Tag: language

4.2 Sentiment

What one perceives from the symbols of language needs to be focused, and it is how one’s mind recognise the expressions. Sentiment is related to how persons understand expressions. There would be necessity to care about the appearance and form of expression to be used among persons, but caring about the form of expression with excessive attention would put too much focus on it, and deploying only the care of appearance into society doesn’t solve the issues completely.

Over the history of language, it became less “passioned” and focused on “reason”, exactness, and clarity(1). The “progress” of “the lettered languages” results in the “progress” of “the grammar and the logic”, they also become “cold” and “monotone”(2).

From music to language, the former is more abstract and the latter focuses on the small meaning, the current human beings became able to identify the small parts. Abstractness has more adaptability. Music is more abstract than language. Music is abundance of information. It enriches the sentimentality. There are what are difficult to be speechable, but felt by persons.

The concept of sentiment becomes more important to think about the interaction with others. The globalised world enabled to interact with people of different backgrounds, and sometimes not necessarily we share each other the context of people we interact, which includes the custom, religion, ideology, and others. Sentiment is a concept worth discussing, in order to understand each other in our deeper part as I don’t think it is possible to understand enough the cases of different custom, religion, ideology, and so on to communicate with others given the limit of time in our life. That is to say that we need to cultivate the deeper sphere of ourselves that can go beyond the differences which could cause conflict among different groups of people. Sentiment is a primary aspect of human beings profoundly rooted in ourselves.

Apart from the environmental factors such as policies in society, I regard how one understands an expression and why one expresses hate speech as being related to one’s internal state within oneself. By cultivating the internal aspect of oneself, I try to tackle the problem of hate speech. This is the basis of referring to the concept of sentiment which is the internal aspect of oneself and if sentiment is developed I presume it is less likely for hate speech to occur as those who with the developed sentiment take into consideration within oneself what the receiver of the expression would feel.

Around 19th and 20th centuries “are most easily understood not as a period of deepening understanding of the nature of rationality or of morality, but rather as one in which there occurred an astonishingly rapid progress of sentiments, in which it has become much easier for us to be moved to action by sad and sentimental stories”(3). This sentiment lets people contemplate from others’ perspectives, and they think of others’ circumstances in their standpoints. As of the middle of 19th century, “We are entering into an order of things in which justice will again be the primary virtue; grounded as before on equal, but now also on sympathetic association; having its root no longer in the instinct of equals for self-protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between them”(4).

The kind of sentimental education is as follows. This kind of education uses a story that puts a person to the situation of others and it lets them to imagine what others would feel in the circumstance. In his writing, Richard Rorty described that “to answer the much more frequently posed question ‘Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?’”(5), “A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story that begins, ‘Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers,’ or ‘Because she might become your daughter-in-law,’ or ‘Because her mother would grieve for her.’”(6). This type of sentimental stories puts the person, in the case above the person who asked the first question, into taking into account the situations of others. The importance of “sentimental education” is that it “gets people of different kinds sufficiently well acquainted with one another that they are less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human”(7). The growth of sentiment is expected to be, for example, from watching films which nourish empathy among persons. Stories are often what different episode focuses on different person. It enables viewers to be in the different viewpoint which the featured person is put in. This letting people to be in the place of another is to lessen the solid standpoint of oneself.

Sentimental education is related to the development of persons in society whose life is too limited to understand the different cultures and customs of other groups of people. Even though persons are mortal, societal architecture which could foster the growing of persons could contribute to the better society where less expression of hatred occurs. Also having the viewpoints of different persons are useful to make a more sensible judgement than having only one. People’s sentiment plays a supplementary role to buffer the intensity of conflicts among people which unshared information causes. It is to lessen the tension among people.

One of the roles of arts is to develop sentimentality in oneself. At least a certain people need to have the grown sentimentality which makes enough to overcome the hardships. Anime or novels are type of works which foster the development of sentiment. The inward of oneself can surpass the reality, and brings benefits such as resilience to society.

With regard to the scale of population, sentiment works to maintain community. If the community gets larger and so do their population, the complexity increases. The intervention of sentimental education creates the core of compassion. In the larger society, people are not much aware of the detailed situations of some group as the number of groups in a community also increased. The intervention is more required in larger community than smaller where one’s ability to picture the situations of others works relatively easier since the difference of circumstances is more limited. The complexity is related to the number of agents in a community, and the community’s paths of information.

The form of language could exhibit its beauty to the world, however the phenomenon of promoting political correctness at the beginning of 21st century seems that it is promoted to avoid the conflicts among people stemming from the appearance of words which is offensive. It narrows the sphere in which the kinds of words are acceptable. Not only abusive words, words of certain connotation which has possibility of being perceived as politically incorrect are also refrained from being used. How people perceive is related to how people use words including political correctness. Sentimentality is a way to expand the sphere of language to deal with the narrowness of the speech sphere.

Speaker needs to think of how it would be perceived by audience in the meantime audience think of the context in which speaker expressed that way. Sentimentality works towards both speaker and listener and other audience: the first mentioned is to imagine how one’s expression influences towards listener and other audience in society; the second is to understand the essential part of expression not being just influenced by the superficial meaning of the expression one is facing, what is the core of the expression; the third is related to how other people in the community react to a certain expression, which is a large part in how the expression is perceived by the community. What cultivation of sentimentality means is that it creates the soil on which one perceives things in the world, that is to say the preliminary attachment of information before one perceives symbols. When one sees the discriminatory expression by others, the preattached information which grows sentiment in oneself affects the position one takes to that behaviour. It is a perspective of what peoples have in common before seeing expression, and sentimentality could be the one. At the moment one sees the symbols written by others, the symbols themselves have vast amount of discarded information such as what factors led them to write those on the material. The viewers with enriched sentimentality perceive it with one’s sentimentality by referring to the present social situations or possible backgrounds.

Combined with the development of sentiment in oneself, the principle of the Golden Rule is worth looking at. The Rule suggests that one should “treat others as you would like to be treated”(8). The Rule encourages people to think about their own actions in the perspective of others. The Golden Rule has practical aspect which is closer to lives of persons. Apart from the theories which are abundant with jargon, the Golden Rule is closer with its practical aspect. Against this Rule, although one may claim that I don’t feel annoyed by the way I treat you, even if one doesn’t feel annoyed, one should take into consideration that another presumably would feel annoyed. Understanding the probability of others feeling offended is an element to keep in mind.

In terms of hate speech, understanding the position of persons who receive hate speech is necessary for people to understand its negativity. Even if we intensify the regulation in the public space, for example to implement the laws that are to give stricter penalties to those who did hate speech or erase more eagerly hate speech from the walls in public space as well as on online platforms while focusing on the regulation, this type of regulation doesn’t guarantee the disappearance of hate speech in society. It just tried to make it disappear from visible space, but hate would just move to different places and would remain in less visible places such less popular online sites. This signifies the importance of understanding the negativity of hate speech more profoundly in one’s mind. Given this nature, the importance of the development in one’s mind is emphasised.

If adding more words to the topic of hate speech, apart from the cases that it is obvious to everyone the speech is recognised as a hate to certain group of people, there would be cases that is not easy to recognise whether it is hate speech or not. Regarding expression, it is not always clear to distinguish it as hate or not. Cultivation of sentiment is to supplement the ambiguous nature of expression by nurturing the inner sphere in oneself.

Political correctness is a tendency that people are required to care about the form of language and use the correct words regarded by the world. If we look at the form of words, some words are not societally accepted at present though it was used decades ago.

(1) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1993), p.68.

(2) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1993), p.79.

(3) Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.185.

(4) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and The Subjection of Women (London: Penguin, 2006), p.180.

(5) Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.185.

(6) Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.185.

(7) Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 176.

(8) François Héran, Lettre aux professeurs sur la liberté d’expression, (Paris: La Découverte, 2021), p.171.

3.2.2 Context

Looking at objects from different context is often seen. One of them is that in humanities, people reinterpret the old works written by authors who wrote them in different social context. Even, to quote some passage from other authors’ works are to pull the sentences, and often context, of another and to connect it to the writing of one’s own.

The difference of language is not limited to the case of, for example, English and French. It also includes the case that even if they both speak English, if what they have in their background is different what they mean by using the same kind of words is different. Word is a box in which one can put the meaning into it.

The difference of context can be explained by the plus and quus functions. These functions were explained by Kripke. He described that a person, who has “never performed” the “computation” of “68+57” but has computed others in the past whose “numbers smaller than 57”, responded the answer of “68+57” is “125”(3). He meets another person who claims that the answer “should have been ‘5’!”, and suggests the misinterpretation(4).

Context changes over time in terms of social surroundings including norms, technology, and the changing characters of persons.

Depending on context, the meaning of a word changes.

Apart from the societal view, in individual view, context partly consists of one’s philosophy. As one reread the same book which they have read before, they may notice a new finding which they haven’t got in the previous reading because of their changing character and thoughts over time. Also, one can point out the wrong of another, the person told can recognise it but may not fully understand at the moment in their mind and may understand when their surroundings changed.

Some people come to become stubborn when getting older that is because they are surrounded by solid context from their past experiences. Their views are more fixed than when they were younger, having more factors that underpin them.

People do not talk to the person in front of them especially when they first meet. They talk with people of similar category they have met before. Categorisation and what is required to be said is processed in themselves. People change what they talk, imagining what is in necessity there. That is to say that they presuppose those who listen to it. Humour is in part what kind of speech you make towards a given context.

Whether one recognise it is a lie or not depends on the circumstance. Lying is often perceived negatively, however in some case it also is recognised as not merely negative, that is to say whose case is not able to be just condemned as the action of lying. Lying has arbitrariness in the expression. It is not simple failure or success, lying is different. Deception is intendedly to play different linguistic game between them. In addition, whether what one talked is perceived as arrogant or not depends on what the receiver thinks.

Take the meaning of words superficially, and claim that what it is written becomes an excuse in some cases. It attempts to take advantage of literal sense. The word “literally” is used because people often do not use the word literally.

In the societal perspective, a case is that interpretation of constitution changes depending on the time it is read. Around constitutional issue, in the late 18th century in which US needed to abolish the Articles of Confederation to have the new Constitution in place, their basis on that move was what’s written in the Declaration of Independence that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness”(1). The “rule was valid not because it was found in some authoritative rule book, but because it had become taken for granted by the Framers’ generation. Not by everybody, but by enough”(2). This rule is not likely to be accepted as valid in a different age, and demonstrates the relationship with social surrounding.

As social surroundings change, technological advancement such as computer enabled the rapid spread of information from one place to another. It can be spread in a moment, and peoples’ expressions are abundant in the lives of persons.

The negative aspects also need to be paid attention to. The problem of disinformation is one of them, which is also a problem of informational structure of how to manage the flows of information on the platforms. Besides, when speech is globalised, peoples of different contexts face each other. Compared with the previous ages, it is more likely for different peoples to interact each other with less context shared. It in some cases is beneficial to the development of some intelligence as such that scientific discovery can be shared rapidly in a global world through the communication tools, though some conflicts also arise.

While I feel that it is necessary to spend time in updating the policies put in place in our community, even if we (try to) erase hate speech from public places such as the walls that we see in a city or town, the prejudices or hate which at least partly are the cause of hate speech doesn’t get disappeared from society. In this respect too, the necessity to look at the inner part of oneself to cultivate their compassion towards others is required. Especially, the feeling of what if I were in that position is an essence for having this value in society.

The true creates the context. A true philosopher makes people aware of the important ideas or perspectives in their society, some of which they were even not aware of. Then, they make a history of ideas.

Footnotes

(1) Lawrence Lessig, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp.12-13.

(2) Lawrence Lessig, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p.14.

(3) Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1982), p.8.

(4) Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1982), pp.8-9.

3.2.1 Context

What I would like to emphasise is that the difference of context or background among different groups of people causes the confrontation in a society. When it comes to the debates around the topic of freedom of expression, I do believe that the context of expression is what should be paid attention to more. In order to progress the debates in this domain, I make my argument on the context of expression. That is because what people perceive from an expression differs, if they have different backgrounds. In other words, if context differs, even if the expression is the same, what people perceive from the expression could differ. Besides, even if both persons claim the same argument, if what each experienced in their life is different, it could be different. This is a complex aspect of expression, but it is worth being taken into account provided that this aspect of expression causes tension among different groups of people in a society.

In a society of large population, there is a variety of people with different background. Of the limited time one has spent, they are not likely to imagine all the patterns of situation which persons in the same community face. Even the number of people crossing boundary of nation-states is enormous. In that situation, regarding the interpretation of an object, it could vary by each person. The community of larger scale is difficult to maintain compared with the smaller one as in the larger community it is more likely that what each person believes could differ and they often organise their own group that they share the same purpose, and others organise their own groups that the purposes are different.

Those groups could in some extreme cases are going to be a divide in a national scale. One of the particularly important differences among people is what happiness means to each member of the community. Some would seek the wealth of capital that maximises their happiness with abundant materials in their life, others would not feel happiness from that type of wealth and they rather feel happy when they spend their time in calmer way such as being surrounded by nature. In addition, when community is larger, there are different groups of people with different background emerges, these are represented by educational, geographical background. The latter geographical background means that the difference of geography has different culture in one’s background. Some culture is tied with the geographical factors such as abundance of nature or what has happened in a particular place and how it affected in the region over time and how the effect remains today. Where one was raised and spent his life so far, and that is sort of time and place matter affects the context in which one lives. Plus, the different living standards, that is different living conditions, such as the income would little by little differentiate the interests of people living in the same nation-state. There are different units as a globe, a continent, a nation-state, a province, etc. It depends on to what extent they would like to govern the region, but if it gets larger the more difficult to implement a kind of law which has legal and illegal distinction given the differences in each scale of community.

It would be much easier to refrain from having conflicts if the community is small and homogenous as it is with the people seeking the similar interests. However as the world is globalised in a sense that development of transportation system and information became available to huge number of people living on the earth and securing the freedom to choose the way they want to live, at least some in the world moves to the direction that the flow of persons into other communities and diversity in a community needs to be tolerated rather than enclosing the communities.

In the complex world where a vast number of persons look at the same expression, it is viewed by those who have different contexts. When controversy occurs, the different contexts have been claimed by different peoples. Even if different context among people may cause conflict, the difference doesn’t justify the restriction on freedom. It is because in ultimate sense every individual has different context of their own, and nobody is able to express if that restriction is put in place.

Around dispute on freedom of expression, it often seems that there’s group of people who feels uncomfortable by the expressions of another group. The latter group claims that they have their right or freedom to express it. These disputes are often seen in the topic of belief. There’s a different degree of importance in one’s life that some may have deeply been rooted in person’s identity and others are less related. If an emperor of a country is who has been receiving beliefs from the public over the decades, it is more likely to cause anger when some expression hurts the feelings of the public.

Even if the publisher claims the freedom of expression on the one hand, the perception or opinion of another is different, and it often seems that each side has the different context. Fundamentally, the contexts of persons are different depending on them as each has different experience in their life linked with when and how one has spent their life so far. It has inevitably to do with the physical world in which one has lived. The geographic and timely factors are tied to oneself. This is what is related to the idea of the reality, people are in the different positions, that is why different views arise.

Paving the context is seen in art and museum. The curation of art in a museum is an important element in the exhibition as it is how the works are presented towards the audience. It is how they provide the context to the audience.

On sensitive issues such as the ones related to their history, the same opinion uttered by a person of one nationality is perceived differently if that is uttered by another person of different nationality.

3.1 Expression

People express their emotion, views, opinions, and so forth with their friends, parents, and others. Expressing at least in some cases removes the complexity of the world in human recognition. It emphasises some parts of the world, which are included in the expression, and others are not. It is key for the receiver how to perceive the expression whether they also think of the unexpressed parts to what extent.

Communication can tell another more than what one supposed to tell if another has more knowledge or imagination in it. When one talks about a certain thing, another could interpret the meaning different from what one had intended.

One of the important propositions in thinking about communication is the “notion of holistic proto-language” — the alarm calls of vervet monkeys, according to Alison Wray, “should be compared with complete messages rather than with individual words in human language”, and “holistic” means “no internal structure” and “never combined with any other vocalization to form a multi-component message”(1). Voice changes based on the sentiment that speaker feels(2).

Experience, or what people sensed in their life, fulfils words. It is often said that as people get older people get sympathetic. That is presumably because of the accumulation of experience in their life. Even if they watch a part of a film they can see their closer experience in it or can feel that situation more realistically.

People come to have the ability to use language. It is a matter of how people use their ability to distinguish. It is to tell the difference. Adding words in a publication is to limit the context in general, however using abstract words sometimes opens up the context.

When it comes to languages such as English, they tend to precisely specify the objects that it refers to and a sentence can be divided into further smaller parts.

Letters such as A of alphabet have generality(3). The letter A “of the Phoenician alphabet” “plausibly” comes from “a head of ox”, later it became generalised to “represent” the widest reach of the sound(4). This generality makes possible that different persons communicate via letters. At the standpoint of using the medium, it is possible to communicate, however in more profound sense, what persons interpret from them can differ.

The information also tries to be borderless by translation. The threshold became lower but previously it was chosen by those who engage in translation and who speak different languages by which information cross border.

To write a larger volume of texts takes time, compared with the short text of 200 words, for instance. A long text, which is a book of 200 pages, is presumably written by an author who was at their desk for many hours to write a book, before publishing as a book it in addition goes through the publishing company and its editor. In contrast, a shorter text can be written without careful consideration and it may be spent just a few minutes to be published, or it may be written by spending a few hours during which the author spent their time in choosing the words carefully. By having the Internet available, barriers to send/receive a writing became removed.

Being unable to use metaphor makes expression poor. And where they cannot make their expression in long length, they would have to shorten their expression though they may be aware that it could be interpreted in a variety of ways.

Nuance of an expression is delicate. Manipulate it to spread in a negative way or it was spread by accident in a negative way happens. In the age where rapid spread of information is possible by for example social media, the spread of the sort described above is instantly possible.

If words they encounter are difficult to understand, they don’t try to care about the order of words unless they are intellectual or enthusiastic. The use of words, how it is constructed sometimes are looked with attention unconsciously or consciously.

In typical cases, most people cannot endure the moment that one talks to another person, but the latter in conversation doesn’t respond to them. The conversation from another triggers one to respond to. In case of writing, this binding is weaker as it can be remote or distant.

There is a variety of aspects which arise from speech and expression, it includes historical revisionism. In the pandemic started worldwide around 2020, a negative phenomenon of information called infodemic took place, and the years around then more particularly in US context, how to deal with conspiracy was in dispute as well. Dating back further, in 2016, the word post-truth was in trend, and Oxford Dictionaries recognised it “as its 2016 international word of the year”(5).

As regards the privacy of persons, there are magazines which publish the photos or articles on the private life of those who are well known to the public. Apart from the misconducts, and the similar sort of wrongdoings, revealing the private aspect of persons even if their professions are publicly visible ones undermine the privacy of those targeted people.

With regard to the ethics of persons, even if one put in emphasis one’s freedom, how to speak and present needs to be taken into consideration with one’s ethics. If works supposed to be presented is likely to have inflammatory aspect, whether it will really work for the public good needs to be discussed in advance.

Verbal attack on dignity of others by expression causes a conflict among peoples. Enemy of dignity is, as literally means, perceived by recipient as what they express offends their dignity. When receiver of the expression felt their dignity is offended, unless they are convinced by the explanation of expressor that it is not intended so, it has the risk of dividing groups of people, and it would be better for the expressor to think about what kind of public benefit it has. In other cases, for example, media often publish the information which is not favourable to authorities. However, it endeavours to have the public benefits in it and it is perceived often as an opponent of argument.

By expression, people can damage the dignity. As a supplementary framework, offending dignity is judged as negative as people of different contexts collide. In this sense, despots should not oppress the citizens as it offends the dignity. Racial discrimination that causes unfair judgement on certain groups of people is not tolerable.

Footnotes

(1) Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, first Harvard University Press paperback ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.109. Steven Mithen mentioned the concept of holistic proto-language by Alison Wray.

(2) This sentence is written by being influenced by p.102 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1993).

(3) Henri Bergson, Histoire de l’idée de temps: Cours au Collège de France 1902-1903 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016). Particularly p.38.

(4) Henri Bergson, Histoire de l’idée de temps: Cours au Collège de France 1902-1903 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016). Particularly p.38.

(5) ”Post-truth’ declared word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries’, BBC, published 16 November 2016, accessed May 15, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37995600. The original text is bold, which is removed in this writing.