What We Speak.

In semantic debates about code and the like on the web, there are usually two opposing archetypes: the Purist who adheres strictly to standards, and the Pragmatist who crisply “does what works, within reason”.  Where you fall along the spectrum between the two determines, among other things, the vehemence you bring to the debate.

It’s tempting to dismiss both extremes as ridiculous—a nasty hybrid of punditry, horn-tooting, and linkbacks. And yet, aside from the annoying minority who revel in brandishing the megaphone, there is something legitimate going on beneath the surface of these arguments. 

In his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker describes semantics as:

the relation of words to thoughts… [and] the relation of words to other human concerns.  Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world…

In other words, the debates I’m talking about aren’t merely the product of smallness and infighting: they stem from the fact that the orienting concepts guiding our use of language differ dramatically from person to person.  Whether we’re talking HTML or politics, this is always the case.

How We Think.

This hints at a larger, and pretty amazing, point about language in general—the idea that how we speak gives insight into how we think.  And that models of how we think are windows into how we understand the world around us, and one another.   Another (long) quote by Pinker:

There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words.  There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too.  Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness.  Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will.

These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same.  They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic.  Though these ideas are woven into language, their roots are deeper than language itself.  They lay out the ground rules for how we understand our surroundings, how we assign credit and blame our fellows, and how we negotiate our relationships with them.

A close look at our speech—our conversations, our jokes, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies—can therefore give us insight into who we are.

It’s useful to consider that our speech is not haphazard and random, but motivated by something deeper and more intrinsic to our common humanity than culture might lead us to believe, when making value judgments and generating responses to the way others are.

And it’s downright fascinating to think of these ideas as having some bearing on our recurring semantic tiffs.