David Peat

Language 87putes. This does not mean that doctors or lawyers have different eyesightor logical abilities from the rest of us. Laypersons, too, can recognizebones and make logical arguments, but without the very fine toolof a technical language it becomes much more difficult to do so in anyprecise way.Common sense tells us that flexibility, richness, and precision in aparticular area of language enable us to convey discrimination withgreater clarity. In turn, such discrimination allows us to see the worldin a more clearly differentiated way. Jonathan Miller, in The Body inQuestion, points out that, to a layperson, the insides of the human bodyappear as a confusing mass of meat. However, doctors’ training, whichinvolves a combination of dissections and naming, teaches them to“see” the body in terms of various organs and their interconnections.As with the world’s creation stories, the act of naming brings somethinginto existence out of a background of chaos.Of course a language is far more than a vocabulary. Blackfootspeakers emphasize the rich way they use verbs and discriminate betweenverb tenses. Living in a world of flux, their language is adaptedto deal with constant transformation. By contrast, our Indo-Europeanfamily of languages stresses the way nouns—objects in thought—areconnected through verbs. These languages allow us to reify ideas andconcepts and treat them as objects of thought. Bertrand Russell arguedthat a great deal of metaphysics comes about because of the way languageis structured in that the subject of a sentence connects with thepredicate. Because a predicate exists, and because “I” as subject relateto it, there is a persuasive tendency to treat the predicate as being insome sense real.By contrast, the Blackfoot deal in process and when they need torefer to objects, they use verb forms. Names are more fluid, changingthroughout a person’s life. Blackfoot speakers have joked to me, “We’rebetter adapted to dealing with quantum physics than you are!” Thisjoke carries quite a layer of significance because it was exactly the samepoint made by David Bohm.Bohm agreed with Bohr that we are inevitably suspended in language.He did not, however, agree with Bohr’s conclusion that we aretherefore forever blocked from discussing the quantum world. The