One of the themes that I’ve focused on in these little PoL essays is the concept that language shapes thought. We think in words, and if something is simpler to construct grammatically, we are more likely to think it. There is more to this, though. If we aren’t careful, language is also able to limit our thinking. I’ll demonstrate through example.

On both your world and on mine, there has been a longstanding debate over whether viruses are alive. (Here is an interesting article on the debate for those interested!) Without getting needlessly mired in the details, the difficulty comes from viruses having some traits of things we classify as “living,” and some traits of things we classify as “nonliving.”

So once we’ve looked at the evidence, once we’ve weighed all the values, and considered all the points of debate, shouldn’t we be able to to come to a conclusion? Shouldn’t we be able to discover the truth of the matter?

No. A resounding “no.”

The entire debate is predicated on the presupposition that there is any kind of objective truth to the question of “Are viruses alive?” The word “alive” (regardless of what language you speak) is something that has been invented. The word was created to describe things that were observed. The word is also much older than any observations of the microscopic world. The only underlying truths are those which we seek to describe with the word.

What this means is that the word “alive” isn’t necessarily equipped to deal with elements of that miniature world. Without knowledge of things like viruses, how could we have created vocabulary guaranteed to properly account for them? And that is the core of this entry. Words are brilliantly useful for describing what we observe, but we must take great care that we not mistake those words themselves for a greater truth than what we use them to describe.

If you’re fighting over something like whether viruses are alive? You’re probably having an argument over what you think the word “alive” should mean, rather than whether the virus itself has any kind of particular quality, which can be settled by simply examining it.

To use an old metaphor: Do not confuse a map with the territory it looks to describe. If they differ, the map is the one that is wrong.