There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words. There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will.
These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same.
They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic.
Though these ideas are woven into language, their roots are deeper than language itself.
They lay out the ground rules for how we understand our surroundings, how we assign credit and blame to our fellows, and how we negotiate our relationships with them.
A close look at our speech—our conversations, our jokes, our curses, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies—can therefore give us insight into who we are.#2366•
Chapter 1
Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it is also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.
It is about the relation of words to a community—how a new word, which arises in an act of creation by a single speaker, comes to evoke the same idea in the rest of a population, so people can understand one another when they use it.
It is about the relation of words to emotions: the way in which words don't just point to things but are saturated with feelings, which can endow the words with a sense of magic, taboo, and sin.
And it is about words and social relations—how people use language not just to transfer ideas from head to head but to negotiate the kind of relationship they wish to have with their conversational partner.#2358•
Learn
is what linguists call a factive verb; it entails that the belief attributed to the subject is true. In that way it is like the verb know and unlike the verb think.#2340•
Factive verbs entail something a speaker assumes to be indisputably true, not just something in which he or she has high confidence: it is not a contradiction to say I'm very, very confident that Oswald shot Kennedy, but I don't know that he did. For this reason factive verbs have a whiff of paradox about them.
No one can be certain of the truth, and most of us know we can never be certain, yet we honestly use factive verbs like know and learn and remember all the time#2341•
The concept of a connotation is often explained by the conjugational formula devised by Bertrand Russell in a 1950s radio interview: I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded. The formula was turned into a word game in a radio show and newspaper feature and elicited hundreds of triplets. I am slim; you are thin; he is scrawny.
I am a perfectionist; you are anal; he is a control freak.
I am exploring my sexuality; you are promiscuous; she is a slut.
In each triplet the literal meaning of the words is held constant, but the emotional meaning ranges from attractive to neutral to offensive.#2344•
Language is understood at multiple levels, rather than as a direct parse of the content of the sentence. In everyday life we anticipate our interlocutor's ability to listen between the lines and slip in requests and offers that we feel we can't blurt out directly.#2330•
The polite dinnertime request—what linguists call a whimperative—offers a clue. When you issue a request, you are presupposing that the hearer will comply. But apart from employees or intimates, you can't just boss people around like that. Still, you do want the damn guacamole. The way out of this dilemma is to couch your request as a stupid question ("Can you .
.
.
?"), a pointless rumination ("I was wondering if .
.
."), a gross overstatement ("It would be great if you could .
.
."), or some other blather that is so incongruous the hearer can't take it at face value.
She does some quick intuitive psychology to infer your real intent, and at the same time she senses that you have made an effort not to treat her as a factotum.
A stealth imperative allows you to do two things at once—communicate your request, and signal your understanding of the relationship.#2350•
As we shall see in chapter 8, ordinary conversation is like a session of tête-à-tête diplomacy, in which the parties explore ways of saving face, offering an "out," and maintaining plausible deniability as they negotiate the mix of power, sex, intimacy, and fairness that makes up their relationship. As with real diplomacy, communiqués that are too subtle, or not subtle enough, can ignite a firestorm.#2326•
Without a substrate of thoughts to underlie our words, we do not truly speak but only babble, blabber, blather, chatter, gibber, jabber, natter, patter, prattle, rattle, yammer, or yadda, yadda—an onomatopoeic lexicon for empty speech that makes plain the expectation that the sounds coming out of our mouths are ordinarily about something.#2342•
Chapter 2
• The human mind can construe a particular scenario in multiple ways.
• Each construal is built around a few basic ideas, like "event," "cause," "change," and "intend."
• These ideas can be extended metaphorically to other domains, as when we count events as if they were objects or when we use space as a metaphor for time.
• Each idea has distinctively human quirks that make it useful for reasoning about certain things but that can lead to fallacies and confusions when we try to apply it more broadly.#2360•
Isaac Asimov once wrote, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny. . . .'"#2337•
The same line of reasoning, applied to other verbs, illuminates the other major elements our thoughts are built from: the concepts of having, knowing, and helping, and the concepts of acting, intending, and causing.#2354•
Scientists engage in induction when they go beyond their data and put forward laws that make predictions about cases they haven't observed, such as that gas under pressure will be absorbed by a liquid, or that warm-blooded animals have larger body sizes at higher latitudes. Philosophers of science call induction a "scandal" because there are an infinite number of generalizations that are consistent with any set of observations, and no strictly logical basis for choosing among them.#2359•
Mark Twain wrote, science is fascinating because "one gets such wholesale returns on conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact."#2333•
Intransitive verbs like snore appear without a direct object, as in Max snored; it sounds odd to say Max snored a racket. Transitive verbs like sprain require a direct object, as in Shirley sprained her ankle; it sounds odd to say Shirley sprained#2352•
as in the old sign "I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant"#2334•
It may sound a bit hoity-toity, but the idiom still appears in newspapers and the Internet. My collection includes UT me no UTs (the title of an essay protesting the ugly two-letter postal abbreviations for state names, such as UT for Utah), Comment me no comments, Blog me no blogs, and even Jeff Malone me no Jeff Malones, from a basketball journalist rejecting the suggestion that Malone was all-star material.#2365•
Though causative constructions ordinarily finger a guilty party, they can jettison their subject when expressed in the passive voice. That makes the passive a convenient way to hide the agent of a transitive verb and thus the identity of a responsible party, as in Ronald Reagan's famous non-confession "Mistakes were made," now a cliché for evasion by a public figure.#2364•
Chapter 4
People take even greater umbrage when they hear themselves labeled with a common noun. The reason is that a noun predicate appears to pigeonhole them with the stereotype of a category rather than referring to them as an individual who happens to possess a trait.#2361•
Chapter 5
Call this the messianic theory. It is based on the idea that TO THINK IS TO GRASP A META-PHOR—the metaphor metaphor.#2370•
Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on. Nor is mathematics about a Platonic reality of eternal truths.
It is a creation of the human body and senses, growing out of the activities of moving along a path and of collecting, constructing, and measuring objects.
Political ideologies, too, cannot be defined in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor that SOCIETY IS A FAMILY.
The political right likens society to a family commanded by a strict father, the political left to a family cared for by a nurturant parent.#3079•
For an analogy to be scientifically useful, though, the correspondences can't apply to a part of one thing that merely resembles a part of the other. They have to apply to the relationships between the parts, and even better, to the relationships between the relationships, and to the relationships between the relationships between the relationships.#2368•
In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins explains how sexual selection can produce flamboyant displays like the outsize tail of a widowbird. Traits in males that are attractive to females can vary wildly over the course of evolution, Dawkins notes, because there are many stable combinations of a tail length preferred by females and an actual tail length in the population (which is itself a compromise between the length preferred by previous generations of choosy females and the length that is optimal for flight).
Mathematicians call this "a line of equilibria," and to establish the conditions that produce it they require abstruse equations.
But Dawkins explains the idea as follows:
Suppose that a room has both a heating device and a cooling device, each with its own thermostat. Both thermostats are set to keep the room at the same fixed temperature, 70 degrees F. If the temperature drops below 70, the heater turns itself on and the refrigerator turns itself off. If the temperature rises above 70, the refrigerator turns itself on and the heater turns itself off.
The analogue of the widow bird's tail length is not the temperature (which remains constant at 70°) but the total rate of consumption of electricity.
The point is that there are lots of different ways in which the desired temperature can be achieved.
It can be achieved by both devices working very hard, the heater belting out hot air and the refrigerator working flat out to neutralize the heat.
Or it can be achieved by the heater putting out a bit less heat, and the cooler working correspondingly less hard to neutralize it.
Or it can be achieved by both devices working scarcely at all.
Obviously, the latter is the more desirable solution from the point of view of the electricity bill but, as far as the object of maintaining the fixed temperature is concerned, every one of a large series of working rates is equally satisfactory .
We have a line of equilibrium points, rather than a single point.#2371•
It's an instance of something that every philosopher of science knows about scientific language and that most laypeople misunderstand: scientists don't "carefully define their terms" before beginning an investigation. Instead they use words loosely to point to a phenomenon in the world, and the meanings of the words gradually become more precise as the scientists come to understand the phenomenon more thoroughly.#2367•