Paradox and the Transformation of Language

I will be presenting a paper this spring at the Conference for Global Transformation, and although it is only tangentially about paradox, a tangent can be a useful place to visit. Here is a little tease, to whet your appetite. A link to the whole paper is at the end.

TRANSFORMING LANGUAGE TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD

Lisa Maroski

To the extent that language shapes our world and our thought, a new type of reality cannot rely on a language grounded in the old type of reality, the one that we are transforming. What would a new type of language be like? What types of underlying presuppositions would it have?

Would a transformed world look much like the one we have now? Would we refer to things the same way, use the same words, reason using the same principles developed thousands of years ago by Aristotle? Or would a transformed world look, sound, and feel different? Would we interact with it differently? To the extent that the world our senses perceive will always be “just what’s so,” but the world in which we be is shaped by our language, then perhaps to transform the world concomitantly requires us to transform the language we use to describe and create it. Otherwise, are we simply pouring transformed wine into old conceptual bottles?

To read the whole paper, click here.