Does this recent theory mean that words have actual meaning?

We share many common experiences and we can learn about others through modelling (see an good psychology text). The desire to share experiences using language is consistent with empathy. It does not suggest that words have inherent meaning, but that we seek to share language to share experiences.

@Dr_Lawrence – Okay – but the theory is that language originates, biologically, from empathy, not that it’s consistent with or even motivated by. Our biological ability to empathize produces language.

I think that is is possible that the ability to create language originates from empathy, but the actual words themselves are not universal, they are still arbitrary. Even some hand gestures, which probably came before words, can be similar or the same in different cultures, but I still believe that they came up arbitrarily in the first place. That’s why an African clicking language is different in sound and syntax and grammar than English and that is why some languages have far fewer words than other languages. The languages themselves are arbitray, but the ability to have language can indeed come directly from empathy (which is one of the many ways that humans learn).

Language isn’t arbitrary as it has developed from our shared thoughts and experiences. The number of possible human languages is nearly infinite but they can all be translated into each other reasonably satisfactorily. Words do have meaning. Animal languages however, such as that of dolphins, are quite different from ours and we are unable to understand a word as a dolphin’s view of the world is so different from ours.

@flutherother – The theory, though, is that all of that language is coming from the same empathic mechanism – perhaps even cross-species.

I like @Kardamom‘s answer. I don’t see any contradiction here.

I don’t get it. What’s the alternative to “actual” meaning? I see a lot of words here, and they sound like they are profound, but I don’t get it. Why do you place such significance in mirror neurons?

Certainly, communication can not happen if we cannot imagine what someone else is feeling. This is what happens with facial expressions and other body postures. If we assume the expression or posture of someone else, we can feel those feelings.

These things are pretty universal. Think of the “yuck” face. Think think of how you feel when you see someone smiling. These things have evolved with us. Being able to feel what someone else feels, or to believe you know what someone else feels confers a survival advantage, apparently.

It seems like you want to link a specific feeling to a specific word, but I don’t see how you jump to this conclusion. Feelings are feelings. Different groups of people can use different symbols for the same feeling. There is no inherent connection between any particular symbolic sound and any particular meaning.

There can be universal sounds, such as squeals of pain, or grunts of pleasure, but those sounds do not contain symbolic content. They are what they are. Feelings are what they are. Linking any particular sound or movement to any particular idea is still pretty random.

The only exceptions to that that I can think of now, are the words for mothers and fathers. Mama and papa or dada seem to occur in many many languages.

@iamthemob We intuitively know how other people feel and experience the world and we call this empathy. This is the instinctive level of communication that language is based upon. The colour I see when I look at grass is I believe the same colour that you see and we agree to call it green. There is no certainty here but we assume it to be true and it works nearly all of the time.

I can tell when my dog wants to go for a walk. I know the signs and this is a level of empathic communication without language. I can then create a word that we both understand; probably ‘walkies’ and we have the beginnings of language, though with dogs it will never develop much further.

The word is arbitrary, but the meaning is not and ‘walkies’ can be translated into a hundred languages that a dog will always understand.

The “empathic civilization” huh? Even more fascinating, on a sociological basis, how empathy, compassion and sympathy seem to have become synonymous. Nothing on how understanding an other, projecting one’s self upon him/her, might produce antipathy. Consciousness was supposed to lead to more precise and efficient discrimination, but it also produced self-consciousness which resulted in extreme skepticism, perspectivism, altruism, Marxism, democracy and all that crap. When one feels the weakness in an other, does he not associate it with his/her own? Now discrimination, consciousness of disparity, is deemed “evil”, making obliviousness the new enlightened state of – in irony – consciousness. Surrendering to the very mechanisms that made life and consciousness necessary, as a (re)action to it, has become a form of New Age pragmatism. Nihilism is now progress…a return, or a surrender to the inevitable uniformity of non-distinct, non-resisting, surrender.

@cackle – I believe you’re grossly overstating the case. Sociology as an academic or social scientific sphere is quickly loosing it’s relevance/coherence, it seems – but your points seem to indicate that at least socially/culturally there’s a calling for consensus of thought.

I don’t, however, see that there’s a mass movement against the concept of difference. How/where are you seeing this – and how does it result from this question?

You’ve been trained to associate certain word with certain activities. For those like you, the mere mention of the term “anarchy” evokes images of burning buildings, chains, and violence; discrimination evokes the images of cruelty. Yet a discriminating palate is a sensitive one. It has a more refined possibility of choice. What (s)he does with it is a different issue. This modern nihilistic trend towards non-distinction is characterized by a slandering of awareness. One must become blind, less conscious of diversity, otherwise one might be accused of bigotry, cruelty or closed-mindedness, in an ironic twist mirroring the twisting of hierarchies. An Orwellian nightmare: call stupidity “enlightenment”, label inebriation as a state of being, make the term relating to the very act of becoming conscious into a representation of human vanity and evil, and you’ve got a herd of sheeple.

@cackle – How do you know what the word “anarchy” evokes for me?

@cackle – I really do like that the above lines “You’ve been trained to associate” and “For those like you” indicate a generalization of attitudes (in addition to a whole lot of assumption based on…what?) which seems to run opposite to what seems to be an argument for attention to difference.

What is it, again, that you’re trying to get at – and how is it an extension from the question? (which, I don’t know if you read the links, is about a neurocognitive phenomenon).

I answered you twice and you still don’t get it? Good luck.

@cackle – Nope – because nothing in the initial discussion requires us to disregard difference – and particularly not a slandering or villainization of difference. You’re not saying who the “those like me” are – and why you predict “anarchy” means what you think I think it means – along with “those like me.”

You haven’t really answered anything once, let alone twice. Clarity would be appreciated…although it’s expected less and less…

Like I said, good luck.

@cackle – As I thought.

Many nouns refer to objects in the real world you can point at. We don’t need mirror neurons for those nouns. They are used for many verbs, though. As you said, watching another perform a task, such as drinking a cup of tea.