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How we describe and build our human reality with language
Most of what we say and write has purpose — the why of it — what we are intending to accomplish by saying it or writing it.
What we say and write also has structure — the discrete components, including phonemes or letters and words that are used in it, and how they are arranged in temporal or spatial sequence to build phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and larger language structures.
And when we build language structures by saying or writing what we do, in order to achieve our purposes, we attempt to use the meanings that those structures will invoke in other people — the pre-existing ideas that those structures will activate in their brains — to create, at least temporarily, new idea networks in their brains. We intend that those new idea networks will cause our hearers or readers to modify their behavior in ways that will achieve our purposes, either immediately or over a longer period of time.
It’s by a continuing, reciprocal process of conversation that we create and share new ideas and behavior and construct our human reality together.
My purpose in writing this short essay is to get you, the reader, to think about how our language ability works, and perhaps to want to learn more about it, so that you may become more aware of both its strengths and its limitations. We can use our languages to achieve great things together, but we can also use them in ways that result in disaster, intentionally or unintentionally.
