Tina’s new book on language and belief

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Pigs and Truffles Giveaway!

Tina Lee Foresee, a longtime fellow blogger, has a new book coming out: Truth & Generosity: How Truth Makes Language Possible, by her and her husband, Neal Weiner. From what I understand, it will be on the relationship between language and belief. She’s working to promote the book, which is what the pig hunt and truffles in the linked post are about. If you’re interested in the philosophy of language and cognition, or just want to score some chocolate, check it out!

Update 11/2/23: Tina left a comment with a link to a preview of the book intro and first chapter on her site.

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7 thoughts on “Tina’s new book on language and belief”

    1. Sapir-Whorf is one of those things that always seemed plausible to me, but only in a weak sense of language influencing, not necessarily determining, thought and perception. It also seems likely that environment influences thought and perception, which then influences language, which in turn influences cognition back, with the relations being too complex for simple cause and effect statements.

      But I have to admit I’ve never taken a deep dive in this area. My readings about it so far have been pretty shallow.

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      1. We sometimes hear that such-and-such a language “has no word for” such-and-such a concept. I was reminded of this by a recent comment on a post about Iain McGilchrist’s “two ways of knowing.” In English we tend to suppose that to “know” something is to “know a fact,” and McGilchrist has to expand on the different sense in which we “know a person.” But he says that the German words “wissen” and “kennen” reflect the distinction he’s trying to make.

        This is certainly a case where language influences perception,. Certain aspects of our own experience might not be fully salient to us until they are “pinned down” by the words in our vocabulary. McGilchrist spends about three pages explaining his two different “ways of knowing,” and if he succeeds, this is proof that the conceptual barriers between languages can be overcome. But having read those three pages, indeed the entire book, I still have only a shaky grasp of the difference between “wissen” and “kennen.” I trust fluent speakers of German have acquired much greater facility with these concepts.

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        1. You made me curious so I checked to see how Google translated those terms. “Wissen” translates to “knowledge”, and “kennen” to “know”. That’s a noun vs verb translation, but maybe not capturing the nuance McGilchrist was describing.

          But I think your point about salience sounds right. Languages bring different aspects of our perceptions into attention. So dividing up the color spectrum in different ways calls attention to different distinctions along that spectrum than a language than divides it up another way.

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