The Epistemological Influences of Language

Our Study

We want to explore the ways in which we employ language, looking both at the structure of Language, and the rhetorical character of language.

• We see things with the sophistication of the vocabulary of our Language. The words that we find used in a language are used in context. Thus, we can perceive as we have vocabulary that allows us to see and as we need to see different things our vocabulary changes or our Language fails us.
• Different terms applied give different views. A thesaurus lists synonyms -- words that mean the same. But words have shades of meaning and those shades provide slightly different meanings. Thus, different words give us different perspectives.
• Names permit generalization and classification. All things and all moments are in some sense unique. So when we use names to talk about the similarities in things or moments, we abstract out particular characteristics for emphasis. The vocabulary of our Language delimits such generalization and classification. We generalize across similar cases and we generalize across time.

• Noun centered. Indo-European languages such as English are noun and abstraction centered. A well-formed English sentence takes a noun and says something about it. Other languages are verb centered. A well-formed sentence in their syntax may, for example, name an action and then specify who or what participates in the action. The implications are profound. Things in rest is the normally perceived condition in Indo-European languages. Things are put into motion. Things in motion are normal in the verb-centered Languages.
• Space/time metaphysics. Indo-European languages construct life by relating things to each other in space and to track changes in past/present/future. Other languages construct life differently. For example, they may have as their basic differentiation the manifest and the unmanifest. Anything that can not be touched or felt is of a different order. Time does not matter as much as directness of experience.
• Two-valued. Indo-European Languages and their logics tend to stress opposites. Thus, A cannot be non-A, and non-A cannot be A is a basic premise. Old and young, male and female, smart and dumb, and such pairs are the way we perceive in Indo-European Languages. Other languages tend to see things more naturally as continuums. Age is a continuum.
• Static. Indo-European Languages feature state of being as a natural form. Action is added. In other Languages, times of rest are merely interludes in action. Change is natural.

• Words cluster with each other into meaning systems. Words do not occur at random but the use of particular words then invoke other words. Example: War metaphor. The words in a cluster serve to single out things, events, and characteristics for awareness and judgements of importance.
• Meaning systems relate words to each other and imply relationships expected in experience. If a war metaphor is used, casualties are expected and victory marks the end of the events. Thus, the clusters of terms set up predictions about events.

• Description. The meaning systems provide a vocabulary and relationships among that vocabulary with which people, events, or things are described.
• Evaluation. The vocabulary and relationships are used to express approval or disapproval; like or dislike; admiration or condemnation. Some words praise; others condemn.
• Action. The meaning systems provide a vocabulary to direct action in particular directions.

• The power of language to influence perception would imply an anarchy of knowledge and experience if it were not that language is social. Meanings systems emerge from social processes. This gives them continuity and power to maintain themselves which frames particular messages. Thus, as individuals, we can pronounce variations on meaning systems by using the resources of language such as metaphor and analogy. But we are always tied to variations on socially endorsed frames.
• Cultures, subcultures, and groups -- Communities -- develop language of their own.
• Cultures. That different cultures have different language should be obvious. Certainly, at the cultural level, different Languages are spoken, but we also know that those of different cultures have different ways of talking about things. The British, for example, do education differently than we do, even though we "are divided by a common language" as Winston Churchill put it.
• Subcultures. Although this one may be a bit more difficult, we also have a clear notion that African Americans have a different style of discourse than do Euro-Americans. Similarly, we know that the language we hear in the center-city streets of American cities are different from what we hear in the suburbs. What we hear in the boardroom of a corporate office is different from what we hear at a union meeting. These different ways of talking arise from different subject matters and different assignments of importance in the various subcultures. These in turn lead to different evaluations and different ideas about appropriate action. And, of course, as we learned in the sociological influences of language, these different ways of talking become the glue that hold these subcultures together.
• Various other groups. Even within small groups of people -- my wine tasting group, my academic department -- we have particular vocabularies that we can employ without definition when talking to each other and that leads to common understandings, evaluations and ideas about appropriate reaction.
• Socially, we
• learn language patterns
• continually repeat patterns in sharing information, judging the world around us
• urge others to join us in responding to the events of our lives, and coordinate our response.

• When encountering experience meaning systems are employed to understand it. If we look at a community that has just encountered an event it is trying to come to terms with, we may see several meaning systems competing to explain the events. We hear lots of voices speaking for, and appealing to, the community to understand this way or that way.
• Over time, those many voices begin to diminish in quantity as particular explanations (and thus particular meaning systems) develop greater power as more people flock to them. Some important spokesperson -- the President, for example -- may declare a particular explanation to be the "correct" one. Thus, we may reach a consensus. Of course, we may not reach a consensus and the different ways of understanding events -- pro-choice and pro-life viewing abortion -- define our schism.
• Competing explanations (framed by the different meaning systems) compete with two tests:
• Reality Tests. We have learned that meaning systems make predictions about events. Once we have begun to apply a meaning system, it provides a plot of what people are going to be like, how things are going to turn out, and what the consequences are of actions we might take. If things turn out as that particular meaning system predicts, the usefulness of that meaning system to the community is enhanced, and the community's faith in its power increases. If character and events turn out differently than the meaning system predicted, the power of the meaning system ebbs as the community's faith erodes.
• Social Tests. Meaning systems exist to coordinate the people in a community. When large numbers of people begin to employ a particular meaning system to explain events and coordinate their response, the faith in a meaning system is increased and its power enhanced. As larger numbers find other meaning systems more useful, the power of a meaning system diminished.
• The ebb and flow of the power of meaning systems. As time passes, communities use their most powerful meaning systems to explain events and respond to them. Those proving most useful through the reality and social tests grow in power. Those proving less useful begin to fade.
• For a community, a meaning system:
• Leads to relative agreement on what they are dealing with,
• coordinates action to give a community response,
• and celebrates the unity of the community.

• Meaning Systems are born.
• They emerge as new ways of talking about experience.
• They develop strength as their influence spreads as more use them to explain their experience and their ability to explain their reality is proven. Eloquent spokespersons who can wield them dramatically and effectively can be important, but ultimately the success depends on their usefulness to a broad community.
• There is a diffusion process here in which small communities begin to develop the meaning systems, to declare them, and they spread to be useful to broader publics.
• When the broader community has incorporated the meaning system, can use it to encounter its experiences, it has matured.
• Meaning systems that live in a community are taught as people are initiated into the community.
• Education is the learning of meaning systems.
• The learning takes place as parents teach their children, as teachers teach their students, as everyone learns new lessons.
• Communities often develop rituals that signify the acquisition of mastery over meaning systems: the high school diploma, the license to practice, the PhD oral examination.
• Meaning systems will change over time.
• Each use of a meaning system to explain some new event puts that meaning system at risk. In its use by the community, the community will adapt the meaning system so that it may be effectively used.
• Changes in meaning systems will stick or erode according to their power in social use.
• The Death of a meaning system. Meaning systems die when they fail the tests in their use. The death may come by:
• conversion. When the events of the world prove a meaning system of ill-use in explaining those events, or when events go other than the meaning system predicted, the community may turn to another meaning system in a dramatic conversion. Examples: Americans going to war after Pearl Harbor, a spouse discovering the adultery of a loved one.
• bleeding off adherents. Since meaning systems must have the power to guide a community in developing a common understanding and a common response, when large portions of the community lose faith in a meaning system, its life is gone. Examples: the death of the New Deal political motive, a growing worry about the soundness of a company by its employees.
• death or retirement of proponents. Often those who are comfortable with a meaning system pass from power in the community. If they fail to teach that meaning system to others, the meaning system dies. Example: the end to segregation of the races.

• Through metaphors and analogy, language expresses understanding in terms of meaning systems that are normally applied to other matters. Examples: seeing our sports in the metaphor of war; studying language with a metaphor of life.
• Ways of systematic understanding are elaborations of such metaphors. Example: seeing human beings as machines in which motion can be see as isolated movements of body parts, parts can be replaced, and output can be measured.
• Most new understandings develop this way. Example: seeing cigarette smoking as addiction.

• Kenneth Burke notes that there are four different orders of language: four domains -- apparently distinct -- in which words are used.
• The Natural. The natural order is the order of physical reality. Things in the natural order have physical existence. Except at the extremes these things can be perceived with easily with our senses. They take up space and their change over time is marked by changes in physical characteristics.
• The Verbal. The verbal order is the order of language use. It includes words which describe grammar, rhetoric, poetics, logic, dialectic, symbolism, and so forth.
• The Socio-political. The socio-political order is the order of personal and social relationships. It includes things like rights, justice, democracy, marriage, love, obligations, duty, and so forth.
• The Super-natural. The supernatural order is the order of the religion and mysticism.
• When we form rhetorical messages we cross these orders. Thus, "father" is a natural condition of biological descendance between males and their children. But we most often think of "fathers" in terms of a socio-political relationship -- the responsibilities to raise children, to prepare them for the world, to love them, and to shelter them from harm and develop their abilities. In fact, many people are fathers without a natural relationship to a child. We, in fact, use father in one of these senses -- the natural or the socio-political to construct our relationship with the divine. The Christian Lord's Prayer appeals: "Our father, who art in heaven . . ."
• The power of language emerges from the ways in which we use language to cross these orders. We give "marriage" reality with the ring, a natural symbol of a socio-political relationship, made so by a verbal act "With this ring, I thee wed." We develop natural, physical behaviors such as hugging and kissing that express the unobservable relationship of love. War is a complex human activity with natural implications of destruction, initiated and organized socio-politically with typical verbal patterns including the invoking of the deity in support of the socio-political justice of our cause.
• In our culture, the "natural" has the most reality for us because our culture is physically oriented. But the socio-political that is where we live our lives is constructed in the verbal.

• In this lecture, we have tried to increase your consciousness of the ways in which language works to shape our understanding.
• In normal times, such an exercise is required to make you conscious that understandings are shaped in word use. This is because in these stable periods we simply use meaning systems, we do not think of them as meaning systems at all but as truth. Example: We did not think of the Cold War as a metaphor for foreign policy when we were in the midst of it; it was merely the way we understood the world.
• In times when meaning systems are disputed, we develop an understanding that in fact the use of meaning systems is somewhat arbitrary. We see the power that meaning systems have to shape our understanding. Example: The dispute over abortion and women's choice has made the moment when life begins an issue; in earlier times we simply understood it.

• Words cluster in patterns of use we call meaning systems.
• Meaning systems allow us to see and to relate things in socially understood patterns.
• Communities use communication to figure out what is happening, and to choose and coordinate response to it.
• These meaning systems are born, mature, change, and die.