Can language describe reality?

Biology, Physics, Chemistry. 23/09/10

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This episode is with Nick Enfield. He is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Nick's research on language, culture, cognition and social life is based on long term field work in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos. His books include Natural Causes of Language, Distributed Agency, and How We Talk. His latest book is 'Language vs Reality: Why language is good for lawyers and bad for scientists'

In this conversation we talk about evolution of language and How well it can describe reality?, Can language nudge our thoughts?, Maths as a language, evolution of human reason and rationality.

About the guest

  • 00:00:00 Introduction

  • 00:01:07 What is language?

  • 00:04:01 When does a communication system becomes a language?

  • 00:08:02 How language got started?

  • 00:13:31 Do sapiens have an advantage which helped us to start a language?

  • 00:17:30 Language is too blunt for scientists and good for lawyers

  • 00:23:40 We simplify the complexity of the world

  • 00:28:23 Why language was evolved?

  • 00:30:52 On Donald Hoffman's work

  • 00:35:36 Brute reality and social reality

  • 00:36:59 Yuval Harrari's imagined reality

  • 00:40:38 Power of all the languages

  • 00:44:29 Language in an AI society

  • 00:47:25 Complexity of a language

  • 00:56:18 Can complexity of a language affect psychology?

  • 01:00:08 Sapira-Whorf hypothesis

  • 01:04:07 Co-evolution and evolution of languages

  • 01:08:05 Desmond Morris' work on neoteny

  • 01:10:54 Purpose of a language

  • 01:16:04 Rationality, reasoning and language

  • 01:22:35 Truth and rationality

  • 01:27:45 Fighting misinformation

  • 01:30:19 Confirmation bias

  • 01:31:55 Should we care if a language is dying?

  • 01:38:06 Is mathematics a language?

  • 01:44:26 Thank you!

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