Micro and Macro Economic Notes Essay

Submitted By nicolachelsea96
Words: 836
Pages: 4

What are the benefits and disadvantages of language as a way of knowing?

I am going to look into what extent language helps us as a way of knowing. Firstly I am going to look at what language really is; it is the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way. On the other hand knowing is belief through justification.

There is a debatable question about whether there can be thought without knowledge, We don’t often ask ourselves this kind of question but answering it or at least trying to answer it might allow us to evolve in the search for ourselves. However, it is practically impossible for us to bring a categorical answer, nor even a scientist one, the nature of this question being existential and dubious. To make our reasoning, it is necessary to precisely define the concepts used (language and thought). Go ahead and try to think of something without a voice in your head.
You may visualize scenery, shapes or colours but you will doubtfully be able to construct an elaborate vision of history or conceptualization of self in this field. Without language there are simply no tools in the sandbox to do these things. So then what is language in relation to thought? Did we "think up" language or did the language "think up" us? This leads me to say that language is innate as it is a necessity for communication and thought processes.

However, by using language we may produce some confusion because many words and sentence types can be misleading and make you interpret the complete wrong meaning of what is being put across, for example:
“He gave her baby food.” There is some uncertainty in this sentence because there are two very different meanings to the sentence. one being that the persona gave a female some baby food, however there is another way to interpret it being that the narrator is giving a female's baby some food.

I am currently a chemistry student and have recently passed my triple science GCSE's and I feel that language and terminology are a very significant part of the subject because if you do get the terminology wrong you could end up in a very horrible situation. For example, if you are doing an experiment and you use heptan-1-ol instead of heptanol you will get very different results and could cause a very harmful product if you combine it with the wrong thing. In situations like this is it is very important to ensure that you use the right language and you need language to think things through, be safe and ensure that everybody is around you is safe by communicating the right messages.

There are many other examples of how language can be misleading and cause further problems, for example certain areas in a country create their own way of speaking which in some cases becomes very different to the standard country language. An example of this would be cockney rhyming slang; we have a saying 'up the apple and pairs' meaning upstairs where as if we translated that into another language it would not make any sense