Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Terpomo11 t1_iu7kf2g wrote

Reply to comment by Eager_Question in How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language - fascinating ethical shifts come with thinking in a different language by fonliahea1994

It says a lot about how much of our day-to-day thinking is basically just our brain's autocomplete.

32

Eager_Question t1_iu7mq03 wrote

Yeah! And also how much of it is purely about what we think is normal. My default "normal" things in Spanish and English are different. And therefore what a "sanctity" or "this is unnatural" reaction looks like in both languages will change. The whole thing runs on availability bias.

A lot of moral philosophy I have read is super reliant on reverse-engineering moral ideas from a combo of moral intuition and phrasing. And yet almost none of it is linguistically comparative. I have never read a philosophy paper that discusses language differences at length that is not about philosophy of language.

There are a few papers I read recently that seemed kind of incoherent to me, where I think if the author was forced to translate their own work into another language, they would realize the narrowness of their perspective.

9

Terpomo11 t1_iu7n3id wrote

I've found myself mentally translating arguments in one language into my other to see if they still make sense.

11

Eager_Question t1_iu7psl2 wrote

A wonderful habit to have!

I'm wondering if you can do this on purpose. My French is very unemotional and theoretical, as I basically have to reverse-engineer sentences in it a lot of the time.

But if I read only Enlightenment works in French and never anything else, could I trick myself into making an "enlightenment thought" switch, like having a virtual machine inside another one?

I'm also learning Latin. If I read a lot of ancient Latin literature, will I get an "ancient Rome" switch inside my brain? Will it change my instincts in Latin vs French vs English vs Spanish? I know for a fact that I have found some books or short stories vastly more compelling in one language than the other (e.g. La Casa De Asterión is a masterpiece in Spanish. It's interesting and okay in English. Mistborn is a lot of fun in English. It is unbearable in Spanish).

I think the capacity to turn different moral intuitions on and off could prove astonishingly useful, and yet I rarely hear anyone discuss doing this on purpose.

5