The Purpose of Language

2009.10.31   prev     next

“I’ll have a double cheeseburger, please.”

“Would you like fries with that?”

“No, but gimme a diet Coke with it.”

“What size?”

“Medium.”

“Thanks, that’ll be $2.50.”

The purpose of language is to communicate information. And the information that language is useful for communicating is the type of information illustrated in the above conversation.

Many revered intellectuals, throughout history and even today, have thought that the above type of conversation is petty drivel or garbage, and that the great benefit of human communication is to persuade people to do the right thing, and thus eradicate (or at least greatly reduce) the “evils” of this world.

Those intellectuals, I think, were (and still are) deluded. You can’t persuade anyone to want any particular thing — their built-in preferences will override your best arguments. You can, of course, inform people of facts they didn’t already know, and perhaps make them realize that their preferences are better served by doing such-and-such (the action that you prefer them to take). Or, you can deceptively pretend to inform them, again for the purpose of getting them to do what you prefer they do.

But their actual preferences are, in all likelihood, set in their DNA. The chance to eliminate destructive preferences exists as a future project of genetic damage repair and prevention. This cannot be accomplished by talking to the individuals who carry those destructive preferences.

Distillation

When the facts of this world are laid bare for all to see (as they are increasingly becoming, as technology relentlessly advances) it will become less-and-less possible to persuade others to suit your own preferences, and the purified preferences will increasingly run up against each other with no information exchange being relevant to the conflict. The preferences of the great majority (i.e. construction, not destruction) will win, but by force, not by persuasion.

The intellectuals have it backwards. The billions of allegedly mundane, petty, shallow, burger conversations we have every day with other constructiveness-minded people are the massive benefit that language and communication bring to humanity. Without these conversations, mass destruction and possible extinction would result — even if no one preferred it.

And the intellectuals’ best arguments that your preference should be such-and-such? It is those arguments that are the absurd drivel and meaningless crap — that has no chance of turning anyone’s preferences around at all.