When communication seems to be failing, my instinct is to taboo my own communication-disrupting language and adopt my interlocutor’s language instead. When I don’t understand my interlocutor’s language well enough to adopt it, my instinct is to ask questions about it. When communication has failed so thoroughly that I can’t ask such questions and understand the answers, I pretty much give up.
It seems like a lot of people don’t do this. I wonder why? It seems common for people to resist adopting any of the other party’s terminology. Some possible explanations:
I’m mistaken. It’s actually rare for people to resist adopting the other party’s terminology — I’m just exercising the availability heuristic.
This is like speciation. The cases where people don’t adopt the other’s terminology are those where it’s advantageous (to whom?) to pick one side of a language barrier (and defend it) instead of mixing. When that isn’t the case, people already have mixed their terminology — invisibly.
It’s a way of pushing cognitive costs around as a primate status fight — “I’m too important to bother to understand you; you have to understand me.” (In the extreme case this would lead to the creation of low-status roles that specialize in understanding without expecting to be understood. Do those exist? Some wag would probably say “wife” or “husband”, ha ha.)
It’s a way of defining and defending territories — “Yes, you get to insist on your language in that magisterium, and I get to insist on mine in this one.” (This seems to be more what goes on in academia than #3.)
People are ignorant of the benefits of understanding one another. Only awesome people like you and I have figured out that understanding other people is awesome. (This seems really unlikely, but it seems to be the premise of some schools of communication improvement.)
People are afraid that if they started using the other party’s language they would mess up their command of their current language. (Economists can’t afford to learn to talk like cultural anthropologists because they might slip up and use anthro-jargon in front of their economist buddies and seem ignorant of economics jargon.)
People are afraid that if they started using the other party’s language they would become disloyal to their current affiliations. (Economists can’t afford to learn to talk like cultural anthropologists because they might become convinced cultural anthropology is right and would lose all their economist buddies.)
In the extreme case this would lead to the creation of low-status roles that specialize in understanding without expecting to be understood. Do those exist?
9. Language carries with it many framings, assumptions, associations, and implicit value judgments (see: The Noncentral Fallacy). Letting the other side set the language lets them shape the playing field, which gives them a large home field advantage.
10. People are cognitive misers who mostly rely on cached thoughts. For example, the arguments that they make are arguments that they’ve thought about before, not ones that they’re thinking up on the spot. And their thoughts are cached in their own language, not the other party’s language. (Related to #3, but it’s not about status.)
/#1 might certainly be true, but if so it’s true of both of us; it seems common to me as well. I agree with you about #3 and #4, though I mostly think of #4 as a special case of #3. I find #5 unlikely, but if we’re going to list it, we should also note the symmetrical possibility that you and I overestimate the benefits of understanding one another. A variant of #7 is that using the other party’s language is seen as a signal of alliance with the other party’s tribe, which might cost them alliances with their own tribe… e.g., even if the economist isn’t convinced of cultural anthropology, their economist buddies might think they are. (Which arguably is just another special case of #3.)
As long as we’re listing lots of possibilities, I would add #8: They believe their language is superior to their interlocutor’s language, and that the benefits of using superior language exceed the benefits of using shared language. And, relatedly. #8b: Behaving as though they believe #8 signals the superiority of their language (and more generally of their thinking). Which arguably is just another special case of #3.
I see the difference between #8 and #3 being that using superior language might be positive-sum in the long run, whereas pushing cognitive costs onto someone else is zero- or negative-sum.
I suppose. That said, if your thinking is superior to mine then you gaining status relative to me (whether through cognitive-cost-pushing as in #3, or through some other status-claiming move) might be positive-sum in the long run as well. Regardless, I agree that #8 is distinct from #3.
I should also note that the strategy I describe often fails when people interpret my questions about their language as veiled counterarguments, which they then attempt to decipher and respond to. Since my questions aren’t actually counterarguments, this frequently causes the discussion to fall apart into incoherence, since whatever counterargument they infer and respond to often seems utterly arbitrary to me.
It’s not surprising that people do this, since people do often use questions as a form of veiled counterargument.
In the extreme case this would lead to the creation of low-status roles that specialize in understanding without expecting to be understood. Do those exist?
I don’t think “understanding without expecting to be understood” is quite it, but there are a number of relatively low-status roles, in domains with specialized vocabularies, whose job is basically to act as a translation layer between specialist output and the general public. Tech support is the obvious example. In medicine, family practice seems to have shades of this, and it’s low-status compared to the specialties. Grad students sometimes pick this up in their TA role. I’m not sure if anything similar happens in law.
11*. Each party suspects this (perhaps correctly) of the other.
(This is the same but with the usual ethical symmetry assumption that the other is at least in theory capable of occupying the same position towards us that we occupy towards them.)
Yeah, pretty much this.
When communication seems to be failing, my instinct is to taboo my own communication-disrupting language and adopt my interlocutor’s language instead. When I don’t understand my interlocutor’s language well enough to adopt it, my instinct is to ask questions about it. When communication has failed so thoroughly that I can’t ask such questions and understand the answers, I pretty much give up.
It seems like a lot of people don’t do this. I wonder why? It seems common for people to resist adopting any of the other party’s terminology. Some possible explanations:
I’m mistaken. It’s actually rare for people to resist adopting the other party’s terminology — I’m just exercising the availability heuristic.
This is like speciation. The cases where people don’t adopt the other’s terminology are those where it’s advantageous (to whom?) to pick one side of a language barrier (and defend it) instead of mixing. When that isn’t the case, people already have mixed their terminology — invisibly.
It’s a way of pushing cognitive costs around as a primate status fight — “I’m too important to bother to understand you; you have to understand me.” (In the extreme case this would lead to the creation of low-status roles that specialize in understanding without expecting to be understood. Do those exist? Some wag would probably say “wife” or “husband”, ha ha.)
It’s a way of defining and defending territories — “Yes, you get to insist on your language in that magisterium, and I get to insist on mine in this one.” (This seems to be more what goes on in academia than #3.)
People are ignorant of the benefits of understanding one another. Only awesome people like you and I have figured out that understanding other people is awesome. (This seems really unlikely, but it seems to be the premise of some schools of communication improvement.)
People are afraid that if they started using the other party’s language they would mess up their command of their current language. (Economists can’t afford to learn to talk like cultural anthropologists because they might slip up and use anthro-jargon in front of their economist buddies and seem ignorant of economics jargon.)
People are afraid that if they started using the other party’s language they would become disloyal to their current affiliations. (Economists can’t afford to learn to talk like cultural anthropologists because they might become convinced cultural anthropology is right and would lose all their economist buddies.)
… ?
In my experience, they’re called “employees”.
9. Language carries with it many framings, assumptions, associations, and implicit value judgments (see: The Noncentral Fallacy). Letting the other side set the language lets them shape the playing field, which gives them a large home field advantage.
10. People are cognitive misers who mostly rely on cached thoughts. For example, the arguments that they make are arguments that they’ve thought about before, not ones that they’re thinking up on the spot. And their thoughts are cached in their own language, not the other party’s language. (Related to #3, but it’s not about status.)
/#1 might certainly be true, but if so it’s true of both of us; it seems common to me as well.
I agree with you about #3 and #4, though I mostly think of #4 as a special case of #3.
I find #5 unlikely, but if we’re going to list it, we should also note the symmetrical possibility that you and I overestimate the benefits of understanding one another.
A variant of #7 is that using the other party’s language is seen as a signal of alliance with the other party’s tribe, which might cost them alliances with their own tribe… e.g., even if the economist isn’t convinced of cultural anthropology, their economist buddies might think they are. (Which arguably is just another special case of #3.)
As long as we’re listing lots of possibilities, I would add #8: They believe their language is superior to their interlocutor’s language, and that the benefits of using superior language exceed the benefits of using shared language.
And, relatedly. #8b: Behaving as though they believe #8 signals the superiority of their language (and more generally of their thinking). Which arguably is just another special case of #3.
I see the difference between #8 and #3 being that using superior language might be positive-sum in the long run, whereas pushing cognitive costs onto someone else is zero- or negative-sum.
I suppose. That said, if your thinking is superior to mine then you gaining status relative to me (whether through cognitive-cost-pushing as in #3, or through some other status-claiming move) might be positive-sum in the long run as well. Regardless, I agree that #8 is distinct from #3.
I should also note that the strategy I describe often fails when people interpret my questions about their language as veiled counterarguments, which they then attempt to decipher and respond to. Since my questions aren’t actually counterarguments, this frequently causes the discussion to fall apart into incoherence, since whatever counterargument they infer and respond to often seems utterly arbitrary to me.
It’s not surprising that people do this, since people do often use questions as a form of veiled counterargument.
I don’t think “understanding without expecting to be understood” is quite it, but there are a number of relatively low-status roles, in domains with specialized vocabularies, whose job is basically to act as a translation layer between specialist output and the general public. Tech support is the obvious example. In medicine, family practice seems to have shades of this, and it’s low-status compared to the specialties. Grad students sometimes pick this up in their TA role. I’m not sure if anything similar happens in law.
(Continuing Unnamed’s list)
11. They suspect (perhaps correctly) that the other side’s terminology has anti-epistemology embedded within it.
11*. Each party suspects this (perhaps correctly) of the other.
(This is the same but with the usual ethical symmetry assumption that the other is at least in theory capable of occupying the same position towards us that we occupy towards them.)
Is that not a special case of #8?
Would you be willing to do this in a discussion with say a theologian or a creationist?
Sure. I’ve done the former many times, the latter a few times.