History
The idea that language and thought are intertwined goes back to the classical civilizations. Famously Plato argued against sophist thinkers such as Gorgias of Leontini, who held the physical world cannot be experienced except through language, this meant that for Gorgias the question of truth was dependent on aesthetic preferences or functional consequences. Contrary to this idea Plato held that the world consisted in pregiven eternal ideas and that language in order to be true should strive to reflect these ideas as accurately as possible. Following Plato, St. Augustine, for example, held the view that language was merely labels applied to already existing concepts, and this view remained prevalent throughout the Middle Ages. Others held the opinion that language was but a veil covering up the eternal truths hiding them from real human experience. For Immanuel Kant, language was but one of several tools used by humans to experience the world.
Read more about this topic: Linguistic Relativity
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)