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How Much Do Models Influence Our Thinking?
OCatenac writes: "Frank Schirrmacher, head of the arts and science department for the influential German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, considers the question of how much metaphor and model influence our view of the world."
A model, in a way, is language to express ideas. Much of our knowledge today that we take for granted today is built on the knowledge from our ancestors.
George Orwell said it well in 1984... If you control the language, you control thoughts:
If you breed breed out the concept of "freedom" and take related words out of the lexicon, you can control your population so that they don't know that they're free. Even if someone has a thought in his head that he's not free, he can't communicate that idea to others.
Similarly, if you create new language (or models), you allow new thoughts to form.
Some psychology guy proposed this decades ago... The Whorfian hypothesis. It is a neat idea, although I don't recall why, it was discounted.
A google search reveals oodles of material.
I think 1984 was written around the time this was a big idea.
Language doesn't control our thoughts, but it does strongly affect how we express them (for obvious reasons.) To steal an example from Pinker, 1994: The fact that you can be unable to find the right words to express "what you meant to say" is, among other possible illustrations, a demonstration that lingustic determinism just doesn't totally make sense.
Creating a new model doesn't necessarily allow new thoughts to form -- but it gives a different way of looking at a situation, and lets the creator of that model express his thoughts more clearly to himself and to others, which can lead to better-developed theories and better communication of thoughts.
You can't not have a concept just because you don't have a word for it. It's just that you can't talk about it without the words.
We know this to be false, because of studies of other cultures where there are very few color words (White, Black, and Red, for instance). These people can discriminate between pink and purple just fine, even though their vocabulary doesn't allow them to verbally make distinctions between these colors. So people can perceive what their hardware is set up to perceive, even if they don't have any words to describe what they are perceiveing.
On the other hand, people also have a short-term memory limit of 5 to 9 (7 +/- 2) chunks of information. A good model can turn 15 to 20 unrelated pieces of informaion into three or four chunks -- which can all be held in short-term memory at one time and mentally manipulated. So having a good model will make some thoughts possible that would be impossible (because of the limitations of short-term memory) without the model.
however, I think you are largely overstating the supposed doubtlessness of your stronger proposition, that models and metaphors are the world itself. it makes sense in a po-mo context, but if you think academia's opinion-of-the-week on the nature of reality is 1) universally accepted across schools of thought and cultures, and 2) not going to change in a decade or two, then well... i'll have to respectfully disagree with you.
more generally, I'd say it's always good to weigh good old common sense in front of the latest theory. postmodernism has revealed some rather large gaps in so-called objectivity, and I'm the first to rejoice of it -- but I do'nt necessarily buy its stronger claims, and I do think that the word "truth" still *sometimes* makes sense.