Language plays a powerful role in transmitting knowledge from a very early age, but it does not completely control our other ways of knowing. While language can influence our perceptions and thoughts on subtle, unconscious levels, it is also influenced by perception, emotion, and reason. The relationship between language and our other ways of knowing is highly interconnected, with each having some impact on the others. The statement that language controls all other ways of knowing is an extreme view that does not fully consider the complex, two-way interactions between language and our senses, feelings, and logical reasoning.

1. Name Candidate Number Atlantic College May 2005
"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 plays a great role in the process of transmitting knowledge: everybody learns a
language at a very early stage of their life and this means of communication will be used throughout
in order to give and receive knowledge. In the course of just one day we claim that we know
something just because we have read it somewhere or somebody has told us about it. We
can therefore see what a powerful tool language is. The statement in the question, however,
does not just mean that language is one of the most important Ways of Knowing, but even that it
controls every other one of them with the capacity of influencing or determining our way of
knowing the world. At a first sight this thesis seems quite logical: it would be hard for us to imagine
a school or any way of transmitting knowledge without the use of language. However knowledge
comes also from our senses, our individual reasoning and our feelings. This essay will investigate
the role of language in each of the other Ways of Knowing and will assess to what extent the claim
"All of the other Ways of Knowing are controlled by language" is valid.
The possibility that language could affect or even determine the way we view and think about reality
has been investigated by anthropologists, philosophers and linguists. One of the strongest
formulations of the belief that language determines thought and perception is the so called "Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis". A quote from The Status Of Linguistics As A Science by Sapir summarizes the
belief these intellectuals held:
"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social
activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language
which has become the medium of expression for their society."1
If we look at the well-known example of the colour spectrum we can find a proof of the fallacy
of the belief Sapir argued for with this statement. In different languages the boundaries
between, say, red and orange may be different, but this does not mean that people speaking
1
Available on the World Wide Web at <URL: http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html> (Accessed January 7th 2005).
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2. Name Candidate Number Atlantic College May 2005
different languages do not perceive the difference between a darker orange and a lighter one.
Therefore we can see that humans are capable to perceive the "objective world" overcoming
the biases that language may impose. However to say that language does not affect at all our
perception may be misleading as well. Looking at recent experiments made by Dr. David Gil,
researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, we can see that
language could affect some parts of our perception. Studying Riau Indonesian, Dr. Gil found that
in the verb system of this language there is no differentiation between past, present and
future. Together with Dr Boroditsky, Dr Gil put forward an experiment the results of which arguably
confirm the hypothesis of Whorf and Sapir. "People are shown three pictures, one of a man about
to kick a ball, one of 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 are the most similar. Indonesians
generally choose the first two pictures, which have the same men in them, while English
speakers are likely to identify the two pictures that show the ball about to be kicked".2 According to
the two scientists, this is because, not having Riau Indonesian a differentiation between verbs in the
past, present and future tense, its native speakers were led to regard as more important the
spatial relationship between the first two pictures and to ignore the temporal relationship. In
other words, depending on the grammatical structure of our language we are led to perceive
some relationships more strongly than others. We can therefore see how the language could
influence our perception, even if subtly and on an unconscious level.
This conclusion has an effect also on the relationship between language and reason: if
language makes us perceive some things more strongly than others, then also our thoughts
about these things will be affected and conditioned by language. On another level we can see
that our thoughts are influenced by language every day: we are driven to purchase certain
products by advertisement, or we could be led to believe that a war is just if an authority calls it
"holy". Again this is just a mild version of what the statement in the question suggests, that is,
that language determines the way we think. This thesis was firstly put forward by Wilhelm von
Humboldt (1767-1835) with the name of "Weltanschauung hypothesis". He regarded thought as
impossible without language, in other words, he believed that we cannot think about something
without a word connected to it.
2
‘Babel's Children’, The Economist, January 8th 2004.
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3. Name Candidate Number Atlantic College May 2005
This concept was used by George Orwell in his most known novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in
which language is gradually destroyed "to narrow the range of thought". 3 In this novel the
author suggests that if certain words did not exist, people would never have the ability to think
of the concepts expressed by these words. For example Orwell argues in his book that the
concept of freedom would be impossible without the word. However intriguing this theory has some
flaws that make it erroneous: first of all we can see that languages borrow words from other
languages when they do not have one for a specific concept. Language is a living and dynamic
phenomenon, and people have always found ways of expressing their thoughts, even in the most
tightly controlled and totalitarian societies or even if a word was not readily available to describe a
certain concept. In fact, language is continuously creating new words in order to define a new
concept. Thus we can see that both the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" and the "Weltanshauung
hypothesis" give an extreme view of the relationship between language, perception and reason
which is proved to be partly wrong by numerous examples.
Concerning emotion we can find many examples in which language is affecting us emotionally:
sometimes it is enough to say just one sentence to upset somebody or to make him happy. An
example of this was the rejection letter a friend of mine got from a certain university. Besides the
sadness of not being accepted, the letter produced feelings like anger and helplessness just with the
phrase "From your predicted grades it is clear, I am afraid, that an application to us would stand little
chance of success". If the phrase was formulated in another manner or even if it did not include the "it
is clear", it would have sorted out a different reaction. This is only one of the countless possible
examples of emotions induced and controlled by language. Because we can notice very easily when
words can affect us emotionally, we are keen to agree with the statement in the question, but we have
also to consider that emotions, too, can control language. Just the fact that each language has a
specific word for "love" or "anger" shows that emotions have a certain influence over language.
Also it is easy to observe that we use a different kind of language when we are angry or quarrelling with
somebody. Besides that we can see that in certain languages, like Italian, the way of talking is
conditioned by the degree of closeness in which the two interlocutors are. In fact, if a person does not
know the other, or if one is a subordinate of the other, they will both use the third feminine person
for each verb that relates to the other. If the two people are friends or colleagues, than they will
just use the normal and colloquial "you". This is a very important feature of Italian language and it
3
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 55.
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4. Name Candidate Number Atlantic College May 2005
possibly has roots in the will of people to express their sentiment of respect or friendship to the others.
As with reason and perception, we arrived to the conclusion that language can influence emotion, but
that the latter is highly independent and that sometimes it even manages to control language.
In conclusion we can say that the statement "All of the other Ways of Knowing are controlled by
language" expresses an extreme vision of the relationship between language, perception, reason and
emotion, a vision that gives language the capacity of influencing greatly our understanding of reality.
Surely language is a fundamental part of the culture every one of us carries. The culture is then
"filtering" everything we know, be it through perception, reason or emotion. Thus there is a control of
language, through culture, of the other Ways of Knowing. However, we also saw that language may
be affected by perception, reason and emotion and this would indicate that there is no unilateral control
and that the different Ways of Knowing are highly interconnected, so much that sometimes we cannot
determine whether one influences the other, or whether it is the opposite.
Word Count: 1490
Bibliography:
G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 2000, Penguin Books edition, London.
World Wide Web sites visited:
Available from the World Wide Web <URL: http://venus.va.com.au/simRestion/sapir.html> (Accessed
January 7th 2005).
Articles:
‘Babel's Children’, The Economist, January 8th 2004.
‘You Are What You Speak’, The New Scientist, Vol. 176, issue 2371, 30th November 2002, page 34.
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