Language and world view

The article touches upon the linguistic aspect of the work devoted to modeling the consciousness of a rational being. Language is considered as one of the constituent parts of the display of the world in consciousness. A variant of the division of language into components is proposed, which allows you to create a model of consciousness in the form of a real structure.

Let us try to answer the question: “What is language for, and what is its role in the life of a rational being.”

This question arose in the process of modeling the consciousness of a rational being. The source of the concepts on which the model was built was a man. Man is a social being, and his vital activity is inextricably linked with language.

In the course of constructing a model of consciousness of the rational being, the role of language in the process of thinking became clear. If we proceed from the assumption that the concepts described in the work are applicable not only to the model, but also true to humans, then we can make the assumption that the main role of the language is not so much the function of communication between intelligent beings, but mapping of the world in the mind of the rational being (person). The communicative function of a language determines such a property as uniformity.

The unification of language, for a certain group of creatures, is a factor that forms the society of these creatures. The formation of society has contributed to the increased survival of individuals in the group thanks to the opportunity to exchange individual experiences and coordinate joint actions. The exchange of experience and the ability to keep it either in memory or using records opened up a unique opportunity for creatures with intelligence, less often to repeat the mistakes made earlier and not to waste time and effort on discovering what has already been discovered.

However, the property of uniformity of language is not necessarily a necessary condition for the being to be reasonable. The work allows us to imagine a hypothetical case when a certain creature created or arising independently as a result of the game of nature, deprived of the opportunity to communicate with other intelligent beings, living, in comparison with the life of an individual, for a long time, possessing an information processing apparatus coming from the outside world with the appropriate apparatus , described in [2], will be able, in the course of his life, by assigning arbitrary designations to objects and relationships that have come to his attention for the first time, accumulating generalizations, creating amb a unique language display information from the surrounding world. Such a creature, possessing it a powerful forecasting mechanism and a large memory, may slowly but surely be able to accumulate knowledge to a level comparable to the amount of knowledge accumulated by mankind. Do not recognize such a being reasonable - it is impossible. Perhaps the history of the language of a person was as follows.

At a time when human ancestors did not communicate with each other using language, each of these creatures formed their own, individual mapping of the world in their minds. The confluence of circumstances predetermined the fact that those individuals who were united in groups and acted together received an advantage in survival. Joint actions led to the fact that human ancestors began to use unified signs (words) to identify objects of the surrounding world and relations of objects. Over time, in this way, a stable set of characters appeared, which is called language and which can, with good reason, be called a unified means of displaying the surrounding world in the minds of a group of people.

Before proceeding to the part in which an attempt will be made to present the language in the form of structures that allow to translate the provisions described in the work in the form of a real construction, I will cite several fundamental concepts of some linguistic schools that were used in this work.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 -1913) was the first linguist to draw attention to the distinction between speech and language. According to Saussure, language is a grammatical system and a dictionary. This is an inventory of language tools. A kind of code. Speech means the act by which an individual uses the language to express his thoughts.

In the book "Essay on the science of language" (1883), Nikolai Vyacheslavovich Krushevsky (1851 - 1887) long before Saussure stated that "the word is a sign of a thing" and that "language is nothing but a sign system." The same fundamental position was maintained by the Prague linguistic circle (founded in 1926). "The Prague School, taking the position of the landmark character of the language, insisted on the need to consider attitudes towards the surrounding reality, that is, the reality that the sign reflects.".

Philip Fedorovich Fortunatov (1848 - 1914) considered language as a collection of words and phrases. "A language consists of words that, with the exception of a few, come together in combinations in judgments, in sentences; therefore, in words of language we must distinguish between individual words and words in their combinations in thinking, and therefore in speech, in sentences" .

Wilhelm Humboldt (1767 - 1835) hoped to penetrate the mystery of language as a means of educating thoughts through a comparative analysis of factual compilation and analysis of other functions reflecting the external world in various languages. This aspiration of Humboldt to understand the deep connection between language and thinking echoes the concept put forward by Alexander Afanasyevich Potebnia (1835 - 1891). Potebnya argued that language is a means not to express a ready-made thought, but to create it.

The approach of correlating the language and intellectual activity of a rational creature (work), which is offered to your attention, allows you to look at all existing languages, as well as at languages ​​that a person can learn as they become acquainted with other intelligent creatures (for example, dolphins) from a general position. In various languages, it is possible to display the world around us in various ways, however, if the activity of a rational being obeys the concepts described in [2], then the language should provide the following functional capabilities for mechanisms performing intellectual activity:

• the ability to express everything that happens in the world in the form of facts (statements);
• the ability to link the facts (statements) dependencies (causality and adequacy).

The words "fact" and "statement" here means constructions of signs that reflect descriptions of elements and interrelations of elements of the surrounding world.

Consider the question of how to display elements of the surrounding world in the model. Solve the question of the designation of elements. We will assume that to each element of the external world, be it an object, an action, a property, ... one can always put its identifying sign in correspondence. Elements of the external world can be reduced to two classes:

• objects;
• relations.

As a definition, these classes can offer the following. The class of objects includes signs that identify the material objects of the external world. Signs identifying the relations of objects of the external world, which are given to the type of object, also fall into this class.

The class of relations includes signs identifying the relations of objects of the material world, the relations of the relations given, and unary relations (a relationship attributed to only one object). For example.

Jack built a house. (object - Jack, object - house, attitude - built)

Construction is completed. (the given object is a construction, the relation is completed)

Beautiful girl. (object - a girl, unary relationship - beautiful)

Analysis of the words that make up the language leads to the identification of signs and structures (sets of characters), which can be divided as follows.

1. Signs reflecting the elements of the surrounding world. These include objects and relationships of objects around the world. Masha, beauty, walked ...
2. Signs correlated with generalizations of the elements of the surrounding world. These include the generalization of objects and the generalization of relations. The man, the property, moved ...
3. Constructs identifying some complete relationship. These designs correspond to the facts. In the morning the sun was shining.
4. Signs and constructions correlated with the relations of statements and facts among themselves. (causality, equivalence, similarity, temporality, ...) In the morning the sun was shining, so the dew on the grass dried up.

(in the morning the sun was shining) is a fact;

(the dew on the grass has dried up) is a fact;

(therefore) - causal relationship linking two facts.

The division of the language into the listed parts allows you to look at the question of the representation of the world in the mind of an intelligent being from a generalizing position.

The four listed elements of the meaning of the surrounding world can be attributed not only to the spoken language (verbal channel of communication with the outside world), but also to other channels of interaction of the sentient being with the surrounding world (sight, smell, tactile influences, ...). The obvious assumption suggests that the objects of the external world and their relations are displayed in the mind of the rational being in the form of sets of signs corresponding to different channels of communication with the external world. The display of the object "bee", for example, has signs in the form of facts presented in verbal form, signs showing the banding of its abdomen, obtained with the help of sight, signs showing buzzing, ... The mechanism that ensures the interaction of a rational creature with its surrounding world part of it is the driver of predictions of the current situation.

The work deals only with signs of the verbal channel of communication with the outside world. However, it can be assumed that in building a forecast for the development of a situation, a chain of related facts is formed in the forecast branches using all types of signs (corresponding to all communication channels with the outside world). Depending on individual experience, the process of thinking uses the type of causal dependencies of that channel of communication with the outside world, which to a greater extent contributed to the formation of corresponding generalizations and their connections. If you observe people, you can see that some people mostly think in words, some in pictures, and some people use images in their thinking, that is, information of various kinds about the subject of thinking.