LANGUAGE'S ROLE IN THINKING

Most of us in the West approach things scientifically. Our prerequisite for accepting any new idea is that it must be backed by scientific proof and logic. In every corner of our society, we are learning and living in ways that are dramatically out of date. Today's scientists are dancing in quantum worlds and beyond, while the rest of us are chained to ancient reductionist science. The philosophers of the day are delighting in interpretive understandings of the world while the rest of us linger within the boring confines of a linear, cause-effect, subject-object understanding of the world.

Language creates distinctions -- linguistic patterns -- from the unfathomable complexity of the whole. It selects aspects of that complexity and combines them in ways that are useful. Language allows us to remember, to process, and to share what we have understood about the world and most importantly, to create new understandings. It does not just name what is out there. Language creates the experiences that we identify and speak about in a way which implies that the universe is "out there". We see things because (and as)they have labels that fit our existing set of labels.

Language emerges from the interplay of our capacity with language, the world, and the breadth of our experience. The fundamental language capacity of an individual human being emerges from the social (commonly used) language and the everyday experiences of a person are social and thus contained in existing language.

Throughout history every society has had its own unique prevailing metaphors, belief systems, and understanding of the world. And in each society what prevails is not open to question. Occasionally, a society will go through a dramatic change very rapidly -- usually referred to as a revolution -- but as it turns out, even then, the change in fundamentals is only slight. Even in creating America, as unique as it is, there was not an alteration made in the fundamental beliefs of the nature of the world but only of the beliefs about the relationship between people and state.

Our patterns of understanding and meaning are embedded in language. If someone thinks or speaks outside of those patterns they are ignored -- or worse. The shadow this casts on the possibility of change is obvious. Our language is a composite complex adaptive system which emerges and evolves into the on-going source of our understanding of the world. What cannot be expressed does not become part of the world.