Do Natural Languages Embed Latent Epistemic Stances?
In which we marvel at how the translation of "making sense" in different languages appears to uncover default modalities of mean making.
I am able to reach a fluency level that allows me to dream in only two languages: Italian and English. But that’s enough to start to notice subtle differences that might reveal insightful and significant cultural differences.
One that I recently talked about with a friend revolves around “sense making”: in English we would say “this doesn’t make sense” while in Italian we would say “this doesn’t have sense” (avere senso). He told me that in Russian we would say “this doesn’t reach sense”. In French, we would say “this doesn’t give it sense” (donner du sens). Spanish is like Italian, “this doesn’t have sense” (tener sentido).
What tickles my brain about this is that sense seems to be something that some languages assume to be created (a default empiricist stance) while other assume to exist and needs to be found (a default rationalist stance). Now I’m curious to map all languages along this dimension (and please write me to let me know how this is in other languages you know).
A lot of what I’ve been reading during the pandemic revolves around “mean making” and “sense making” as the very core of human cognitive abilities. Making sense of things is effectively understanding something, which in turns means creating a (simplified) model of it so that we can hold it in our head and use it for predictive purposes. Sometimes to be any good at predicting things, it needs to be too complex for us to hold it comfortably.
A lot of the social and political tensions modernity, globalism, information age and the pandemic appears to have unleashed can be interpreted as reaching the limits of our sense-making abilities. Fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, political polarization, return to authoritarianism can all be seen as regressive ways to return within the limits of our ability to make sense of the world and create predictive models for systems that are now too complex and interconnected to be effectively modeled and predictable with the modeling capacity that worked before.
Could language difference around meaning as “invented” vs. “discovered” influence the way people from different countries approach reaching the limits of their collective prediction capacity? Could simply the exposure to different languages help reduce the sense of despair that is often perceived when reaching the limits of our own sense making abilities?
I don’t really have answers for those questions and it’s certainly risky to draw simplistic conclusions from something this latent, but I find them intriguing and thought provoking to ask myself.