Topics Language

Question If it was for an organised civilization of aliens to be discovered, could an actual form of communication emerge? I mean, aside the fact that we would speak different langugages, we would have totally different habits, different way of thinking and ethics (if not different ''types'' of logic as they would have grown on a diffent planet with all the consequences this fact induces).

Accepted:
June 7, 2012

Comments

Great question. I would think, though, that the onus would be on the skeptic raising the question to give solid reasons why communication would NOT be possible. Already on earth we find different cultures with different languages, different "habits," different ways of thinking and ethics, and in fact even different 'types of logic' apparently (or so some cultural psychologists have argued at various points). But why should that make some form of communication impossible? True, the process of translating between such languages might be more complicated than it would be if more were shared; and true, more miscommunication might well occur during the translations, due to all sorts of pragmatic reasons. But that seems very far removed from holding a strong claim such as "communication is impossible." Absent such an explicit argument, and given the kind of counterevidence different earth cultures already present, I would have to go with a "yes" answer to your question! (By the way, Donald Davidson famously argued, in " On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," that the claim that there could be other conceptual schemes different from "ours" doesn't make sense -- such schemes would not be translatable into ours, but the idea of untranslatable languages also doesn't make sense ... Pretty relevant to your concerns -- check it out!)