Does language influence how we think? This looks like a psychological question, in many ways it hasn’t left the domain of philosophy: the psychological research is unclear, leaving us with largely logic and common sense; it involves issues of what consciousness is, “what is it like to be a thinker?”; and it raises core questions of how philosophy should be done.

This question is the subject of chapter 3 in Steven Pinker’s <i>The Language Instinct.</i> He begins by quoting the appendix on Newspeak from George Orwell’s <i>1984,</i> which explains the plans of Orwell’s fictional totalitarians to create a language in which dissent would be impossible. Pinker goes on to mention a number of other sources for this idea, including a non-fiction piece of Orwell’s: “Inspired by Orewll’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ pundits accuse governments of manipulating our minds with euphemisms like <i>pacification</i> (bombing), <i>revenue enhancement</i> (taxes), and <i>nonretention</i> (firing).” Then, though, Pinker declares this is all wrong, and, once he has his other villains set up, he informs us that Orwell actually agreed with him: Orwell thought euphemisms were a form of lying, not mind control.

Central to Pinker’s essay, though, is an equivocation:<blockquote>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 congitive 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.</blockquote>Notice the little slip? In one sentence, Pinker is talking about thought shaping language, in the next, he is talking about thought being identical with language.

Similarly, there’s an equivocation when Pinker asks, skeptically, “Do people literally think in English, Cherokee, Kivunjo, or, by 2050, Newspeak?” A logician would say there’s a missing quantifier: is this a question about whether people think only in words, or think sometimes in words? Pinker cites evidence of people thinking in pictures, which does show we do not think only in words, but it actually supports the hypothesis that we think sometimes in words, because it would be bizarre if our apparent thinking in words was an illusion while our apparent thinking in pictures was real.

But is there definite evidence that language effects thought? If we define “lying” as saying anything that is in any way deceptive, then euphemisms lie. But if we take “lying” to mean saying something one knows to be false, then euphemism isn’t lying. Euphemisms are alternative, if often vaguer, ways of saying something. Pinker says “Once a euphemism is pointed out, people are not so brainwashed that they have trouble understanding the deception.” He speaks in terms of pointing out euphemisms rather than exposing lies because the meanings of euphemisms are generally common knowledge. When we point out a euphemism, we force people to think about things they already half-knew, we are not really giving them new information.

Take, for example, the word “pacification.” Most people, when hearing the word, do not immediately think “bombing,” but they know it is something the military does, and it means something like “subduing.” Since people also know that militaries rely on guns and bombs and combat knives are the main tools of militaries, they know enough to know that pacification means subduing people with guns and bombs and combat knives. The significance of using the word “pacification” is that it saves people from making these connections, even if they would be glad to have made the connection once someone like Orwell tells them:<blockquote>Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.</blockquote>However, it makes no sense to tell someone, “the U.S. government said it was trying to pacify Vietnam, but this is a lie, it was really bombing Vietnam.”

Turning from euphemism to political invective, consider this wonderful example from Orwell’s <i>Homage to Catalonia:</i> Members of the Soviet-backed party in the Spanish Civil War would attack their opponents as “Trotskyites,” a word which had three different meanings that were muddled together: (1) a member of an organization founded by Trotsky (2) a supporter of global socialist revolution, like Trotsky (3) a fascist. It makes little sense to claim rhetoric about “Trotskyites” was lying in the conventional sense, rather, it used a word to hide a fallacious inference. To a naive ear, Orwell’s example seems incredible, but it’s the stuff that fills the my blog posts on <a href=”http://www.uncrediblehallq.net/category/stupidity/”>stupidity</a> and has a close parallel in <a href=”http://www.uncrediblehallq.net/category/stupidity/”>Ann Coulter’s rhetoric about “liberals.”</a>

In general, failure to pay attention to the meanings of words is one of the main marks of bad philosophy and bad reasoning in general. Jumping between two meanings of words is one of the easiest ways to hide a fallacious inference, and dressing up bizarre claims in academic jargon is one of the easiest ways to make them look like truisms.

Final comment: trying to deny the importance of words to know we think was quite a surprise coming from Pinker. A major point of his book <i>The Stuff of Thought</i> is how language reflects how we think, and how word choice matters even when the meaning is unchanged. One of the best chapters was his chapter on swearing, which contains such gems as:<blockquote>The seven words you can never say on television refer to sexuality and excretion: they are the names for feces, urine, intercourse, breasts, the vagina, person who engages in fellation, and person who acts out an Oedipal desire.</blockquote>Pinker wrote this knowing, and reminding people, that his word choice mattered, that words have power.