Monday, June 3, 2019

Knowledge Precedes Language

Language has the ability to reconstruct many aspects of a given society, but to claim anything more--to claim that worldviews are linguistic constructs--is to err and heinously misrepresent the power of language.  A sound worldview is attached to knowledge, and if knowledge was a slave to language, knowledge could not be obtained--a self-refuting impossibility!  Demonstrating that knowledge is not a slave to linguistics is a very simple matter.

In order to even assign a concept or thing a linguistic term, after all, one must already understand it in some way.  No one would be able to create languages without possessing knowledge beforehand.  It is impossible to devise or learn a term or sound for a concept that one does not know of!  Knowledge precedes language by utter necessity, and the latter could not exist without the former.

Furtheremore, even if humans were completely incapable of speech, it is not as if we could not reason!  The ability to grasp reason grounds knowledge; language cannot amount to anything more than a means of communicating knowledge from one person to another.  In the absence of language, human sociality and civilization could never have developed to the extent that it has, but the laws of logic and truth are not linguistic constructs, and thus even a mute species could still comprehend them.

Language certainly shapes how some people perceive various aspects of reality, but it in no way dictates everyone's worldviews.  No one is forced into a particular epistemological or metaphysical system merely because of the language that they or their society use.  Language is purely arbitrary, and reason is wholly fixed and necessary; as long as a person looks to the latter instead of the former, knowledge is not an unattainable thing.

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