We have a very strange relationship with words. We perceive them as possessing almost magical powers, and as having a primary existence over all other things in the world. Very often we confuse the act of naming with the act of creating (for example, in the Book of Genesis, naming things is equivalent to making them: "And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night"). This sort of magical thinking also leads us to believe that words precede concepts, when the truth is exactly the other way around. This mistake is evident in two ways: we think that if there is a word then there must be a meaning that it designates, and we also think that one word can only have one logically distinct meaning. On both counts, we're wrong. There are distinct words that name just one concept (as in: "speed" and "velocity"); there are names that don't have any meaning because they do not designate any coherent concept (e.g. "glocal" or "social capital"); and, there are words that we use without realizing that they designate more than one logically distinct meaning. Take, for example, the simple word "is." We use it in at least three different meanings:
1) To indicate that something exists ("There is a tree in Brooklyn;" "There is such a thing as an innocent bystander")
2) To indicate that something has a certain property ("My hair is black;" "Ghana is a country in Africa") and
3) To indicate that two things are equivalent ("To love is to suffer;" "To think is to create;" "Two plus three is five").
The fact that the word "is" has more than one meaning has been first noted by the pioneers of mathematical logic (Gottlob Frege, Charles Sanders Peirce, Giuseppe Peano, Bertrand Russell, etc.), and recently rediscovered by Bill Clinton ("It depends on what your definition of "is" is).
A profound implication of all this is that language can hamper discovery. There are still many concepts we are not aware exist because our language muddles them with other concepts by naming them all with one word.
No comments:
Post a Comment