Does language help or hinder the way we acquire knowledge?

Language is something that humans have used almost since the beginning. It is combination of sound that is used to communicate between people one of the fundamental parts of a community. It is something that is incredibly important to us. Our language allows us to do many things. We use it to express our thoughts, connect with others and also for our knowledge. In these ways, language makes things a lot easier for us in facilitating our thoughts and helping to develop them as well.

In fact, it can be argued that thinking requires having a natural mental language, such as English. We think in this language, and without such a language, much of our thought would make no sense. Therefore much of our knowledge acquisition is mostly based on our language. We acquire knowledge through the guidance from parents, role models, school and teachers and life experiences. However, learning from one’s own experience is only part of how we learn and acquire knowledge, the rest is mainly language based.

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The majority of our knowledge is actually acquired from communication with others. Much of what we learn is in fact knowledge passed down or taught to us through language. Therefore, language is something used by humans as a way to make things easier in the acquiring of a language. Knowledge is widely based upon the things we learn from our education. Education is a system that we use to develop our own knowledge. Teachers are an example that knowledge can be passed from a person to another.

Every day students in classes gain knowledge from their teachers. The knowledge we acquire from our education is mainly what we learn from communicating with their teachers. The communicating by which we share the information clearly requires language. Language too, is what allows us to understand the new information that we acquire through language. People gain further knowledge by the variety of techniques they develop from their education. They use their best method to learn and acquire new knowledge.

We can then use such methods to gain knowledge acquisition ourselves. Therefore language is both very important and helps us a lot our acquisition of knowledge through education. Books are another way that we use to acquire knowledge. This knowledge can be acquired then passed on and shared with many other people. Even in this way to acquire knowledge we are heavily dependent on our own natural language (to be able to read and understand the information we are given by the book or the text).

In this sense, without language, much of what humans have learnt over time could not even be recorded, and therefore our knowledge today would be incredibly limited and we wouldn’t be able to pass it to the next generations. It is very clear that language is the most important way of knowledge that is the basic of the other ones, such as, reason, emotion, and perception. I think that without language, human knowledge would be immensely restricted, as language is was even structures many of our basic thoughts.

Therefore language is very helpful in our knowledge acquisition. Though language may have some limitations in the way we perceive our world, without it there is an ability to assume that our thoughts would have little meaning. However language can also keep us away from knowing. In the use of language, we label things, for example is you see a long, wooden, thing that you can write with you call it pencil. Without this label we would be able to say the differences between a pencil, a phone or book, for instance.

If we don’t know how to label something, this can keep us away from knowing. If for example we just know what big means, you can only say that an elephant is big, and anything else, because we don’t know any other words that can describe an elephant. So by using our language as a way to gain knowledge, we can actually acquire it only when we know what we are talking about. If for example we somehow end up in the middle of a conference, and we have no idea what they are talking about, we won’t be able to understand anything, also because they might use some specific language.

When two people are speaking two different languages, and they don’t understand each other, both of them won’t get the message the other person wants the other to get. In the end they might understand each other, and interpreting what the other person is talking about. The interpretation of another language, or the translation, is never perfectly accurate, and this might affect the knowledge these two people want to get. In the sense they are not changing the message, but it can be interpreted in the wrong way.