Question Does language shape our understanding of what we call reality (or, maybe, our perceptions of reality), or does reality shape our language? Is there, significantly, a German world, a French world and an English world, each of them different from one another in important or trivial ways?

Accepted:
June 30, 2010

Comments

Here is a simple response, which I think is true: Language shapes our understanding and our perception of reality (different words will cause us to focus on different aspects of the world around us) and reality shapes our language (different environments will cause us to adopt different words). Speakers of different languages all belong to the same world, however, for there is only one world.

Here is a more complicated response that may do a better job of addressing your concern: When people use different words to refer to the very same objects -- a bug, a chair, a curtain -- the differences in their view of the world can seem trivial. But when different languages focus on entirely different things (even the words for objects such as bugs and chairs can have importantly different associations in different languages), they are bound to reflect important differences in the worldviews of the relevant speakers. In some cases, the different views may be quite compatible because they simply attend to different things -- different parts of a single world. In other cases, where there seems to be a disagreement about the very same thing (about what will help a fever, for example), it may be difficult to decide who is right because it is difficult to decide whether the disagreement is really about the same thing (fever or something of which the fever is just a symptom? help reduce a fever or help it do its work? reduction in objective temperature or reduction in felt distress? etc.). In these cases, we may say that the different speakers exist in different worlds as way of noting differences in their worldviews, but I think that this way of talking is dangerous insofar as it encourages us to give up on the attempt to communicate with others about our common world.