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What we call things and where we draw the line between one class of things and another depend upon the interests we have and the purposes of the clas… - S. I. Hayakawa
" "What we call things and where we draw the line between one class of things and another depend upon the interests we have and the purposes of the classification. For example, animals are classified in one way by the meat industry, in a different way by the leather industry, in another different way by the fur industry, and in a still different way by the biologist. None of these classifications is any more final than any of the others; each of them is useful for its purpose.
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About S. I. Hayakawa
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (July 18, 1906 – February 27, 1992) was a Canadian-born American academic and political figure. He was an English professor, served as president of San Francisco State University and then a United States Senator from California from 1977 to 1983.
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Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa
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Additional quotes by S. I. Hayakawa
Of all forms of symbolism, language is the most highly developed, most subtle, and most complicated. It has been pointed out that human beings, by agreement, can make anything stand for anything. Now, human beings have agreed, in the course of centuries of mutual dependency, to let the various noises that they can produce <span style="color:green" title="with their lungs, throats, tongues, teeth, and lips systematically">[...] stand for specified happenings in their nervous systems. We call that system of agreements language. For example, we who speak English have been so trained that, when our nervous systems register the presence of a certain kind of animal, we may make the following noise: "That's a cat." Anyone hearing us expects to find that, by looking in the same direction, he will experience a similar event in his nervous system -- one that will lead him to make an almost identical noise. Again, we have been so trained that when we are conscious of wanting food, we make the noise "I'm hungry." </SPAN>
Whether he realizes it or not, however, Mr. Mets is affected every hour of his life not only by the words he hears and uses, but also by his unconscious assumptions about language. [...] Such unconscious assumptions determine the effect that words have on him -- which in turn determines the way he acts, whether wisely or foolishly. Words -- the way he uses them and the way he takes them when spoken by others -- largely shape his beliefs, his prejudices, his ideals, his aspirations. They constitute the moral and intellectual atmosphere in which he lives -- in short, his semantic environment.
The relation between language and thought are discussed in Stuart Chase, Power of words (1954), especially Chapter 10; the important sourcebooks in this area are Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 4th ed. (1958), and John B. Carroll, ed., Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956).
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