Seeing through Language

Summary

We see the world through language; but how should we understand this metaphor? Is language a medium that simply reproduces for the mind, or accurately records, what is out there? Or is it so dense there is no telling what the world is really like? Perhaps language is somewhere in between, a translucent material, so that the world bears the tint and focus of the particular language we speak.

All these attitudes have, or have had, their apostles, but none of them seems to me more than half right, and none captures what is most important about language. Language is certainly a convenient human skill which we use in coping with one another in our common terrestrial setting. Without it we would not think of things, as we do. But it does not follow, of course, that we never perceive how the world really is, as Kant thought, or that every view is necessarily distorted, as Bergson and many others have held. There might be an argument for this view if it were possible, in principle at least, to isolate some unconceptualised given which could be shaped by the mind, for then it might make sense to imagine a multitude of structures within which the given could be shaped. Without the idea of such a given, however, it is hard to divine what it is that wants shaping, and few of us now are taken by the idea of an unprocessed given.