The Overshadowing Effect of Language

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The overshadowing effect, i am sure if you mention that term, but from the section where i talk about this in the book, there's more recent work about verbal overshadowing. So experiments would include seeing a robbery. You watch a video of bank robbery, and you see the perpetrator's face. And with one group of people in the experiment, you are asked to describe the purpose trators face as accurately as you can. The other group who were told, yer, this is a dumb bell, would make the line straighter than it was in the original drawing,. so theyre clearly being affected by the way in which language had kind of got them to construe what they

We describe the world using language — we can’t help it. And we all know that ordinary language is an imperfect way of communicating rigorous scientific statements, but sometimes it’s the best we can do. Linguist N.J. Enfield argues that the difficulties run more deeply than we might ordinarily suppose. We use language as a descriptive tool, but its origins are found in more social practices — communicating with others to express our feelings and persuade them to agree with us. As such, the very structure of language itself reflects these social purposes, and we have to be careful not to think it provides an unfiltered picture of reality.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

N.J. Enfield received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Melbourne. He is currently a professor of linguistics and Director of the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney. His recent book is Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.