Language and Reality

Abstract

Speech—both audible and inaudible—is always speech about something. The subject matter may be natural reality, social reality, or psychic reality (the manifestations of a person's spiritual life exist for us objectively, i. е., outside us and independently of us, and thus form part of reality which we investigate). The epistemological controversy up to this day has been over which element is primitive : language, which creates our image of reality, or reality, which is mirrored, reflected, mapped by language. Two solutions are possible: either the linguistic process is an act of creating an image of reality, or it is an act of mirroring, reflecting, etc.

Spaces of Communication: Elements of Semio-Pragmatics

“…in television studies. 22 And as the department in Paris-3 grew, additions include permanent positions for television studies.…”

“…There is thus a constant back and forth going on in the book between the immanentist and the pragmatic paradigms. No one is more aware of these switches than Bettetini, who, in his presentation, talks about the "dialectical tension" 22 that is at the heart of his thinking. It is obvious that he wants to renounce neither the immanence that reassures him theoretically (it is immanence that, in his view, establishes semiotic relevance), nor the consideration of the pragmatic dimension that he strongly senses cannot be expunged without being cut off from the actual workings of communication.…”

“…The fact that their language includes ten words to describe snow is said to lead them to consider that there are ten different objects, whereas a French person sees only a single object, snow, to which they might tack on adjectives: crystallized, melting, frozen, powdered, and so on. 22 Another example comes from research on the performance of arithmetic operations in various languages in the Amazon region: it seems clear that there is a link between lexical richness around numbers in a language and the ability of enunciators of that language to perform certain arithmetic operations. On that view, then, one's language would thus have an effect on one's cognitive capacities.…”

Marx, population and freedom

“…A first example: the leading Marxist humanist Adam Schaff recognised that socialist societies are not free from alienation, but one of the chief causes was that neglect of the problem of the human individual had in the 20 th Century to the theoretical impoverishment of Marxism and its practical distortion (Schaff, 1967, p.143). In his view, personality is and always will be: 'the defining factor of a real individual, peculiar to the individual' (Schaff, 1970(Schaff, [1965, p.94). Schaff's view that elimination of private property is an essential step towards the flourishing of individual personality points both to his fidelity to the Marxist tradition, but also to his implicit recognition of the sheer complexity of the multiple prerequisites for freedom in a Marxist sense, many of which will inevitably be severely circumscribed by the diminishing allocation of natural resources to individuals that a growing population inevitably entails.…”

Development of an Evaluation Tool for Assessing the Use of Inclusive Language: An Institutional Perspective

“…The way in which language shapes our reality has been long discussed [1]. In this sense, inclusive language can be analyzed based on the assumption that language reflects and (re)produces reality [2].…”