All of the other Ways of Knowing are controlled by language. What does this statement mean and do you think it is a fair representation of the relationship between perception, emotion, reason and language?
Theory of Knowledge
“All of the other Ways of Knowing are controlled by language.” What does this statement mean and do you think it is a fair representation of the relationship between perception, emotion, reason and language?
Language, is like the fuel the drives the car. As it drives thoughts but rather than controlling the ways of knowing, it limits and extends our thoughts through perception, emotion and reason. Language is a system of symbols from the Egyptians Hieroglyphics to the Chinese Characters. These symbols together put forth a pattern and within these patterns we as humans use them to communicate, furthermore to express our thoughts and also develop them. Language is also used to perform many other functions such as to represent certain entity, using language as a form of artistic being and also for merely entertainment purposes. Language is neither objective nor neutral as it is determined by the approach by its operator. Having said that, the statement “All of the other Ways of Knowing are controlled by language.” Suggests that language is governing our thoughts and our ways of knowing the world, a quite reasoned statement however does it control all of the ways of knowing in the same extent. What are the roles of language within each of ways of knowing?
Perception, “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” As a young infant as we might not recall but it is reasonable to believe that during those times as we were not introduced to language we recognizes according to our needs. An infant would recognize a bottle of milk as only a source that fulfills the needs of the body rather than able to think or say that it would be a “bottle of milk”. Seeing comes before words as we use words to explain what we see and if we had learned other languages we would use other languages to describe things that we distinguish. Therefore language can hugely impact our perception if there was no language we would be unable to distinguish the surroundings in our world. Furthermore even when language is established in our life’s later on. Different language speaking people will have different thoughts. Two linguists Dr. Boroditsky and Dr. Gil carried out an interesting experiment. As these there were two groups of people that were performing the experiment, the Riau Indonesians and native English speakers. They were shown three pictures, a man about to kick a ball, the same man having just kicked a ball, and a third of a different man who is about to kick a ball. They are then asked which two of the three did the find being the most similar. Indonesians generally choose the first two pictures, which have the same man in them, while English speakers are likely to identify the two pictures that show the ball about to be kicked an emphasis on the temporal, rather than the spatial, relationship between the principal objects in the picture. This was because as it happens to be the Indonesians had a language with a verb system that there was no variation between past, present and future. Changing their ways of which they perceived the pictures, just by the subtle difference in grammatical structure it had influenced how they had perceived the pictures during the experiment.
