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Sunday::Apr 07, 2024

Language Nails

T

here's a meme that goes around occasionally of a man driving nails into the sand as the waves on the beach wash around him. This is accompanied by some sort of musing that this is analogous to language (or perhaps human concepts) attempting to capture reality. The implication is that the task is useless, and that the nails are both too static and too poorly-shaped to either conform to the waves, or to bind them.

While there's some measure of truth here, it's probably pretty overblown. Yes, the world is extremely complex, and the human mind and language depend on abstraction and simplification to make sense of things. But, this is the nature of how thought and language work, and is a feature rather than a bug; and, more importantly, it is an important aspect of the World that it can be abstracted and simplified, and still be consistently perceived and described by rational beings. To put it another way, if language were wholly inadequate to the task of describing reality, then no two humans would be able to agree on any shared perceptions.

The Skeptical line is generally something like "We just arbitrarily draw lines around bits of reality and then give them names." But if these lines are truly arbitrary, then no one else would draw them where we drew them -- we would point at a dog and say "dog", and our companion would assume we were talking about the left-half-of-the-dog-plus-the-lamp-post-it's-peeing-on. The stability of the referents of our language and perception means that there is something in the world that we can attach meaning to. Language is not magic -- we are just attaching words to things that a sufficient number of people agree exist. It doesn't mean anything to say that "dog" isn't the right way to describe the animals that share our homes -- it's just a word, for a thing that we can all see. Just because our understanding of dogs is not infinitely precise doesn't mean they aren't there, asking to be understood, and begging for a treat.