It’s difficult to dispute that repetition (especially from multiple sources) of ideas can give them more weight than Ol’ Tommy Bayes would recommend, nor that language co-evolves with the most-communicated ideas in a community. By those mechanisms, there is going to be a strong correlation between language and long-term beliefs.
I’d argue that causality goes in both directions for that correlation, in a sort of feedback loop (along with other forces, such as actual experienced truth and intellectual propagation of ideas that language has yet to catch up with). What you talk about gets more belief-weight, and what you believe gets talked about more.
Personally, I’m in the “influence” rather than “determine” camp—novel and disbelieved ideas are very often discussed, just using more words and more intellectual effort than the routine, unexamined beliefs that underlie more common utterances.
Could you contextualize your view that disbelieved ideas get plenty of play? My knee-jerk is disagreement there. Isn’t the vogue of public discourse to immediately halt the the development of unpopular/disbelieved ideas through shaming, ostracization, and gatekeeping?
I see moreso repetition of the accepted ideas (which really are prescriptions with concomitant proscriptions, impliedly or otherwise) increasing as social controls grow stronger. I’m assuming the people that post here are very smart so likely your experiences of discourse are very exceptional. But what about the masses?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity for some pointers to the long-hypothesized interaction between language and thought.
It’s difficult to dispute that repetition (especially from multiple sources) of ideas can give them more weight than Ol’ Tommy Bayes would recommend, nor that language co-evolves with the most-communicated ideas in a community. By those mechanisms, there is going to be a strong correlation between language and long-term beliefs.
I’d argue that causality goes in both directions for that correlation, in a sort of feedback loop (along with other forces, such as actual experienced truth and intellectual propagation of ideas that language has yet to catch up with). What you talk about gets more belief-weight, and what you believe gets talked about more.
Personally, I’m in the “influence” rather than “determine” camp—novel and disbelieved ideas are very often discussed, just using more words and more intellectual effort than the routine, unexamined beliefs that underlie more common utterances.
Could you contextualize your view that disbelieved ideas get plenty of play? My knee-jerk is disagreement there. Isn’t the vogue of public discourse to immediately halt the the development of unpopular/disbelieved ideas through shaming, ostracization, and gatekeeping?
I see moreso repetition of the accepted ideas (which really are prescriptions with concomitant proscriptions, impliedly or otherwise) increasing as social controls grow stronger. I’m assuming the people that post here are very smart so likely your experiences of discourse are very exceptional. But what about the masses?