'Language vs. Reality' with Nick Enfield

·1 hr 11 min·5 clips

Two parachutists land in enemy territory and must find each other without communication, relying on a single bridge as a Schelling point.

Host Iona Italia introduces Nick Enfield, a linguistic anthropologist and professor at Sydney University, to discuss his book 'Language Versus Reality.' Enfield begins by explaining language as a coordination tool, drawing on economist Thomas Schelling's concept of Schelling points, like two parachutists meeting at a bridge without communication. He emphasizes that language's primary function is to influence and coordinate with others, not just convey information. Examples include the word 'spoon' serving practical purposes in social interaction and Tangram experiments showing how descriptions become economical over time. Enfield delves into verbal overshadowing, where using language to describe experiences like faces can overwrite memory, making eyewitness accounts less reliable. He contrasts brute reality, such as physical facts, with social reality, like ownership created through language, citing philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe's potato example. The discussion explores how language categories are shaped by perceptual distinctions, like walking versus running, and social needs, such as kinship terms in different cultures. Enfield highlights how languages force or avoid distinctions, like gender in German or English pronouns. The episode shifts to narrative, with Enfield analyzing stories as tools for social glue and cognitive simulation, referencing the high rate of fictional murders compared to real life. He describes stories as having surface and deep goals, akin to Hollywood screenplays, and discusses why we enjoy adverse narratives as excitement without danger. Enfield concludes by warning that language can act as 'off-switches for the mind,' encouraging mindfulness to avoid thought-terminating categories, especially in scientific inquiry.

As heard by us

A measured conversation on how language narrows reality while helping create the social world.

Language comes through here as the shared tool that lets people live together, while also narrowing the world to what can be said. In conversation with Nick Enfield, Iona Italia brings out the difference between brute reality, which words can only partly catch, and social…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play when you want to test how much of reality survives the trip into language.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Quillette Podcast