Words and ideas

Does the language you speak determine the way you think?

Our astronomer recently had occasion to read some Aristotle, as background to an investigation that had historical aspects to it.  We approach Aristotle with some care, because he worked in a quite different environment from ours, and it’s very easy to find fault with his methods and conclusions.  It’s harder to understand them, and to learn from this philosopher who was undoubtedly a genius.

One argument that our astronomer noticed was that the universe has three dimensions, because one uses the word “both” when there are two, but “all” only when there are three or more.  Three, then, is the number of completion, of All.  Laying aside a bit of Pythagorean mysticism (of which Aristotle himself is skeptical), we notice that this uses a linguistic argument to prove a matter in geometry.  The Classical Greek language apparently made a grammatical distinction between one, two, and three or more objects, and Aristotle took this to imply something basic about the nature of reality.  Does this mean that philosophy is dependent on grammar?  Does the language you speak determine the thoughts you think?

This seems obviously true, in that if you don’t have words for a concept, you can’t express it.  Somewhere we recall an account of a meeting of bishops in the late Roman Empire, in which the Eastern delegation gave up in exasperation trying to explain a fine point of theology.  They said Latin was such a crude and barbarous language that it could not capture the subtlety of the argument in Greek.  Looking at another aspect, Spanish (for example) has two verbs that translate to the English “to be,” ser for qualities that are intrinsic and permanent, estar for qualities that are transient or accidental.  Such a matter of linguistics could suggest the Aristotelian distinction between natural and accidental features of an object.  It leads to the sneaking suspicion that, if we limit ourselves to one language, we may be missing a lot of philosophy, or (nowadays) science.

We don’t think it’s quite that deterministic, however.  As far as we can tell, Classical Greek had only one “to be” verb; Aristotle worked out his natural versus accidental dichotomy in that context, and indeed it can be explained without too much trouble in English.  Perhaps it’s easier to do in Spanish, or another language with dual verbs, but we notice that the rules governing the distinction in Gaelic don’t quite match those in Spanish.  Some extended explanation will be necessary in any case.  And of course most of modern science is done in mathematics, which is not finally dependent on the words you use to surround it.

But we do think that learning another language (well!) is of great value to the scientist or philosopher.  It forces you to make distinctions that never before occurred to you (ser or estar?), and so confront gaps or assumptions you may not have been aware of.  And it may suggest ideas to you, ideas best expressed in another tongue.