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A Very Timely Example of the Power and Danger of Language

Jim Mason
2 min readDec 20, 2023

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The Colorado Supreme Court decision exhibits clearly how language both serves and endangers us humans

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

The United States Constitution is a written document, part of what I called the Cultural Exoskeleton in another recent essay of mine (https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-cultural-exoskeleton-and-its-embodiment-9f8d4e47c746 ). It is read and interpreted by living people (and now even by computer algorithms), each in their own way. Individuals differ greatly in the amount of it, if any, that they read and what they learn from it — that is, how it modifies their brains — and how they subsequently make decisions according to what they have learned.

Even legal scholars, including judges, will differ in exactly how they understand the Constitution and the Colorado court decision, and how they make decisions according to their understandings, such as exactly how they interpret the words “insurrection” and “officer” in those contexts. They will communicate some of those decisions by producing more oral statements and written documents, which will be understood by other people including you and me, each in our own way. Those people, in turn, will make decisions such as voting, based on how our brains have been modified, and we will possibly produce more oral and written language utterances for other people to receive.

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Jim Mason
Jim Mason

Written by Jim Mason

I study language, cognition, and humans as social animals. You can support me by joining Medium at https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership

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