Development idea of the day: Vocabulary enhancement

Jean Rogers waxes Wittgensteinian:

Arabic, for example, can convey business, merchant, etc., in a word, but it takes a lengthy explanation to capture ‘entrepreneur’. After the recent success in working with Ministries and linguistic experts to invent an Arabic word for “corporate governance”, which also did not exist until the recently approved “hawkamat ash-sharikat”, CIPE and its Egyptian partners are now raising the issue of creating Arabic terminology that captures the breadth of meaning in entrepreneurship. This is really a process of concept formation. It can be lengthy and seem esoteric, but it is essential to moving forward on these issues — if there is no common word or language for a topic, then the concept itself does not adequately exist in society.

As something of a Wittgensteinian myself, I'm attracted by the implied argument here: all of our thoughts can be expressed in a public language, and if an important word does not exist in a given society's language, then the idea associated with that word can't really take off an that society. If there is no word for entrepeneurship in Arabic, then in some important sense there is no entrepeneurship in Arabic-speaking societies. Wow, that sounds racist, doesn't it? I think I need to talk to a Proper Philosopher before I take this any further. Any suggestions of Philosophy of Language types who might be able to help?

Posted by Felix at 18:09 EST

Comments

the guys at "Language Log" have discussed this a lot. See this post, for example

Posted by: me at 18:38 EST, February 06, 2007

I'm always reminded of this when I read these types of stories. They're probably at the same level of analysis.

Posted by: tbelcher at 18:50 EST, February 06, 2007

Much that I admire Witty's great intellect and instincts of charity, his ideas, I'm afraid, don't get a lot of respect among cognitive neuroscientsts and philosophers these days. Witty is an admirable dead end philosophically (but a heck of an architect in his spare time).

The excerpt quoted sounds vaguely like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism. In this, thoughts are seen to be determined by the categories made available by their language. A weaker variant is linguistic relativity, holding that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers.

The fundamental flaw here is the idea that thought is the same as language. A conventional absurdity. An entrepreneur is one who literally takes between, from French. There are plenty of entrepreneurs all over the world ignorant both of English and French. Witty was simply wrong. See Steve Pinker on the Language Instinct. Cheers.

Posted by: Alan at 20:55 EST, February 06, 2007

Hmmm? I don't understand what you're saying. Just because a word doesn't exist in a particular language/culture doesn't mean that the people don't understand the concept. A private citizen running a falafel stand or selling fruit on the corner or whatever is in fact an entrepreneur whether the word exists in the culture or not. And surely they must have some equivalent word to defiine private non government owned business.

No, your theory doesn't sound racist, just inaccurate.
And I don't believe "all" thought can be expressed in public language. Some thought is beyond language, or perhaps I'm confusing emotion with thought.

Posted by: len at 21:58 EST, February 06, 2007