Eager_Question t1_iu7mq03 wrote on October 29, 2022 at 4:23 AM

Reply to comment by Terpomo11 in How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language - fascinating ethical shifts come with thinking in a different language by fonliahea1994

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.

Terpomo11 t1_iu7n3id wrote on October 29, 2022 at 4:27 AM

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

Eager_Question t1_iu7psl2 wrote on October 29, 2022 at 4:57 AM

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.