Here it is obvious that language will have a very powerful effect on the way that the situation is described. For the individual, who was present and experienced it, will have first hand accounts on what happened. For the detached observer, he will have to rely on the first hand accounts from the witnesses, and from these accounts draw any conclusions themselves. The significant wheel in this process is that the external observer needs to be objective, free from bias, and draw conclusions based solely on the information he/she has access too. However, this is almost never the case, and this is why it is extremely difficult to find the truth about any historical event. Consequently, history is time and time again distorted by the historian who interprets the events based on his or her values, his or her own morals. For the people studying the historians work, it will be difficult to sort between what is actually true and what is the historian’s point of view. As the existentialists claimed, to find the real truth one must be a first person observer, or else the real truth will get lost in the restatements of the historians.
One of the major themes within existentialism is the freedom of choice. Unlike other living creatures on our planet, human beings do not have a fixed nature; rather we create our own nature through our own choices. Thus our nature is what we say it is, which can be extremely ambiguous. This makes the whole concept of ethics rather sketchy, since ethics is a set or principles or conduct set by society. If we choose to make these rules, then we should also be allowed to choose to break them, and so there is a serious clash of believes between existentialism and traditional philosophy. Ethics is our reasoning, our choices, what we perceive to be good or bad, wrong or right. Since language is what humans use to reason within our heads, one may ask what good is, or what is right? According to Sartre, good for an individual depends completely on how they choose to interpret it. For example, a student has handed in their ToK essay to the teacher to get some feedback on whether it is good or bad. The teacher finds the essay to be good, but finds “good” to be too vague of a description, so the teacher looks for a more definitive synonym. There are around 20 different synonyms for the word good, ranging from acceptable and satisfactory to outstanding and exceptional. There is a huge difference in connotation between these synonyms of the same word, so what is perceived as good can mean a whole range of things.
Being someone who has grown up in many different countries around the world, I have experienced this firsthand. I am of Swedish origin, but my first language has become English after the last 10 years in international schools. After moving home last year, and starting to use Swedish much more extensively, I have noted that there are several words that mean one thing in Swedish and have multiple, different meanings in English. One such word is “bevis” in Swedish, which means either evidence or proof in English. If someone asks “Vad har du för bevis?”, which translated means “What evidence/proof do you have?”. Even though these two words are synonyms of each other they have distinctly different meanings. While evidence is specific and means “a thing or things helpful in forming a conclusion and judgement”, proof means “The evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true.” Hence, when someone asks “Vad har du för bevis?”, how do you interpret it? Is the person asking for evidence or for proof? This problem is applicable to all languages and translating between them, and poses a large problem to language aspect of the TOK wheel. Since literature is written in every language in the world, there is a large demand for translation between languages so that everyone can read it. For someone translating works to another language they will always find words that are specific in one language, but don’t have a perfect match in the other, and so he has to choose between synonyms of the word. The translated work will to some degree loose its original meaning since the author choose his words carefully to mean one specific thing (or, to choose a word that is ambiguous). In the translation the meaning may not be as specific or ambiguous any more. As a result we loose meaning, we loose truth, since we are not given the exact words of the first hand observer, the author of the work.
http://www.connect.net/ron/exist.html
