Smith’s Language as Classifier of Consciousness
Philosopher Barry Smith states that while we think of consciousness as “moments of experience,” the way we capture what's similar or different in our experiences over time is via language.
Verified*
Barry Smith
Philosopher
Barry C. Smith is a British philosopher and director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London. He co-directs the Centre for the Study of the Senses and has presented BBC programs on the brain.
Key Takeaways
Core Claim
Language helps us group, compare, and communicate our conscious experiences across time.
How It Works
By labeling and categorizing, language structures how we perceive and organize the world.
Distinguishing Idea
Losing words can fragment perception, suggesting language partly shapes consciousness itself.
Smith’s Language as Classifier of Consciousness
Philosopher Barry Smith states that while we think of consciousness as “moments of experience,” the way we capture what's similar or different in our experiences over time is via language. The “passing show,” he says, “gets assembled into larger, more meaningful groups when we use language to classify and categorize.” How do we do this? How do we connect up these bits of consciousness with something stable? How do we classify the world, not just our own experience, and communicable between experiencers? The answer is language, he says, which he calls a species-specific property of human beings. With language, we codify our own experience, represent the content of our own minds, and compare it with the contents of other minds (Smith, 2012).
Language and Classification of Experience
Distinguishing consciousness from language, Smith tells of someone who lost all of their words for fruit and vegetables, and only those words. They could use language normally and they had conscious awareness of fruits and vegetables, but they could not use, pronounce or even recognize words for fruit and vegetables. “It's as if a whole shelf of meanings had been taken away.”
Smith relates grades of consciousness to grades of language. One can lose the word for an object but can still recognize the object (a form of aphasia). Deeper, one can not only lose the word as a piece of sound representing an object, but also not recognize the object either and lose the whole meaning (a form of agnosia). He describes stroke patients who, for example, can't use the word “glove”. “What is that?” “Can't say.” Perhaps just the word is missing, because if they are asked, “Is there a glove on the table?”, they answer, “Yes.” But other stroke patients answer, “I've no idea.” And if you show them a glove and ask, “What's this for?”, they say, “I don't know, maybe it's for keeping coins.”
Smith suggests that words are ways that our visual consciousness categorizes and structures the world. And perhaps a deeper loss of language can lead to a dissolution of the very categories that we use to classify our perceptual experiences. So, it's not just that I can't name or categorize some object, but without language the actual conscious experience of that object is radically different. If so, language is responsible, at least in part, for organizing consciousness (Smith, 2012).
Tools
Cite