I invent one that does...and that's exactly where/how language originated.

Hi Vraith,
I don't disagree with this at all. But very few people, from a vacuum, make conscious determinations to change their language. It is the ideologues, the people who DO think (rightly or wrongly) who begin such changes. The changes are picked up by other people who get the idea of the ideologue - but didn't think of it on their own - but they like it because they are of a similar bent in their philosophy, and if they are successful, they get a lot of people repeating it. Finally, you get a new generation of young people who hear only the new term and have great difficulty in imagining any other term as normal or proper. Thus, the initiators DO consciously form the language. But we all (even the initiators) happen to grow up and have our language formed for us. Our native language is English (for nearly all here, I think), and we didn't choose that. Nor did we choose the vocabulary that we began to use as we approached adulthood. You did not come up with the term "gay". You heard it, and repeated it, because that's how everyone around you talked. Perhaps much later, when encountering opposing ideas, you decided that the term "gay" was most correct, most correctly described reality as you understand it. I would say that most people are, by the time they do encounter such opportunities to think, have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into how they think that alternatives simply become inconceivable, and those who propose them - nuts.

All you need to do is control 2 things - the education system and the media. (Since there was no centralized education system 160 years ago, and centralized media parallels that (and centralized, overall, even more recently) such controlled spreads of ideology were impossible on national or global scales. Now they are, and it has already been done. To us.)

The most successful changes, I think, have been precisely those regarding morality, and in a specific direction - away from what was common throughout Christendom before the rise of these titans of population language control - and therefore thought control (or carefully pre-planned thought-guidance - the aiming of our thoughts so that we would think in a certain direction and tend to oppose thinking in other directions. As I said before, rhetoric is evidence of that. When people say "discrimination" we have a knee-jerk reflex and shout "Bad!" - without thinking. If the word "tolerance" is used, same automatic response ("Good!") The training ensures that we do not really think - that we have superficial responses - such as that diversity is good for a healthy, vibrant nation (emotive, abstract adjectives are extremely useful here) or that people ought to be free to do whatever they want (in the moral sphere, anyway). The idea that diversity may not always be good, or that there can be such a thing as too much of it - too much of a good thing - and that that is actually bad - never crosses people's minds. The conditioning, however it happened, has seen to that.

My personal opinion is that the key to all that is control of the public schools (ie, their history, something we also have only the most superficial knowledge of). The graduates of public schools become most of society, and wind up in the media, in Hollywood, in, well, everywhere. Except maybe for a tiny elite at the very top - the eye in the pyramid on our one-dollar bill. We have, not a Greek or even Roman model for education, but probably much more like an Egyptian one. And so, control of public education translates into control of the thinking of the next generation of citizens.

I started a thread on this (not intended to be a fighting thread, but more of an inquiry that I think I now happen to know something about) over in Doriendor Corishev. No one has commented yet.