100% FREE ONLINE DATING
sponsored links
| Topic: Loss of Language, Loss of Thought ... | |
|---|---|
|
Edited by
Kings_Knight
on
Mon 07/05/10 06:45 PM
|
|
In a very real way, this is also directly connected to 'political correctness' (controlling the language in order to control the thought) and 'NeuroLinguistic Programming' (using the language to make others believe that something has been said when nothing has been said). Orwell had it right with his 'Newspeak' dictionary ... Once language can no longer be used to accomplish rational thought or critical thinking, there can be no way in which opposition can form because there are no words to express what is felt - or, more to the point: No words to think the thought ...
The entire article's at the link ... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8393&Itemid=48 Loss of Language, Loss of Thought by Wolfgang Grassl | 7/02/10 Loss of language among the younger population -- that is to say, the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought -- is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders. The ubiquitous confusion between "there" and "their" may still be considered a quaint and negligible fluke that nearly creates a new orthographic norm; the inability to express lucid arguments must not. What is being lost is the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect, of distinguishing between differing levels of argument, and particularly any appreciation for abstraction. Increasingly, students expect to be spoon-fed with concrete examples, operational instructions, mechanical repetitions, and pictorial representation. The loss of language is but a symptom of the loss of thought -- and losing thought means losing much more. Assume a typical question in an introductory class on marketing: "Why do we segment markets?" A typical student response is: "What do you mean?" Even the most experienced professor can only paraphrase the question: "Why do we, in nearly all product markets, break down total customer demand into smaller groups?" A response will then frequently start with, "It's like . . ." The question requires students to provide an explanation and not a definition -- to recognize that the question concerns reasons and not causes, and that these reasons must be of a more general nature than any particular example of segmented markets. Inability to answer the question reveals not a lack of factual knowledge -- every student can understand the variability in consumers' desire for and benefits from various products. It rather shows deficiency in grasping the nature of "why" questions, which require moving beyond concrete examples. Let us, in Wittgenstein's fashion, look at the grammar of "it's like," for it reveals the nature of the problem. The phrase seeks to define something by exemplification. As an answer to the question, "What is a ball?" the "it" in "it's like" does not refer to the definiendum, but to the request for a definition. The traditional way of defining something, according to Aristotle and the scholastic logicians, was per genus proximum et differentiam specificam: We need to name the higher category to which a term belongs, then specify some characteristic that sets it apart from other things within this category. However, "like" does not seek to place a ball into the next higher category of spheres or objects, nor does it offer a synonym. It gives an instance of balls, or of the usage of balls. Providing merely an aspect of what is to be explained is not only reductionist (by substituting a part for the whole); it is also a subjectivist move that avoids describing and thus reflecting on the essence of what is to be explained. It is indicative of our age of increasing relativism under the guise of "pluralism" and "tolerance" -- your feeling about the nature of something is just as good as my feeling, because there really isn't any "is"; there may not even be an "a." Then a ball might as well have edges, for who can tell me that I can only call something a ball if it is round? The problem ultimately lies in a misconstrued metaphysics, or rather in the absence of any notion of ontology at all. When Bill Clinton was asked whether he had sexual relations with a White House intern and famously replied that this depended on the meaning of "is," his statement was of course evasive and facetious. But it was also intelligent: For apart from the time-indexed meaning of the copula in the present tense, the "is" in "This is a ball" is different from that in "A ball is a spherical object." The first sentence identifies a particular (or token) as a member of a class (or type), whereas the second offers a definition through the synonymy of types. The "is" in "it's like" is neither of these, for it seeks to define a type -- for example, "a ball" or "market segmentation" -- by reference to a token. It does not even modify the definiendum directly. There is a curious reluctance to think about the nature of things, maybe as a result of decades of teaching that there is no such nature apart from what one wants them to be. Rather, students increasingly see the world phenomenologically -- as a haphazard arrangement of "stuff" and of events informed by the sensory impressions of their own experience but devoid of any structure. < snip > The phrase "it's like" itself seems, well, like a trifle. But it is a symptom of an underlying and more serious malaise: The loss of an ability to think clearly and express these thoughts perceptibly is no trifling matter. It makes our younger generation, and possibly those generations that succeed them, susceptible to boilerplate thinking and ultimately manipulation by others. A speechless society, or one that can no longer enunciate its will clearly and with a large register of distinctions, is reduced to an ant heap. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
IMO, several passages from this article contain the most intelligent observations seen on this site.
I always found it disturbing when I come across people who consider the phrase "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." to be self-evidently nonsense. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I've long lamented how media and government manipulate and destroy language.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I've long lamented how media and government manipulate and destroy language.
|
|
|
|
|
