DOES LANGUAGE DETERMINE OUR SCIENTIFIC IDEAS? H.G. Callaway

"Language expresses and facilitates the typical activities and preoccupations of a community and constitutes the most articulate expression of the associated culture. Thus, though I resist the temptation to identify meaning and usage, it seems clear that broader access to the typical activities of a given community, and associated linguistic usage—argumentation included—, will provide a broader range of evidence useful for interpretation. Since members of a given community have, in the end, no access to it not in principle available to a guest, the degree of self-understanding of a community is largely a function of the degree of communications and openness to participation which it provides—just as we expect the work of radical translation to be facilitated by an openness on the part of the community we wish to understand. Thus, the degree in which a society will be able to overcome the limitations of its own culture and language depends upon sociological structures of interaction and flows of information. "


"The enlightenment changed Western civilization in fundamental ways—most importantly to facilitate the growth of knowledge. But the social forces and individual preferences which brought Western civilization to its prior feudalistic conditions were not thereby abolished. It remains crucial to understand these forces and to see them at work in contemporary forms. Further, since communication regarding language is itself so crucial to our capability to change and reform language, belief, and culture, discourse on language has a special role to play."

"Though retaining the external perspective of one’s own language and belief-systems, the application of game theory to problems of interpretation strongly argues that access to adequate evidence for translation/ interpretation requires the researcher to enter into the culture under study as an active participant. The attitude of distant and “objective” observer, in contrast, blocks needed evidence. So long as linguistic meaning is not identified with actual usage, it is evident that meanings are only imperfectly reflected in usage. Thinking of sentence meanings as truth-conditions, for instance, usage is not merely a function of what is believed true (or any other single factor). A great variety of extra-linguistic intentions and purposes (including many linguistic intentions beyond that of stating what one takes to be true) also play a role in determining the usage of language in a given community and on a given occasion. One objective here will be to explore this point, in a fairly rigorous way."