Baudrillard certainly “got” Dick, as his essays provide a beautifully formalised encapsulation of the primary ideas that motivated Dick, and did so by reading his stories.
Good literature doesn’t have to have a compelling plot, or beautiful literary style, or evocative descriptive prose, or any particular form or mechanism - it just has to do one thing: change you, the reader.
Think about the history of words with a negative connotation that people try to replace, and how the new euphemism acquires the previous negativity.
dang doesn't like it when people say correlation is not causation, but dammit, the fallacy is everywhere! Changes in language accompany changes in thought, but it's not causal.
Please do share more about this "stupid idea" regarding "words shape thought"; as you say, I seem smart enough to share and repeat something stupid so I must be able to understand you further.
I haven't read that particular book, which is an oversight I'll have to correct on my next holiday.
With that in mind, couldn't society's thought process on ownership drive the phrasing, not the other way around?
In other words, maybe you can't change thought processes by changing phrasing.
Languages are used to express ideas. We have debates on this very website about the expressiveness of languages, how expressiveness of language enables (in)efficiency, and which languages are best for a given task.
The expression of a thought influences and, in some cases, limits the kinds of thoughts that can be expressed. This is evident when you see things like someone "writing Java in perl".
Meanings evolve and often doesn’t follow the literal words used. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” for example has seen it’s meaning dramatically shift over time. Basically as soon as a phrase has a well known meaning, that meaning can begin to drift.
The only clarification I can think of for my response is to reiterate that the context I was assuming was the belief that controlling language allows one to control thoughts of real people. My reaction isn't that it should or shouldn't, just that it obviously doesn't.
Maybe "control" would be a better word than "shape", after further contemplation. I agree that words shape thought, because in general, actions shape thought. But nobody can control thought by controlling language. It's futile. Unless you are privileged to be designing the universe.
Is the government subjecting people to enhanced interrogation or torture?
Are they placing them in detention or prison?
Are people undocumented immigrants or illegals?
Is someone a <respectful term> or "just a <derrogatory term>"?
Is someone a freedom fighter, a terrorist, or a traitor?
To the Nazis, were Jewish people human or subhuman?
Can a given historical event be called a genocide?
To me it's pretty clear the words used to describe people and their actions influences how these people and actions are viewed and understood.
This is one reason why propaganda is so effective, and why violence often follows the dehumanization of certain groups of people, in which word choice tends to play an important role.
If there is an example of successful thought control through language, how is anyone going to be able to think of it, by definition?
For instance, in Nazis who truly believed that Jewish people were subhuman, empathetic thoughts towards Jewish people were less likely.
Also, I don't agree that attempts at control have failed. I think they have often succeeded.
- "Thoughts are not influenced by words" would be a silly claim, and I disavow it.
- I am disoriented by your throwing out "some thoughts are impossible for users of certain words", not knowing who and where you think that was claimed. That's not the only way one could try to control thoughts with words. The method people seem to try a lot is to eliminate words to prevent thoughts, which seems like kind of the opposite.
- On what basis do you presume you have good insight into the psychology of Nazis? I mean really, that's awfully glib.
- Your last two sentences don't seem mutually exclusive, but having them together seems to imply they should be, which means I don't know what you are trying to say. Can you give an example of successful control at any rate?
Advertisement works, even though it's not thought control.
Nazi were quite successful in turning Germany the way they wanted, in making soldiers hate and in making them comit atrocities. That was succesfull language manipulation. They lost war for unrelated reasons.
In the end, people will get old, and forget history, and die off, and the feedback loop will go around and around and what people believe will evolve. But nobody will have successfully controlled what people think.
I totally agree that everybody is trying to influence everyone else's thoughts through language. That's what words are for. Nobody could reasonably disagree with that, and I never intended to.
I wonder if you believe that this kind of absolute, unsubtle thought control is what Ursula Le Guin was talking about with the brush example, or what the parent post was talking about. Or even what Orwell was talking about.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is really popular in the full 'thought-control' kind of way, and I do believe that that is not well supported.
What Orwell was talking about, what he thought or feared possible, I disagree with, and, well, you can compare our society to 1984. There is a tremendous amount of propaganda, and it has an effect, but don't you agree that as warped as the mental space we collectively inhabit may be, that it's not under control of a specific entity? Even in, say, the Soviet Union, it wasn't under control. Maybe some day when totalitarians can program brains...
Yes, I agree that the case of a single entity being able to use words to place thoughts directly in minds like a TV version of hypnosis or etch them out of minds as if with electroshock therapy is not an accurate description of... anything.
It's not what anyone means when they talk about words shaping thought, an idea which you disparaged so vituperatively - which would be understandable if anyone meant by it what you seem to be implying they mean. They can mean a number of things, whether it's a coach or leader influencing the attitudes of their followers, a person seeking to direct their own train of thought, a movement using language to dehumanize a minority group, an advertiser affecting how the public views a product, or a propagandist or politician attempting to move the Overton Window. Or many other things, more or less subtle.
And in nazi example, successful controll of how Jews are seen does not imply that foreign non-Jewish armies will never beat you. That would be ridiculous standard.
Nazi succesfull framed Jews as evil and Jews got exterminated. They succesfully framed slavs as inferior and succesfully framed themselves as needing more living space which led to expansive war and population displacement.
That foreign armies conguered them does not imply that messaging aimed at Germans was not succesfull.
Given your statement that "enhanced interrogation" is still going on, that means from my framing that calling it torture failed to stop it, hence attempts to control it through language failed. You're saying that language allows it to happen, but I would say the correct framing is that doing it and the desire of people to rationalize it allows it to happen. The euphemism being an effect rather than a cause.
Yes, nazi lost wwii, no it does not prove their control of langue failed.
No, there being two opposing sides trying to control langue and one of them not winning does not prove control through langue does not work.
Frankly, there are very illogical argument.
It can have unintended consequences, however. For me, hearing the phrase “undocumented immigrants” just irritates me and actually distracts me from the point the utterer is trying to make. It's like a word pretzel designed to get around saying “illegal”.
https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/1994_04_03_newyo...