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Language

With each language in the world there seems to be a set number of words, some have more it seems and some have less. My question is that in a language that has less words, is it limited in it's ability to conceptualize and describe and thus understand less about it's reality around it, or is it's simplistic view what gives a clearer view of things? Follow up: If you can't define a word without using another word, wouldn't words be subjective?

You may be referring (directly or indirectly, intentionally or not) to the infamous Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, in brief the idea that the structure of one's language constrains/determines one's conceptualization of and cognitive approach to the world. (If the Inuit genuinely have more words for snow than ordinary English speakers, then that reflects that they can make (say) visual distinctions between the kinds of snow than we can ....) I'm not particularly familiar with the literature except that I believe this hypothesis is no longer much in fashion at all -- while perhaps in some limited senses different languages (including their different vocabularies, number of words, grammatical structures) are able to express various thoughts differently, etc., far more people accept these days that the 'thoughts' themselves are roughly universally available -- and indeed the fact that languages CAN be translated into each others (even if not always perfectly) suggests that all languages are capable of expressing...
Existence
Language

Does anybody seriously believe that reality itself is merely a function of language, thought and social convention? Some postmodernists like to say this ("reality is socially constructed"), but I doubt any of them would be willing to drink arsenic that has been socially reconstructed into harmless water. Furthermore, if reality is a function of these other factors, then one could not expect anything unexpected to happen (in a reality that is a function of thought, why should a volcano suddenly erupt if nobody thought of it?); yet the unexpected clearly does happen. So why do people stick to extreme versions of anti-realism and constructivism, when more moderate positions that don't deny an external reality, yet still conserve the valuable aspects of postmodernism (understanding of culture, power structures, categorization and convention; deconstruction of beliefs & ideologies; interpretations of and assignment of meaning to natural phenomena; etc.), are perfectly reasonable and tenable?

Hm, you'd first have to specify who you mean by the proponents of "extreme versions" of anti-realism etc, and then ask them directly! (I'm not an expert here but I wonder if some very respectable philosophers (such as Goodman, Putnam, Quine etc) can often get reprsented in ways more extreme than are accurate ...) ... Even a classic idealist of the Berkeleyan variety (ie Berkeley himself), though claiming that all reality is mind-dependent perceptions (and the perceivers of those perceptions) does NOT hold that reality is arbitrary, up to us, constructed by us -- that it's in any sense 'up to us' whether a volcano erupts or whether arsenic kills us-- he holds (at least) that something external to our minds, namely God, controls all that good stuff. So, too, I imagine, contemporary anti-realists (don't know if anyone endorses Berkeleyan idealism/anti-realism any more) would hold that while everything we say about the world, everythign we think about the world, every proposition we utter, etc. is ...
Language

You often hear statements like "90% of our communication is non-verbal", though the percentage tends to vary. What exactly do these statements mean? How can you quantify communication? Surely, non-verbal communication can't communicate 90% of abstract concepts or information. So what is communication? Do claims that most of communication is non-verbal make any real sense, or are these just cliché statements?

Interesting question! Would be nice to look at specific examples of people making such claims, and then analyzing them; one suspects that such phrases are mostly rhetorical, ie dramatic ways of saying 'we communicate a LOT non-verbally', but it's not impossible that some might intend something more empirical, precise, quantifiable by them. After all, we say things like "a picture's worth a thousand words", because we realize that we must often utter many, many propositions to describe everything that is contained in, or communicated by, some image -- so why shouldn't something similar be true re "non-verbal communication", which would include everything from facial expressions to tone of voice to body language to general behavior etc .... Perhaps you could (perhaps some have!) actually studied (say) actual conversations between people and then (roughly) measured what was communicated strictly verbally (ie just which/how many propositions were uttered by the people speaking) and then studied how much...
Language

So I was having an argument with a friend that went a little like this: He was saying that because he was a genius, he walked like a genius. I was saying this was logically invalid, that is, he couldn't walk like himself. If there was a particular way of walking that was specific to geniuses, and he was walking this way, then fine. He could be walking, and he could be a genius, so his walking was a genius walking, but it wasn't like a genius. He couldn't be like himself; he was himself. Who was correct?

Hm. Technically I'd ahve to side with your friend. The relation "is like" strikes me as a perfectly reflexive one, as the logicians might say: everything is like itself. If "being like" is a matter of "being similar", then why wouldn't "identity" simply be the hghest degree of similarity? Everything definitely IS identical with itself, ie maximally similar to itself ... If so, then a genius definitely could walk like a genius .... (Now your debate might have other things going on: you might be relying, say, on ordinary English usage,a ccording to which it sounds a little strained to say something is like itself; but then we should distinguish between the logical status of the relation "is like" and the ordinary usage of the phrase "is like", and you can both be right!) hope that's useful... ap
Language

Some definitions can be justified - for example, cats seem to be a discreet category in the real world, and thus a definition of the word cat must adequately describe this category and how its members differ from other things in the world. But when it comes to things like love, justice, government or art, these things are human constructs, and not some discreet entity in the world; so how do we create justified definitions of these terms? How do we decide what true love is, or what true art is, or what true justice or government is? We all have intuitions, but these intuitions change with time and culture, and people tend to bicker about the details. So how are definitions that do not apply to physical phenomena justified?

This is a great question! I would be inclined, however, to probe it a few different ways. First, there are many who are skeptical of the idea that there are true "natural kinds" ("discreet categories") in nature -- rather, species are themselves notoriously difficult to define, and even "within" some given species there is always tremendous variation across individuals, suggesting "fuzzier" categories rather than strict ones. In fact, if anything you might say we're almost more justified in providing definitions for the "human constructs" than for the natural things, because then we can clearly all agree that it's "up to us" how to define the things and dispense with the idea that we're trying to map our terms onto a pre-existing object or world. And further, I might ask why we need to "decide" what true love is etc; what's wrong with (say) realizing and accepting that many people use these words differently, as long as we strive continuously to be clear about our meanings, to recognize (and...

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