Language is an important part of our lives. It is one of the factors which separate us from animals. Although we try to prove some animals use language, I am sure that they will never come to a point that they speak a proper language even elementary as our ancestors used. Wherever you live in the world you will be using a language to communicate the fellow humans. We will look at some philosophical aspects of language and discuss some of them in detail. As our knowledge is built upon language, it is utmost important to learn about the tool itself, to understand its strengths and weaknesses.
Common observations about language.
There are thousands of languages around the world. And all of them are evolving. More isolated a group of people from the rest of the population, they have unique changes in their language, and some such communities have their own languages, with no connections to the other languages around the world.
From this observation it is apparent that language is a creation of human beings. For the purpose of communication. All these languages are capable of explaining common observations that humans make within that community. More knowledgeable community is more advanced their language will become as new words needs to be added to describe new observations.
So, this also brings up the question what is communication? and what is a language?
Fundamentally communication is the method of a one consciousness, trying to explain another consciousness the observations it made over time. Language is the general convention which is previously agreed within such advanced community to such observations. We can understand this fact with an example.
Imagine a man walk into a room. And we say "The teacher walked into the room". Easy right? Everyone will get the meaning when they read or hear that sentence.
So, we know what is 'Teacher'. We learned it early in our lives that teacher is someone who teaches us some subject.
We know 'The teacher'. When we say the teacher, we put it in context of current situation. And even would know exactly which teacher is this, unique from all the other teachers. If it is early morning math's period, we would know that it is the math teacher. And if you are not sitting in a classroom you would think about a general image of a teacher.
We know 'The room'. We have learned what is a room and agreed upon this.
Similarly, we know what is walking.
The teacher and the room are Nouns. And walking is the Verb.
We can analyze the whole language from this sentence. As the consciousness always try to understand the nature, Language is the great tool for this. But if you see close enough you would see that there is something wrong when we stick to these conventions, and it is really difficult to grasp. Let's be a third person and look at the above scenario.
The observer (in this case a student, or you) see a teacher walking into the room. And this observation makes sense only when he identifies this phenomena and label this in his mind. How does he do that? The language is the tool. He labels it as.
"Oh, the teacher walked into the room"
It doesn't matter what the words are, I am sure any language would have such words to describe above observation. And when we read and hear it, we would make same mental pictures. Now you may ask what the error in this is.
What are nouns and verbs and functions?
Before coming into the philosophy of language, I will take you down the road of mathematics. Calculus. You may have skipped this class like me. I never learned mathematics into the realm of Calculus. So, it doesn't matter you are an art student or not. You will grasp the meaning of what this is about. Modern Calculus was developed by Sir Issac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (independently from each other).
Imagine you are under a tree and an apple fell onto your head. You started to wonder about this phenomenon. You thought about it and made following thoughts.
First, I want to know, what distance the apple fell in each second. How can I do this? You can do a little experiment and fix the frame of time in each second and measure the distance right? (Let's say we can do this by taking photographs at the end of each second.)
Now I want to know what the speed of the apple at the end is of each second. (If you have learned calculus, this is the rate of change in the distance travelled.) As the distance travelled by the apple in each second is different, the speed seems to change over time. So at any given time, the apple would have different speeds. Calculus helps us to calculate speed at any given time accurately provided we know all the variables.
Now I want to know the acceleration, at any given time. Which is the rate of change of the speed. (Again, calculus can help in determining this- and he discovered this is constant in close range which is The Gravity of earth)
Those are the similar thoughts Newton had when he was under the apple tree. And he discovered Calculus. Calculus helps us to study a continuous change which happens over time. These continuous changes which happen over time are described by functions in mathematics. Previously I have written an article about the importance of functions. And how to model the world with mathematical functions. And in conclusion, you would see that there are functions all around us, and that is the only thing there is. As 'change' is the fundamental characteristic of a function, 'change' is also a fundamental characteristic thing of things.
Philosophy of language verbs and nouns(science) understanding construct errors and limitations
Now, we have background knowledge of what mathematicians and scientists see the world as. They see the world as combination of different functions. But when we look at sentences which is the fundamental units of the language, we see mainly it consists of verbs and nouns. Let's go into details of the philosophy of language, verbs and nouns.
Verbs. Of course, verbs are functions. If we looked at the verb 'walking' we can model some mathematical functions to describe the walking. As walking is a continuous 'change' over time. Can you do this with nouns?
That there is the error in language. We have nouns in language. But in mathematical and scientific models of the world there are no nouns but continuous functions. How did we make a fundamental error like this?
Let's look at the above sentence to understand this phenomenon closely. Our sentence was 'The teacher walked into the room'. Our language, in that case our consciousness hides the true nature of 'The teacher' and 'the room'. Who is a teacher?
Teacher is a mind and a body. Collection of things. You can understand the complexity of the word teacher as a collection of things. And these individual things are bound to change. As an example, if we think about the weight of the teacher, it is changing continuously, with each breath. If we think about the height of the teacher, it too is changing. If we look at the color and the mass, these too are changing. These changes even occur in macroscopic to atomic scale. From one given point of time to the other. And basically the 'noun' teacher can be described as a 'collection' of functions.
So, if every noun can be replaced by a collection of functions, what is the purpose of having them? I invite you to read the chapter on understanding time in a novel way to get some intuition to this question. Here I will describe it in language of mathematics.
Every continuous function has infinite amount of data in it. Even something happening over a one second have infinite number of fractions in it. Our minds, or consciousness is not capable of understanding the infinite amount of data. So, just like Newton used calculus to describe a rate of change in a function, we use nouns to describe the world. When we do that, we only limit ourselves to a fraction of time where there is a fixed frame. Just like a fixed frame of a teacher, with a specific, weight, specific height and specific color. However, as you understand this is not the real world. It is just an approximation, which works well, and which makes us happy and sad and continuously living.
In summary.
Language uses models of nouns and verbs to describe the world.
Mathematics and science uses functions to describe the world.
Like calculus in describing the rate of change of a function, nouns describe a fixed frame of otherwise changing function in a real world.
This fact about the language makes us understand the world in a wrong way, although correct in common convention of language, wrong in a true scientific sense.
If you would like to read more on our consciousness, I invite you to read previous article on how to hack our consciousness. And it will get us one step closer to truth, hence nature.
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