The power of the word

I have often puzzled about how it is that children and young people, with little experience of life, with little grounding, can say novel and true things about life, about stuff which properly belongs to the grown-ups. How on earth do they know? How on earth can they know? 

One answer might lie in the words, the facts and the logical apparatus which we teach them.

So we have a whole lot of words, which we denote in what follows by lower case letters: a, b, c and so on. Lion, tiger, pencil, hammer. If we stretch the concept a little, London Bridge or dropping the brick.

We have a whole lot of relations, which we denote by upper case letters: A, B, C and so one. Relations which take a fixed, small number of arguments. So a relation H(a, b, c, d) might be true or false. So it might be true or false that H(a=Mary, b=Jane, c=0.33, d=metres), that is to say that Mary is – or is not – taller than Jane by 0.33 metres.

We have a whole lot of facts, that is to say relations which are either true or false. So H(a, b, c, d) is true while K(a, d, h) is false. Normally, we would have lots of facts for every relation. The sort of facts which we might express by the rows of a worksheet in Microsoft Excel.

Then some rules. For example, for all and any x, y, z, if we have A(x, y) and A(y, z) then it follows that A(a, z). This being a rule which says that A is a transitive binary relation. For example, ‘is less than’ is such a relation among numbers. If 5 is less than 7 and 7 is less than 23,678 then 5 is less than 23,678.

The brains of children and young people can then crank the handle and turn out all kinds of interesting propositions – without their having any real-life knowledge of the things which the words stand for at all. Some of these propositions will be new, unexpected – and true.

And it all hangs together to the extent that the words, the relations, the facts and the rules all hang together, amount to a true description of the world. That the grown-ups have handed down a machine which works, which cranks out the right answers when you power it up.

Then as we grow up, we are sometimes surprised to learn that something we have learned in this bookish way is actually true. Or, more complicated, we learn that something we have learned in this bookish way is not always true. That the rules we were taught when we were small need to be changed a bit, to be qualified. Or perhaps to allow a few exceptions.

Another angle is that by using their language, we learn to see the world in the way that our elders and betters see it. To that extent, our behaviour is conditioned by that language. To some extent, we mould ourselves and the world at large in their image. To the extent that we are able and energetic, able to build new language, we mould ourselves and the world at large in our own image.

The fact that all this works says something important, something deep, about the world in which we live. Perhaps most important, that the stuff on our Earth is organised into different kinds. The Earth is not just a great old muddle; a lot of it has been organised into things, things which we can give names, assign words to. Things like mountains, river, antelopes and pangolins. Human beings even. Actions like kicking the dog or praising the child. Things about which we can say things. Things for which there are facts and rules. 

All this despite the second law of thermodynamics: organisation really does emerge from the void, from the welter and waste. For which see references 1 and 2. Or as St. John is said to have told us, in the beginning there was the word. For which see references 3 and 4.

Perhaps it is time to pop down to the Blenheim to take something for my digestion.

PS: I think the image above is of St. John and is taken from the 12th century Gospel Book of Abbot Wedricus. But, so far at least, this has not been properly corroborated, even to the extent of finding out who Abbot Wedricus was. But the book might be the property of the Societé Archéologique et Historique, Avesnes-sur-Helpe, France.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-story-about-tree.html. For earlier notice of welter and waste.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics. 

Reference 3: The gospel according to St. John – St. John – 100CE or so.

Reference 4: http://biblescripture.net/John.html.