What about Kripke's communication chain, where the original concept gets a little blurry as it gets passed along?It results in some grim confusion . Kate Sullivan
-----Original Message----- From: Cheerskep <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Feb 12, 2013 3:31 pm Subject: Re: "If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world." In a message dated 2/7/13 6:10:15 PM, [email protected] writes: "If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."
*(from: Recent Experiments in Psychology* (1950) by Leland Whitney Crafts, Thiodore Christian Schneirla, and Elsa Elizabeth Robinson) Agree/disagree? This would-be profundity is far too vague to yield fruitful
discussion. The phrase "we would perceive a somewhat different world" is bound to occasion all sorts of different notions, hazy "interpretations", in the minds of various readers. Off this little evidence of what the writer had in mind, I'm inclined to say we don't have to hypothesize a "different language" to make a point here. The very same phrase in English can occasion innumerable different notions. But I can imagine the writer responding by saying, "No, no -- I'm not talking about notions. I'm saying we perceive a different mind-independent world." But readers might then claim that "perceptions" are themselves mental entities, notions; we never find pieces of the non-mental world in our minds, etc. Or perhaps the writer means, for example, that the Inuit (eskimos) see snow differently by virtue of the very fact that they have sixteen different words for sixteen different kinds of snow. (Although, the last I heard, scholars who know the Inuit language say it's baloney: they don't have sixteen different words for different kinds of snow.) Oy vey. What a faulty sieve language is!
