When I am playing mimics and I perform an action, the ones that are trying to guess, can actually do it, since they relate my performance to established terms, words or names. This is a visible way to illustrate how naming things means making a distinction and an association between ideas.
Some people may say that classifying and inventorying knowledge will not be achieved successfully by naming things. They will defend this posture by stating that as knowledge is indubitable, it cannot be classified by ambiguous systems, such us language. Also they might counterclaim that associating ideas through language is not effective as the associations often vary between individuals. Eventually they might as well say that you do not need vocabulary in order to have an enriched view of the world, and in response to this stance I would say that without language, names or words, our knowledge would be basic (only sensory motor for example) because our apprenticeship would be reduced to our own experiences, without being able to communicate and in that way share our knowledge with one another.
On the other hand, we tend to lose the reality’s essence and we distortion it. By putting names to things we are categorizing and generalizing without even noticing. There is also certain abstraction or ambiguity linked to the different interpretations and lack of precision when we label things. Conceptions might be affected by your previous knowledge and/or your context thence your association of the word is different. Even with a word that stands for a concrete thing, we might carry a different association. This often happens with abstract ideas such us “freedom, justice or truth” where it is more unlikely to carry the same association. Then we attempt not very successfully, to create accurate definitions to coverage our associations by using other words. So the more vocabulary (definitions) you have, the more precisely in order to use language entirely denotatively or give the exact right connotation. For instance it once happened to me that I texted my mother while she was at the supermarket, asking her to get me a yellow copybook. When she arrived home, and I saw what she had bought me, I was disappointed. The copybook wasn’t the bright yellow color that I was expecting, but instead it was of mustard yellow. In this case my mom and I knew the denotation of the word “yellow”, but the connotations we each grant to the word differ. When I picture the color yellow immediately it came to my head a bright rubber duckling kind of yellow. My mum instead seemed to imagine a mustard jar. It is improbable that we will carry the same associations even when the word stands for a concrete thing.
A good exemplification of the failures in naming things is the lack of emotion or the incorrect tone you may transmit by using words while chatting, texting, writing or e-mailing. The truth is that sometimes when you are communicating through these types of media, when you use certain words, your receptor might assume wrongly what you where actually trying to say, because words are simply not enough. For example if you are chatting with a friend and he/she uses sarcasm, you will not perceive it as easily as you would if you had been carrying a conversation actually hearing or watching them. Or if you ask them how are they doing, the answer is almost routine and it could be a plain “fine, and you?” just to carry on with the conversation, when they might have been sad, but through typed words you cannot recognize that further emotion.
Something similar happens when you are trying to transmit a feeling or a sensation, and words do not seem enough to cover what you are trying to explain, or you not know how to impart this through words. This situation often occurs to me when I feel a certain smell in the air, and there is no word in the dictionary for what I am trying to say, so I have to associate it to something else. “It smells like when you are just coming out from the shower” for example, associating the smell to that situation. But associations between me and someone else are usually different; therefore the smell I am trying to communicate could be transmitted wrong.
It has happened to me quite a lot that after a friend describes her/his new outfit, I portrait it completely different of how it really looks like, even though the description had been entirely accurate. This since the words used by my friend generated in me a different association. This would be a clear example of the interpretations people may lead based on their previous knowledge in relation with naming things.
Based on the states I mentioned in relation with what is lost by naming things, someone else could pose that essence is certainly not lost by tagging those things, since the fundamental nature of them will not change, no matter what name you give them. For example if you name a terrorist either “terrorist” or “freedom fighter”, the essence of that person would not change (it would be still a person fighting against something, risking his/her life and killing others to achieve it). In my opinion the name given changes its essence because the connotation changes. One term is related to good things and the other to bad.
We might praise language’s suggestive character; or complain its ambiguity. The truth is that language is like poetry, it can gather personal associations which add to its meaning for you individually. Sometimes words can be used as images with suggestive power (metaphors or irony for example). It is difficult to establish whether naming things is a good thing or a bad thing, since by tagging things with a name we gain and we lose plenty, in an almost equitable way. In my opinion it is nor good or bad just necessary in order to communicate. After reflecting about this topic I have clarified some doubts regarding the motion, being able to formulate and relate personal examples of my daily life, and I have come up with new queries. How does a new name aggregate to the universal dictionary, being this new term linked to a specific meaning? Is there a kind of institution that decides when to invent a new name to supply a word deficiency? Can this name be even invented? Who invents later a translation of this new term to every language? Many questions seem to emerge easily around this matter, and certainly leaves plenty more to talk about.
[1] Term “language” took from Theory of knowledge course companion book.