User Allusions
Some pitfalls of apparently rational thinking Using language as a scaffolding for thinking has its limitations too. One has come up a number of times already: the illusion of binarity. Either someone is bald or he’s not. Either something is a genocide or it’s not. Either you’re a scientist or you’re not. From the ordinary perspective, the word itself more or less is the concept (Chapter 15). And words have a tendency to sharpen boundaries—the “handle” is more discrete than the concept it’s a handle for (Chapter 11). So relying on the word makes it easy to avoid the fragile middle ground and the slippery slope. The world comes to be divided up into black and white, and you don’t have to (or aren’t allowed to) recognize its full color. As we saw in Chapters 11, 13, and 14, not having a word for some concept can render it invisible. Going back to one of our examples there: If you think that thinking equals rational thinking, then by definition monkeys can’t think, because they don’t talk. But what do they do? If the only other term you have is “(mere) instinct,” it’s hard for you to appreciate how sophisticated their behavior actually is. They might as well be no different from turtles. So how can we talk about whatever it is that monkeys do? Well, okay, if you don’t want to call it thinking, then let’s call it something else, say “shminking.” Now we’re in business. We can ask: do turtles shmink too? If so, how is monkey shmought different from turtle shmought? Does human thinking amount to shminking plus language, or is it something else altogether? And so on. Without this new word, discourse is stymied. By adding it to our repertoire, we’re off and running. [Jackendoff, 223]
Here, for instance, are roughly one hundred terms all of which could be found in dictionaries published long before computers played any role in society, but which, if read today, give the sense of being technological:account, address, address book, animation, application, archive, attach, bit, bookmark, bootstrap, browser, bug, burn, bus, button, capture, card, chat, chip, clean up, click, close, compress, connection, copy, crash, cut, delete, desktop, disk, dock document, drag, dump, entry, erase, figure, file, find, firewall, folder, font, forum, gateway, hacker, highlight, history, home, host, icon, image, input, install, junk, key, keyboard, library, like, link, mail, mailbox, map, match, memory, menu, mouse, move, navigate, network, open, output, pad, page, palette, paste, peripheral, point, pop up, port, preference, preview, print, process, program, quit, read, reader, record, save, screen, scroll, search, select, send, sever, sheet, shopping cart, shortcut, site, sleep, style, surf, tab, thumbnail, tool, trash, turn on/off, virus, wall, we, window, workplace, worm, write, zoom…[Hosftadter, 396]