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Book now@vervo.com what's going on here is a question about culpability, about blame.

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Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's Abby here and today we have How Words Warp Reality, a talk from linguist, anthropologist and author Nick Enfield. In this episode we're diving into the invisible power of language, how the words we use don't just describe reality, they shape it. So without further ado, I'll be handing over.

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Well, thanks very much for this warm welcome and what a lovely day room we've got in here. I'm going to be talking today about how Words Warp reality and this is actually not the title that I picked, but I'm going to embrace it and we're going to see how we go. It's obviously a big topic and we're not going to cover all of it, but I'm going to try to pick up a couple of threads that I think are the most interesting ones. Next one. So I'm going to be talking in terms of two books that I've written recently, pulling out some threads from there that I think will be potentially of interest that will get us away from perhaps some of the same old discussions and get us into some empirical evidence from oftentimes psychological work, but also linguistic work. One of the things that I want to get out of the way first is the idea of a distinction between brute reality and social reality. So we're talking about reality, but there's really two very important different kinds. And the chess game gives us a nice illustration of this. So it's a distinction that number of people have made with which Sellers gives this example of chess. So we can look at what's going on here and we can see a brute reality here which we can describe in terms of physical objects. If we release them, they will fall down, they have a certain weight, they make a certain noise if we hit them together and so forth. But then there's a whole different reality, which is the social reality. We can say things like the queen can go in certain directions. The queen, in this case, can take the bishop. We can talk about the rules that have been constituted by human activity. And these things are real and true, and we can talk about them as if they're real and true. But the key thing is that they're constructed by social practices. And oftentimes discussion about language and reality mixes up these two types of reality. So we want to ask about whether language can warp social reality just as much as we want to ask if language can warp brute reality. So on the social reality side, John Searle and among others have made a lot of this point, and particularly of the point that language is crucial for social reality. So Searle has a very strong claim here. All social reality is created by language. And fundamentally, I agree with that. If you look at essentially the systems of laws, norms, rights, duties, these things are founded in agreements that we've made, whether they're formal or informal. But those agreements are typically done using language. And oftentimes the words that we use are the things that we retreat to when we hold each other accountable for the agreements that we've made. So that's social reality. But I think what we want to do is set that aside. We'll come back to it and think about brute reality and see where we get to with that. So one other thing that I want to kind of get out of the way first is the question of, now what we want to do is talk about brute reality and questions of what happened in a certain situation. One of the things we want to get out of the way is our use of language in deciding whether something actually happened or was real or was not real. And we want to get our words right. So this is a famous thought experiment or sort of discussion. William James had this scene. He's hanging out with his friends in the forest. There's a squirrel on a tree, and one of these men is going around the tree trying to get a glimpse of the squirrel. And the squirrel is never letting him do so because it's always on the opposite side of the tree. And these guys are arguing over whether the man went around the squirrel or not. Right. So did the man go around the squirrel or not? This interminable argument, James said, is truly interminable until you can agree what you actually mean by the man goes around the squirrel. So he wrote, if you mean the man was now at the north of the squirrel, now at the east, now at the south, now at the west, then yes, the man goes around the squirrel. If you mean he's in front of it, then to the right of it, then behind it, then to the left of it. No, the man doesn't go around the squirrel. So it seems like a kind of trivial point, but it's really crucial because a lot of our disagreements come down to things like this, right? And so those are not questions necessarily of affecting reality with language, but they're questions of interfering with our ability to make decisions or, or judgments about reality using language. Next slide. So we might say all we need to do is agree on our terminology and the meanings of the words that we're going to use. Right. Well, I want to now get into some of the problems with that. Next slide. So Bertrand Russell, some of you might have heard of his famous conjugation. He explained that if you do your high school Latin, you learn the conjugation of the verbs and any verb will have to change its form depending on the subject. Is it first person, second person, third person, amo, amas, amat, I love, you love, he she loves. But he points to the English language conjugation. Here I am firm, you are obstinate. Here's a pig headed fool. And they ran at this time, this was in newspapers, they ran a competition of these different conjugations and who could come up with the best ones. Now it's a joke, but it's a very important insight here and that is that what we have here is something like one underlying reality. Someone who's fixed on a certain belief doesn't want to change their mind. And we can describe it in quite different ways depending on perhaps our subjective perspective, but also perhaps our interests and our goals in trying to get a certain sort of response. So one response might be, if I say I'm firm, I want to elicit praise. If I say you're obstinate, I might want to elicit some kind of condemnation. So then we start to get this question about the subjectivity of description, descriptions around a single piece of underlying reality. So in kind of behavioral economics, I want to link this to this concept of nudge. So many of you will have heard of so called nudge theory. Next slide. And this is where we see design oftentimes in the technological world, oftentimes on in the online world, you've encountered this kind of, of a screen. Would you like to proceed? Yes. Giant green bar, bold letters, no thanks, often quite hard to find and so forth. And this is connected to. Sorry, this is connected to some kind of financial commitment as well usually, but. So the point is that you have choice, but your Choice is being nudged and being directed quite strongly one way or another. And that's what this theory is all about in terms of design, sometimes tech design, sometimes other kinds of how you feel in a form and so forth. And language has a lot to do with this kind of nudge theory under the radar, I want to suggest. So as a general principle, what human beings are often doing is designing actions that invite the responses that we prefer. So I might be doing that in order to get some money from you or in order to get your approval or what have you, as in the Russell conjugation. We also do this in ways that are completely innocuous but that are almost necessary. So I often think about this when I go to see an artwork. So take any. You know, go into a gallery and just look at the art and then look at the label that the artwork is given. So this one here is referred to as wheat field with crows. It has a wheat field. It has crows. But it has other stuff too. There's a sky. There's some kind of tracks through the field, but they're not mentioned in the title. So this illustrates something important about the selectivity of language. We've got some piece of reality here, but as soon as we describe it, we're framing it, we're being selective. And that's not just a matter of my perspective, but it's also a matter of how I direct your attention to what it is that I'm talking about. All right, so I want to now kind of turn to how this. I just gave you an example which was seemingly innocuous and pretty unconscious. I gotta call the painting something. Give me a break. I'm just describing it. Oftentimes it's untitled as well, which is. Which is an interesting choice too. But of course, these effects of language are powerful, and they're known to people who are working in industries where that can be put to use. So there's a famous case study by Thaler in the seventies of the history of trying to get people to adopt credit cards. So in the US when credit cards were becoming more popular, they were figuring out, well, how can we get sort of all of society to take this technology on? There was this catch, and that was that you had to pay a little bit extra, right? So it started out as being a credit card surcharge. It cost 100 bucks. You have the credit card, you pay a dollar for the convenience, you end up paying 101. And psychologists looking at this problem realized that people are much more willing to forego a gain than they are to incur a loss. So they said, okay, well, let's just say instead that there's a cash discount. So you pay the price when you pay with the credit card, and if you pay cash, you get a little discount, and people are less interested in getting a little discount. So in the end, the price is $101. And if you. If you pay cash, you get a little discount, $100. And that was one feature in what worked quite well here, and that is labeling the same piece of reality using two different linguistic kind of framings in such a way that it elicits the behavior that we want. So that's sort of in the commercial world, I suppose. And now let's go into the kind of social domain, and this kind of a scene might be familiar to you. So this is an example, real example from a study. The stock photo isn't. But the. The text is from a study of children's interaction. And in this case, you have a boy and a girl playing with blocks. There's a structure. The structure collapses, and a boy calls out, she poked it. And immediately the girl says, I tapped it. Okay, so what you have here is, on the surface, it could be a kind of dispute about what is the accurate description of what just happened. Was it poke? Was it tap? These are two different words in the English language. And we might be arguing about, you know, what's the accurate representation of reality. But clearly that's not what's going on here. What's going on here is a question about culpability, about blame. And this is how we try to mount a case, for example, in this girl trying to not get in trouble. Right? And because we're accountable for our actions, and the terms that we use to describe the reality of the situation have these consequences for how I will then be viewed. So accuracy, reality is one thing. How we talk about it is crucial for consequences that come next. So it's a far less innocuous, far more consequential example here from Guantanamo Bay, George W. Bush period, when, in this case, a large number of men were incarcerated or were detained, I should say were detained in ways that would not have been allowed by the Geneva Conventions. Were these men soldiers? So there was a very specific move made by the George W. Bush administration, which was to designate these men illegal enemy combatants. So this is a very particular legalistic phrase, but again, it's a word. It's a term in the English language that has these specific legal consequences. So by deciding, you know, just as she tapped it Rather than she poked it by deciding their illegal enemy combatants. Whether we believe that's true or not, it ends up being consequential because that selection was made. And so there's a linguistic choice being made that creates a certain reality that then has consequences. Next slide. Yeah, so there are interesting ways in which these, these kinds of consequences, sort of going back now to more unconscious uses of language, there are interesting ways in which these consequences are real in ways we're not realizing. So let me give you a couple of examples from research on the differences that small amounts of small linguistic changes can actually make. This example, again, not the image, but the language here is from a study that was done of, of people in crisis dealing with. So crisis negotiators dealing with people in crisis. So in these situations, what you have is one of the main things that a crisis negotiator wants to do is to keep the person in crisis talking, right? Keep them engaged in conversation with the negotiator. And that's sort of one of their, their various goals that they have. So in this case, what the researchers did was to just look at a subtle difference in the language of the crisis negotiators. So in some, as I mentioned, one of the things they try to do is just get the other person to continue talking. So saying something like, can we just talk some more or I just want to speak to you, Right? So sometimes they'd use the word talk, sometimes they'd use the word speak. Well, it turned out by looking at these specific choices, that one of these words was more successful in actually getting the person to continue talking. Or to put it another way, what they actually measured was how likely did speak versus talk, how likely was it for it to get an overt rejection of wanting to continue to talk. And it turns out that speak is better than talk in this context. So if you say to the person, you know, I just want to speak some more with you, that's less likely to be rejected and more likely to be successful. Now, the researchers, I mean, I don't know how you feel about this. When I first heard about this, I thought, wow, why? It's hard. It's really hard to figure out why that would be the case. And. But they showed that it is the case. And that I think is really crucial to try to then understand. Well, firstly, it has an impact for what we would actually do in that situation if we were a crisis negotiator. But then we want to dig a bit deeper and try to figure out what's going on in the language. Yeah. So let me give you another example, which is perhaps, well, for me anyway, when I first learned about it was pretty. Pretty unusual, but I think I understand it. So this is from a study that was done in Perth in Western Australia of recordings of people telephoning the emergency line to get an ambulance. And in particular, they looked only at the calls that were about people who were undergoing a coronary crisis, heart attack. Right. And they just looked at various aspects of the language, and they discovered something unexpected. So the professionals who take these phone calls are instructed to go through a certain kind of script. So they have to figure out, who's this? Where are you? And then the first thing that they're instructed to say in the manual is, please tell me exactly what happened. Right. So one recording, it goes something like, please tell me exactly what happened. The man says, well, I was with my wife. We went into the bathroom. We were just getting ready for bed. She was just doing her teeth. And she looked up, she said, I feel funny. And she leaned back against the wall and she slid down. Now she's on the floor and I can't get her to wake up. So this would be a typical kind of response. Now, what they saw was that sometimes people, the professional call takers, actually departed from this wording. And instead of saying, tell me what happened, they said, tell me what's happened with the. In writing, with the apostrophe s, which is an abbreviation of what has happened, which is a whole different thing in English. That's the difference between a simple past and construction and a present perfect construction. Okay, grammar lesson over. But when you put it like that, the present perfect focuses your attention on what's the case right now, not on what's the story that led up to this. And they found that when you ask what's happened, you get briefer descriptions of the current state of affairs. And so what's happening here is that the language choice, putting the S or not putting the s is the difference between eliciting a little narrative like, I'm on the phone, my wife's on the floor, and I'm telling you a little story about how this happened. And the research showed, or at least that there's a correlation between this very subtle little choice. And in fact, they measured the time it took, and they found that these responses after what's happened were half the length of time than the responses under what happened. So that makes a difference in terms of how long it takes to dispatch the ambulance with obvious. With obvious consequences. Next. So there's some examples of ways in which the language that we're using, either by design by a sort of reactive force, or by some mechanism that's completely unconscious to us, is having an effect on how people respond and how people take the situation to be. And you might be thinking, well, okay, that's fine, we're still sort of a little bit in the realm of social reality. What about if we're really talking about personal experience, perception, our impression of the real world around us. What I want to show you now is some examples of how our memory and our understanding of what's happening can be shaped by the words that we're using Next here. This is an image from a study that was done in the 1920s, essentially a century old study by James Gibson, part of a series of studies. But in this particular part of the study, what people were trying to do in this work was to see how good people are remembering things. Look at this image on the left side, the left of the little line there. What the psychologist was doing was presenting people with little ambiguous images, okay? So this thing on the left kind of could be a star, kind of could be a bird, kind of could be an arrow. And what he did was to encourage people to talk about what they were seeing. And so what he found was that if people said it looked like a star, then later. So the second part of the experiment was to get the person who's, they've been told to remember exactly what they saw and then they have to draw it later on. So if they described it as a star, then their drawing later on looked more like this, it was more like a star than the original. If they said what they saw was a bird or an arrow, it would be later reproduced more like the thing that they said it was. Right? So the task, don't forget the task was to remember exactly what you saw. But there was this correlation with the wording that people used about their own experience. And what they essentially were doing then was reconfiguring what they thought they saw, what they believed was there, through this filter of the way that they, the way that they described it. Next. So in a subsequent study, this was done not long after, just a few years later. The experiment is thought, okay, well, in the experiment I just mentioned, people were offering those descriptions, those verbal descriptions themselves. And the experimenters thought, what if we interfere with the person's, what if we actually decide what these, what words are going to be used? Let's see if we can control in a way people's memory of what they saw. So the task was the same. They showed people ambiguous figures, and they said, okay, your task is to remember exactly what you saw, because later you're going to have to draw it again, okay, in the best possible kind of detail that you can. So they gave intentionally ambiguous images. So take this one at the bottom, for example. It's ambiguous between, among other things, a pair of spectacles or a dumbbell. Right. That you would use as kind of weights. The dumbbells don't look like this anymore. It's the 1920s. A little iron ball there with a bar between it. So, for example, what they would do is give one group of people these figures, and they'd have a label on the images this time. Okay? So in this one here, we'd say eyeglasses, etc. Right. Now you've got to look, you've got to remember what you see next. And what happens if you look at the eyeglasses here is that oftentimes people would then add a detail that wasn't there. So they're adding the little shape, the little sort of. What's this part of the glasses that goes over your nose? Right. So it's. That shape has been inserted by the person. And the argument here is that their linguistic encoding of what they saw, which was actually given by the experimenter, has resulted in this difference in what they thought they saw. So next, please. And correspondingly, you can take all these and give them a different label. So take the middle one here. That's. If you say crescent moon, people will remember it as being more like a crescent moon. If you say, let us see, they'll remember it as being more like a letter C. So that's a kind of an interesting way of reaching into people's mind, in a sense, when they've been given a quite specific task to remember something visual. And you put in a. You put a label on it that's somewhat innocuous, and yet it actually has an effect on how they will do this task. So this has been looked at in many other kinds of domains since. So, for example, color. I'm not sure how bright that little square is on there. Maybe not that bright, but you can see a little square on the screen there, and it has a certain color. Now, people have this interesting situation with humans is that we have an incredibly fine visual capacity to visually discriminate between colors, but we have very small vocabulary for colors. Most of us walk around with a dozen, a few dozen words for colors. Some people have very. You know, they might own a paint store or something like that. But most of us, not so much. Now, I can give you one type of task that doesn't involve language. So you can look at this little square on the screen and I ask you to study it, try to remember the exact shade you see. And then I show you this and I say, okay, please pick out what you saw. So it looks hard, It's a hard task and people aren't perfect at it. But there's a certain baseline. People can be pretty good at this task and they'll sort of cluster around the same area of this kind of set of this array of colors here. But you can do the experiment in a way that's analogous to what we saw with those little, with those little drawings. And I can give you the same ambiguous color. So half the people, people on this side of the room see the same color, but the word blue is next to it. And then the other half of the people see the same color and the word green is next to it. Next slide. And then what we see. Bit hard to see here, but as you would predict, given what I've already said, that people will remember what they saw as being tilted towards more the green area for the ones that saw the word green and more to the blue area for the ones that saw the word blue. Next slide. Which is it? Which is it? I wish I knew. I wish I knew. I'm sorry, no one's ever asked me that before. That's a thing. Okay, so it's really interesting because in a way I was just about to say that seems like a very trivial case, right? Seems like a case you couldn't possibly care about. But everyone very. So I say trivial because it's a very sort of no real consequence involved in that. Right. But you want to know if you got it right or wrong. But what difference is it make which chip you actually get? But there is some real life applications of this kind of effect that really are very much more consequential. So one example has to do with facial memory in eyewitness accounts. So in this case, so this is still from a YouTube clip, some of you might have seen it of someone who robbed a bank and was bragging about it on YouTube. So let's just imagine that this person is on video carrying out this, carrying out this, this robbery and you see their face. So this is the, this is the experiment that was done where people were shown a film of, of a robbery taking place. You see the person's face, you see all this, various things happen and then it's over. And then you are. You are broken into two groups. And one group is asked to describe the face in words as accurately as they can. And the other group is given some other task. They're not given an opportunity to describe the face. And then everyone is shown a lineup of faces. And you have to pick out what was the face that you saw? Who was it? Which one was it? Well, as you could probably guess, what I'm going to say is that the people who describe the face in words in greatest detail, they're worse at recognizing the face in a lineup. So what they've essentially done by using words to describe their own experience is strip out some of that analog information in a way by categorizing what they've seen in those terms. So it's pretty disturbing because, of course, what often eyewitnesses are asked to do is to talk as much as they can about what they've seen next. So I'm going to wrap up in just one more slide after this one. So I started out by saying we've got social reality, we've got brute reality. I think clearly language shapes social reality in a bunch of really important ways. And there's also really important ways in which brute reality is not shaped by language. It's independent of language. But in a lot of ways, it may as well be shaped by language because it affects our attention, it affects our perception, it affects how we coordinate around reality, the decisions that we make. And so it really kind of reaches into brute reality in a bunch of important ways. And what I want to say to finish is that this is not a matter for pessimism. We're. We shouldn't get depressed about it because we can always take different linguistic angles on a problem. And that's the most important thing for us to do, is to be mindful about the language that we use. So just finish with this example from a study of the language used in a courtroom case. So this was a rape case, and the victim was in. In court being questioned by a lawyer. And what you see is this battle over what is the correct description of the things that happened during the evening in question. So the lawyer says it was a bar where girls and fellows meet. And in the transcripts of this court case, she says it was a club. People go there. Did he sit with you? He sat at our table. Did he take you to the car? He walked outside with us. So what you see. Just take the middle one here. Did he sit with you? He sat at our table. Those two things that kind of have to both be true about this bit of reality that we're looking at. Okay, the dude either sat at the table or he didn't. But what you've got is a contesting of what is the description that's going to be allowed to stand of that piece of reality. And when you add those up, they build a case and they create, in this case obviously, important consequences. So that's where I'll leave it. Thank you very much.