Status Updates From Language vs. Reality: Why L...

faced with a complex situation in real life, we often have trouble figuring out what is going on at all.Framing isn’t just useful for influencing people.It is necessary for our own sense making.Framing is a tool that creates an interpretation of reality, that allows 2 evaluate it, reason about it, & coordinate around it.it is often only when we describe a situation in words we feel we know what is happening at all.

2/2 If you are aware and critical of what language is doing to you and for you as you process it—for example, if you are reading a version of the news that you do not agree with—then you are not simply going to be putty in the hands of language…One might say that a language predisposes us to think certain things, but perhaps its main effect is in causing us not to think certain things.

1/2 People are not mechanically coerced by language to think and act in certain ways. You can be influenced by language, as we’ve seen. But you are more likely to be influenced by language in these Whorfian ways if you uncritically accept the version of events that language happens to present—in other words, if you are not paying attention.

When you see something and then name it, by the very act giving it a name, you are stripping out information from your own perception of what you experienced. You are doing literally every time you speak.