As a polyglot, I have come to feel that each language carries its own unique soul-its own rhythm, its own gaze upon the world, visible in every word, every sentence, every pause. In my writing, I let languages speak as distinct voices, each with its own consciousness.
Language does more than convey thought; it shapes it. A Japanese speaker, placing the verb at the end, may dwell first on the one who feels, who suffers, who exists in the moment of action. Our minds, sculpted by these linguistic currents, in turn sculpt the reality we inhabit.
No arguments on your deep reflection, just pure admiration for surfacing philosophy, linguistics and neuroscience in ways I’d love to read more about so I’m glad I found your substack.
I never got into the neuroscience of linguistics so I love the part here about language’s impact on the nervous system - I wish more people understood this.
The basic why for me is so that people are more aware of how their words impact someone’s nervous system, in the hopes that people pay more attention to what/how they speak to people.
Life is recursive, but language is linear. Language collapses spirals of experience into words, encoding the logic and perspective of the culture that created it. It evolved from geometry and retains it at its core, but coherence depends on shared understanding between speaker and listener. Where words fail, experience speaks; where culture limits, perspective narrows. Language shapes thought only insofar as it shapes what can be said, not what can be felt.
I love this perspective — language is created linear. I think about how this is defied by poets, lyricists, playwrights, and some other writers who seem to find a way to use language simply as a tool. They play with the rules, redefine them, and craft their own unique language. The same way those who don’t fully learn grammar and words for their intended meaning, use grammar and words to convey their thoughts the way they see fit. It creates a new “language”. In a way we all construe language to convey our own intentions, alternative to language shaping our thoughts
Two thoughts for you: Douglas Hofstadter strange loops and Deaconian language-mind coëvolution.
Strange loops recurse back on themselves, like DNA which is code and data (literally) intertwined in the same storage medium.
Hofstadter, DR (1999). “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”. (20th anniversary ed.). Basic Books.
Second, in his seminal magnum opus, “The Symbolic Species: the Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain”, 1997, Dr Terrence Deacon posited that the corpus of language is held in the minds of people as well as all written words. Whilst learning language, children adapt it as much as their own minds, making grammar easier to learn and more consistent, for instance.
As a trove of knowledge that has changed my perceptions, I heartily recommend the book. :)
Deacon, TW (1997). “The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain”. WW Norton.
This is a very interesting proposal and very well written! I would like to offer a counterpoint on precision, both as a linguist (I have specialized in historical and sociolinguistics) and polyglot. Bear in mind it is a lot— I simply share from my passion for languages.
The deterministic effects of language on thought are still very overstated, even if there are minor differences in language speakers in very controlled research situations. Most academic linguistics and researchers are nowadays critical of the claims of language relativity. It cannot really be drawn from the results of these studies, even if there are statistically significant results, because they are only measuring performance on a few cognitive tests. Do small cognitive differences realistically translate to worldview or a broader way of thinking?
Take the example of Winawer et al. 2007, where Russian speakers are faster than English speakers at detecting changes in color. The actual difference in time was 124 milliseconds. That only shows that Russians are a fraction of a second faster at identifying certain colors, and nothing more. In the real world we cannot realistically claim a greater sensitivity to colors. Maybe if the result were something around 5 seconds or so, we could make a greater claim, but is that still even so meaningful to real life? And do we have evidence of people who learned Russian as a second language, later developing a faster reaction time in this specific context? That would be needed to account for the fact that native Russian speakers have a lifelong exposure to identifying certain hues.
Boroditsky’s studies have also not been replicated well many times; this is an issue. These are popularly cited in pop linguistics, but I have doubts about the way they are used as hard, empirical evidence for linguistic relativity. As a polyglot, I would say that the Whorfian hypothesis (and even milder versions) are very “sexy” and appeal to our pattern finding abilities, but face many caveats. The claims are often fallacious— what people *feel* as language shaping thought is likely more so the culture, place/time of learning the language, and those sorts of concrete trappings that surround a language, which are far more likely to influence our mental associations with any given language. The vocabulary of a language tends to stem from those things as well, and this is realistically where we do find the most effects on consciousness (or reflections thereof).
I always have always wondered myself why the claim that is always hyped up, is always that language shapes thought, but never that thought or culture shapes language. For example, as a Mandarin and Dutch speaker, I find myself very irritated (😅) at times with the complex vocabulary for family relationships in Mandarin, which defines gender, relative age, and so on. In Dutch, even the words for “cousin” and “nephew” are the same, much simpler. This could be seen as a site of linguistic determinism, but I would more realistically say that the vocabulary of each language is simply a product of the mother culture. Dutch culture is far less hierarchy and family-oriented than Chinese culture; it is not like the languages determined this reality, but the history and material conditions surrounding each culture.
The arguments for grammatical gender influencing associations are interesting; as a Spanish speaker I would not say that this really has as much effect on me as others claim, but I can see how things like moon being feminine foster certain associations. Then again, couldn’t it be that moon is feminine because of a pre-existing cultural association in the origin etymology (in Latin)? These are all interesting debates to ponder.
I would recommend John McWhorter’s work on linguistics and specifically this matter. “The language hoax: why the world looks the same in any language” addresses a lot of these claims in a very interesting and digestible way, and also debunks some of Pinker’s claims. If anything it is great to have both perspectives, though I feel this is more faithfully empirical. McWhorter gave a very nice lecture on this at the Santa Fe Institute as well.
Again, wonderful work; thank you for bringing this into discussion! And I really appreciate how you weaved philosophy into this piece!
Thank you for the valuable thought. It is concise in execution and rich in material. Could I get your thoughts on a musing of mine on the topic? Here:
“I think language grounds thought, not shape it. I stand on one side of a swamp. I want to get to the other side. I have two paths of stepping stones, English and Albanian. Neither English nor Albanian determines my decision to go on the other side of the swamp. However, if it's a complex thought I am dealing with where I need the more precise terminology, English presents a path with more stepping stones whereas Albanian the stones are further apart and I have to leap further, increasing likelihood of falling into the swamp and making more difficult reproducing the leap.
In the space of a thought, if English goes from A to B to C whereas Albanian leaps from A to C, B is not naturally inferred. I say it is not inferred because I can't reproduce the identical leap next time around. It would be B-adjacent but not B. So perhaps a way to put it is language grounds immediate thought over a person and language shapes faculty of thought over people and time.
I am reminded of Schrodinger’s dilemma. Thought exists in superposition like the cat. Language collapses it into a single, definite state. Swamp analogy can be richer to explore but Schrodinger’s cat preserves a truer sense the identity of language and thought and the relationship between them I think.”
Thank you for your comment! I have a background in linguistics and I am often trying to convince people away from linguistic relativity. It’s fascinating as an idea, but pales as a reality once a person begins to dissect the decades of research evidence against Sapir & Whorf.
If I continued linguistics research, I always wanted to pursue these cognitive tests with multilingual speakers, like the English and Russian test. Would we see an improvement in differentiating the color blue as an English speaker learn Russian? I doubt it. Maybe if as the Russian learner engages more in Russian culture and uses the blue words more often, they might improve. But knowing another word for blue in Russian doesn’t seem to imply that a person sees the color differently. I would hypothesize that you might have to be Russian and get taught what the main colors are in order to think about colors differently. This test to me seems to have nothing to do with language.
This is a very well-written and engaging work. I appreciate the balance you strike between Wittgenstein’s cage and the more permeable, flexible reality revealed by empirical evidence. I cannot say I have explored these depths with the rigor this essay demonstrates, but it checked some boxes I’ve pondered on before and also took me in directions I hadn’t yet considered.
One thought that kept circling in my mind while reading is how language seems bound up with consciousness itself. It feels evolutionary, as if our awareness and our words emerged alongside each other. I’ve heard the hypothesis that our earliest memories as children don’t fully “exist” until we begin to speak. In other words, our memories (perhaps even more than our reality) are defined by language.
That limitation is never more apparent than when we attempt to describe what lies beyond common experience. I’ve never done psychedelics myself, but I’ve listened to others struggle to articulate their experiences, frustration etched in their faces as they reach for words that don’t exist. Dreams feel similar; they slip through our fingers partly, perhaps, because our language lacks the categories to pin them down. If we don’t have the words, then maybe we don’t even have the memory.
Thank you for weaving philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience together in this way. It affirms what I often explore in my own reflections: that language doesn’t just describe our world; it makes and remakes it, while never quite touching whatever lies beyond its reach.
Funnily enough, Nietzsche makes your exact same point about language being bound up with consciousness in Section 354 of The Gay Science. He argues that consciousness evolved from the evolutionary pressure for communication. I copied the section below if you’re interested:
The problem of consciousness (or more correctly: of becoming conscious of oneself) meets us only when we begin to perceive in what measure we could dispense with it: and it is at the beginning of this perception that we are now placed by physiology and zoology (which have thus required two centuries to overtake the hint thrown out in advance by Leibnitz). For we could in fact think, feel, will, and recollect, we could likewise "act" in every sense of the term, and nevertheless nothing of it all need necessarily "come into consciousness" (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without its seeing itself as it were in a mirror: as in fact even at present the far greater part of our life still goes on without this mirroring,—and even our thinking, feeling, volitional life as well, however painful this statement may sound to an older philosopher. What then is the purpose of consciousness generally, when it is in the main superfluous?—Now it seems to me, if you will hear my answer and its perhaps extravagant supposition, that the subtlety and strength of consciousness are always in proportion to the capacity for communication of a man (or an animal), the capacity for communication in its turn being in proportion to the necessity for communication: the latter not to be understood as if precisely the individual himself who is master in the art of communicating and making known his necessities would at the same time have to be most dependent upon others for his necessities. It seems to me, however, to be so in relation to whole races and successions of generations: where necessity and need have long compelled men to communicate with their fellows and understand one another rapidly and subtly, a surplus of the power and art of communication is at last acquired as if it were a fortune which had gradually accumulated, and now waited for an heir to squander it prodigally (the so-called artists are these heirs, in like manner the orators, preachers, and authors: all of them men who come at the end of a long succession, "late-born" always, in the best sense of the word, and as has been said, squanderers by their very nature). Granted that this observation is correct, I may proceed further to the conjecture that consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication,—that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man (especially between those commanding and those obeying) and has only developed in proportion to its utility Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man,—it is only as such that it has had to develop; the recluse and wild-beast species of men would not have needed it The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings and motions come within the range of our consciousness—at least a part of them—is the result of a terrible, prolonged "must" ruling man's destiny: as the most endangered animal he needed help and protection; he needed his fellows, he was obliged to express his distress, he had to know how to make himself understood—and for all this he needed "consciousness" first of all: he had to "know" himself what he lacked, to "know" how he felt, and to "know" what he thought. For, to repeat it once more, man, like every living creature, thinks unceasingly, but does not know it; the thinking which is becoming conscious of itself is only the smallest part thereof, we may say, the most superficial part, the worst part:—for this conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication, by means of which the origin of consciousness is revealed. In short, the development of speech and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious) go hand in hand. Let it be further accepted that it is not only speech that serves as a bridge between man and man, but also the looks, the pressure and the gestures; our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, our power of being able to fix them, and as it were to locate them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion as the necessity has increased for communicating them to others by means of signs. The sign-inventing man is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious; it is only as a social animal that man has learned to become conscious of himself,—he is doing so still, and doing so more and more.—As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of "knowing himself," will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his "averageness"; —that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness—by the imperious "genius of the species" therein—and is translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual—there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer .... This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarised world;—that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid,—a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisation. Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease. As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned: I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics). It is still less the antithesis of "thing in itself" and phenomenon, for we do not "know" enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowing, or for "truth": we "know" (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "usefulness" is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.
Still, I think that Wittgenstein was mistaken about the primary role of language, just like Aristotle was mistaken about the role of logic.
That’s why Nietzsche was skeptical — though he too could not separate rationality from language/logic and ended up demoting both in favour of intuition.
The truth, as I see it, is that rational understanding and knowledge are visual in nature (that’s why in many languages “to see” has the meaning of “to understand”). As for language, we only use it for communication, to describe our vision to others.
And as for Aristotelean logic, I think it is an illusion. That’s not how we reason.
great read! Ive been reading up on Sapir Whorf theory and AI development. Interestingly researchers have noted that with complex issues AIs tend to switch between chinese and english in the backend and when told to use just a single language they were recorded to do the same task but notably slower and with much larger token usage.
Maybe I should learn my months in chinese and then I’ll finally remember the order 😔
THIS is the kind of stuff I live for! I am glad I found your page. There's a Emcee who is also a Philosopher named KRS-One (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone) that introduced me to this type of neurolinguistics.
He said in a song "Just like that" "You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain and the more words you have , the more youre able to see."
This science-philosophy has developed me own resilience and helped me develop the framework of my Upcoming book "Confronting and Defeating the Imposter system."
All in All, without too much rambling. The Language - Perception link is highly underrated and I believe is the key to a lack of self confidence and regard that is so prevalent today.
“The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.”
Has to do more with “habits of mind” than with language somehow controlling or enabling. Grooves, riverbeds. The habits correspond to the language(s) spoken.
Can keep noticing ever finer shades of experience until you get to phenomena that you can’t describe using language or concept.
"How do we conceptualize logical concepts without relying on language?" - I'm intrigued how visually imagining concepts comes into this, and if there are other ways of thinking about concepts. E.g. would numbers be one way or is that also relying on language?
The words we have free us or constrain us, for with words we think, and through our thoughts, we come to feel
Sensations may start without Words (thoughts) ascribed But, inevitably, thoughts join in and influence what more we allow ourselves or know (personally) how to feel.
What struck me most is how the article shows language as less of a prison and more of a scaffold. Our words guide what we notice and how we frame reality, yet the evidence from bilingualism and aphasia reminds us that thought can spill beyond linguistic boundaries. It feels less like we are trapped in cages of vocabulary and more like we are navigating shifting contexts. Each language offering its own lens, its own way of making the world legible. That tension between constraint and flexibility is exactly where the most interesting cognitive drift happens.
Interestingly I gave birth in France. My French is limited but when I speak about giving birth I have to mentally translate because the experience was conducted in French. I remember some bits with French terms. Love the article so i terrsting. Lots to think about
As a polyglot, I have come to feel that each language carries its own unique soul-its own rhythm, its own gaze upon the world, visible in every word, every sentence, every pause. In my writing, I let languages speak as distinct voices, each with its own consciousness.
Language does more than convey thought; it shapes it. A Japanese speaker, placing the verb at the end, may dwell first on the one who feels, who suffers, who exists in the moment of action. Our minds, sculpted by these linguistic currents, in turn sculpt the reality we inhabit.
No arguments on your deep reflection, just pure admiration for surfacing philosophy, linguistics and neuroscience in ways I’d love to read more about so I’m glad I found your substack.
I never got into the neuroscience of linguistics so I love the part here about language’s impact on the nervous system - I wish more people understood this.
Thank you :) I am glad you enjoyed it!
I wish more people understood this.
Why?
The basic why for me is so that people are more aware of how their words impact someone’s nervous system, in the hopes that people pay more attention to what/how they speak to people.
Thank you peace and joy. Claire
STOP SHOWING INTELECTUAL SUBMISSIVNESS TO ANY MALE🤬…THATS NOT COOL!
Life is recursive, but language is linear. Language collapses spirals of experience into words, encoding the logic and perspective of the culture that created it. It evolved from geometry and retains it at its core, but coherence depends on shared understanding between speaker and listener. Where words fail, experience speaks; where culture limits, perspective narrows. Language shapes thought only insofar as it shapes what can be said, not what can be felt.
I love this perspective — language is created linear. I think about how this is defied by poets, lyricists, playwrights, and some other writers who seem to find a way to use language simply as a tool. They play with the rules, redefine them, and craft their own unique language. The same way those who don’t fully learn grammar and words for their intended meaning, use grammar and words to convey their thoughts the way they see fit. It creates a new “language”. In a way we all construe language to convey our own intentions, alternative to language shaping our thoughts
Two thoughts for you: Douglas Hofstadter strange loops and Deaconian language-mind coëvolution.
Strange loops recurse back on themselves, like DNA which is code and data (literally) intertwined in the same storage medium.
Hofstadter, DR (1999). “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”. (20th anniversary ed.). Basic Books.
Second, in his seminal magnum opus, “The Symbolic Species: the Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain”, 1997, Dr Terrence Deacon posited that the corpus of language is held in the minds of people as well as all written words. Whilst learning language, children adapt it as much as their own minds, making grammar easier to learn and more consistent, for instance.
As a trove of knowledge that has changed my perceptions, I heartily recommend the book. :)
Deacon, TW (1997). “The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain”. WW Norton.
This is well described.
This is a very interesting proposal and very well written! I would like to offer a counterpoint on precision, both as a linguist (I have specialized in historical and sociolinguistics) and polyglot. Bear in mind it is a lot— I simply share from my passion for languages.
The deterministic effects of language on thought are still very overstated, even if there are minor differences in language speakers in very controlled research situations. Most academic linguistics and researchers are nowadays critical of the claims of language relativity. It cannot really be drawn from the results of these studies, even if there are statistically significant results, because they are only measuring performance on a few cognitive tests. Do small cognitive differences realistically translate to worldview or a broader way of thinking?
Take the example of Winawer et al. 2007, where Russian speakers are faster than English speakers at detecting changes in color. The actual difference in time was 124 milliseconds. That only shows that Russians are a fraction of a second faster at identifying certain colors, and nothing more. In the real world we cannot realistically claim a greater sensitivity to colors. Maybe if the result were something around 5 seconds or so, we could make a greater claim, but is that still even so meaningful to real life? And do we have evidence of people who learned Russian as a second language, later developing a faster reaction time in this specific context? That would be needed to account for the fact that native Russian speakers have a lifelong exposure to identifying certain hues.
Boroditsky’s studies have also not been replicated well many times; this is an issue. These are popularly cited in pop linguistics, but I have doubts about the way they are used as hard, empirical evidence for linguistic relativity. As a polyglot, I would say that the Whorfian hypothesis (and even milder versions) are very “sexy” and appeal to our pattern finding abilities, but face many caveats. The claims are often fallacious— what people *feel* as language shaping thought is likely more so the culture, place/time of learning the language, and those sorts of concrete trappings that surround a language, which are far more likely to influence our mental associations with any given language. The vocabulary of a language tends to stem from those things as well, and this is realistically where we do find the most effects on consciousness (or reflections thereof).
I always have always wondered myself why the claim that is always hyped up, is always that language shapes thought, but never that thought or culture shapes language. For example, as a Mandarin and Dutch speaker, I find myself very irritated (😅) at times with the complex vocabulary for family relationships in Mandarin, which defines gender, relative age, and so on. In Dutch, even the words for “cousin” and “nephew” are the same, much simpler. This could be seen as a site of linguistic determinism, but I would more realistically say that the vocabulary of each language is simply a product of the mother culture. Dutch culture is far less hierarchy and family-oriented than Chinese culture; it is not like the languages determined this reality, but the history and material conditions surrounding each culture.
The arguments for grammatical gender influencing associations are interesting; as a Spanish speaker I would not say that this really has as much effect on me as others claim, but I can see how things like moon being feminine foster certain associations. Then again, couldn’t it be that moon is feminine because of a pre-existing cultural association in the origin etymology (in Latin)? These are all interesting debates to ponder.
I would recommend John McWhorter’s work on linguistics and specifically this matter. “The language hoax: why the world looks the same in any language” addresses a lot of these claims in a very interesting and digestible way, and also debunks some of Pinker’s claims. If anything it is great to have both perspectives, though I feel this is more faithfully empirical. McWhorter gave a very nice lecture on this at the Santa Fe Institute as well.
Again, wonderful work; thank you for bringing this into discussion! And I really appreciate how you weaved philosophy into this piece!
Thank you for the valuable thought. It is concise in execution and rich in material. Could I get your thoughts on a musing of mine on the topic? Here:
“I think language grounds thought, not shape it. I stand on one side of a swamp. I want to get to the other side. I have two paths of stepping stones, English and Albanian. Neither English nor Albanian determines my decision to go on the other side of the swamp. However, if it's a complex thought I am dealing with where I need the more precise terminology, English presents a path with more stepping stones whereas Albanian the stones are further apart and I have to leap further, increasing likelihood of falling into the swamp and making more difficult reproducing the leap.
In the space of a thought, if English goes from A to B to C whereas Albanian leaps from A to C, B is not naturally inferred. I say it is not inferred because I can't reproduce the identical leap next time around. It would be B-adjacent but not B. So perhaps a way to put it is language grounds immediate thought over a person and language shapes faculty of thought over people and time.
I am reminded of Schrodinger’s dilemma. Thought exists in superposition like the cat. Language collapses it into a single, definite state. Swamp analogy can be richer to explore but Schrodinger’s cat preserves a truer sense the identity of language and thought and the relationship between them I think.”
Thank you for your comment! I have a background in linguistics and I am often trying to convince people away from linguistic relativity. It’s fascinating as an idea, but pales as a reality once a person begins to dissect the decades of research evidence against Sapir & Whorf.
If I continued linguistics research, I always wanted to pursue these cognitive tests with multilingual speakers, like the English and Russian test. Would we see an improvement in differentiating the color blue as an English speaker learn Russian? I doubt it. Maybe if as the Russian learner engages more in Russian culture and uses the blue words more often, they might improve. But knowing another word for blue in Russian doesn’t seem to imply that a person sees the color differently. I would hypothesize that you might have to be Russian and get taught what the main colors are in order to think about colors differently. This test to me seems to have nothing to do with language.
This is a very well-written and engaging work. I appreciate the balance you strike between Wittgenstein’s cage and the more permeable, flexible reality revealed by empirical evidence. I cannot say I have explored these depths with the rigor this essay demonstrates, but it checked some boxes I’ve pondered on before and also took me in directions I hadn’t yet considered.
One thought that kept circling in my mind while reading is how language seems bound up with consciousness itself. It feels evolutionary, as if our awareness and our words emerged alongside each other. I’ve heard the hypothesis that our earliest memories as children don’t fully “exist” until we begin to speak. In other words, our memories (perhaps even more than our reality) are defined by language.
That limitation is never more apparent than when we attempt to describe what lies beyond common experience. I’ve never done psychedelics myself, but I’ve listened to others struggle to articulate their experiences, frustration etched in their faces as they reach for words that don’t exist. Dreams feel similar; they slip through our fingers partly, perhaps, because our language lacks the categories to pin them down. If we don’t have the words, then maybe we don’t even have the memory.
Thank you for weaving philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience together in this way. It affirms what I often explore in my own reflections: that language doesn’t just describe our world; it makes and remakes it, while never quite touching whatever lies beyond its reach.
Funnily enough, Nietzsche makes your exact same point about language being bound up with consciousness in Section 354 of The Gay Science. He argues that consciousness evolved from the evolutionary pressure for communication. I copied the section below if you’re interested:
The problem of consciousness (or more correctly: of becoming conscious of oneself) meets us only when we begin to perceive in what measure we could dispense with it: and it is at the beginning of this perception that we are now placed by physiology and zoology (which have thus required two centuries to overtake the hint thrown out in advance by Leibnitz). For we could in fact think, feel, will, and recollect, we could likewise "act" in every sense of the term, and nevertheless nothing of it all need necessarily "come into consciousness" (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without its seeing itself as it were in a mirror: as in fact even at present the far greater part of our life still goes on without this mirroring,—and even our thinking, feeling, volitional life as well, however painful this statement may sound to an older philosopher. What then is the purpose of consciousness generally, when it is in the main superfluous?—Now it seems to me, if you will hear my answer and its perhaps extravagant supposition, that the subtlety and strength of consciousness are always in proportion to the capacity for communication of a man (or an animal), the capacity for communication in its turn being in proportion to the necessity for communication: the latter not to be understood as if precisely the individual himself who is master in the art of communicating and making known his necessities would at the same time have to be most dependent upon others for his necessities. It seems to me, however, to be so in relation to whole races and successions of generations: where necessity and need have long compelled men to communicate with their fellows and understand one another rapidly and subtly, a surplus of the power and art of communication is at last acquired as if it were a fortune which had gradually accumulated, and now waited for an heir to squander it prodigally (the so-called artists are these heirs, in like manner the orators, preachers, and authors: all of them men who come at the end of a long succession, "late-born" always, in the best sense of the word, and as has been said, squanderers by their very nature). Granted that this observation is correct, I may proceed further to the conjecture that consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication,—that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man (especially between those commanding and those obeying) and has only developed in proportion to its utility Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man,—it is only as such that it has had to develop; the recluse and wild-beast species of men would not have needed it The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings and motions come within the range of our consciousness—at least a part of them—is the result of a terrible, prolonged "must" ruling man's destiny: as the most endangered animal he needed help and protection; he needed his fellows, he was obliged to express his distress, he had to know how to make himself understood—and for all this he needed "consciousness" first of all: he had to "know" himself what he lacked, to "know" how he felt, and to "know" what he thought. For, to repeat it once more, man, like every living creature, thinks unceasingly, but does not know it; the thinking which is becoming conscious of itself is only the smallest part thereof, we may say, the most superficial part, the worst part:—for this conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication, by means of which the origin of consciousness is revealed. In short, the development of speech and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious) go hand in hand. Let it be further accepted that it is not only speech that serves as a bridge between man and man, but also the looks, the pressure and the gestures; our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, our power of being able to fix them, and as it were to locate them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion as the necessity has increased for communicating them to others by means of signs. The sign-inventing man is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious; it is only as a social animal that man has learned to become conscious of himself,—he is doing so still, and doing so more and more.—As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of "knowing himself," will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his "averageness"; —that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness—by the imperious "genius of the species" therein—and is translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual—there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer .... This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarised world;—that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid,—a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisation. Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease. As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned: I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics). It is still less the antithesis of "thing in itself" and phenomenon, for we do not "know" enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowing, or for "truth": we "know" (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "usefulness" is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.
I’m very much a casual student of Nietzsche - thank you for the add and share!
By the way, what's the research on trilingual/polyglot upbringings? Because I grew up with 3 languages and learnt a fourth quite early on
Is there even enough space in the brain for that? 😂😂
Great research, solid article.
Still, I think that Wittgenstein was mistaken about the primary role of language, just like Aristotle was mistaken about the role of logic.
That’s why Nietzsche was skeptical — though he too could not separate rationality from language/logic and ended up demoting both in favour of intuition.
The truth, as I see it, is that rational understanding and knowledge are visual in nature (that’s why in many languages “to see” has the meaning of “to understand”). As for language, we only use it for communication, to describe our vision to others.
And as for Aristotelean logic, I think it is an illusion. That’s not how we reason.
https://silkfire.substack.com/p/the-illusion-of-logic
great read! Ive been reading up on Sapir Whorf theory and AI development. Interestingly researchers have noted that with complex issues AIs tend to switch between chinese and english in the backend and when told to use just a single language they were recorded to do the same task but notably slower and with much larger token usage.
Maybe I should learn my months in chinese and then I’ll finally remember the order 😔
Thank you! And yes your point makes very much sense, very interesting.
THIS is the kind of stuff I live for! I am glad I found your page. There's a Emcee who is also a Philosopher named KRS-One (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone) that introduced me to this type of neurolinguistics.
He said in a song "Just like that" "You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain and the more words you have , the more youre able to see."
This science-philosophy has developed me own resilience and helped me develop the framework of my Upcoming book "Confronting and Defeating the Imposter system."
All in All, without too much rambling. The Language - Perception link is highly underrated and I believe is the key to a lack of self confidence and regard that is so prevalent today.
Thanks for this.
“The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.”
— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct
Has to do more with “habits of mind” than with language somehow controlling or enabling. Grooves, riverbeds. The habits correspond to the language(s) spoken.
Can keep noticing ever finer shades of experience until you get to phenomena that you can’t describe using language or concept.
"How do we conceptualize logical concepts without relying on language?" - I'm intrigued how visually imagining concepts comes into this, and if there are other ways of thinking about concepts. E.g. would numbers be one way or is that also relying on language?
Yes.
The words we have free us or constrain us, for with words we think, and through our thoughts, we come to feel
Sensations may start without Words (thoughts) ascribed But, inevitably, thoughts join in and influence what more we allow ourselves or know (personally) how to feel.
What struck me most is how the article shows language as less of a prison and more of a scaffold. Our words guide what we notice and how we frame reality, yet the evidence from bilingualism and aphasia reminds us that thought can spill beyond linguistic boundaries. It feels less like we are trapped in cages of vocabulary and more like we are navigating shifting contexts. Each language offering its own lens, its own way of making the world legible. That tension between constraint and flexibility is exactly where the most interesting cognitive drift happens.
As someone who studies formal languages as a hobby for computational linguistics, I say hell yes.
Interestingly I gave birth in France. My French is limited but when I speak about giving birth I have to mentally translate because the experience was conducted in French. I remember some bits with French terms. Love the article so i terrsting. Lots to think about