Topics Language

Question Why do we often put our thoughts into words which we have no intention of writing down or speaking? Surely language is a much less efficient way of perceiving the world as it doesn't express our exact viewpoint, therefore we have to add our own meaning to language anyway. Why then, do we sometimes put exact thoughts into an inexact form during the thought process?

Accepted:
November 15, 2005

Comments

A picture is worth a thousand words, to be sure, and so language is, in a sense, a poor instrument as compared to perception. But perception isn't always what is needed. The very fact that perception makes such fine distinctions of, say, color is what makes it so ill-suited for expressing similarities. Indeed, seeing and expressing similarities is, one might say, precisely a way of being less exact, but certainly for a purpose. I may, for example, want a red pen. I don't care which shade of red it is, so long as it is red. If I had to show you the color of the pen I wanted, I'd have a problem.