Beyond Words: 4 Books That Ask Whether Language Shapes Reality
Four very different books ask a surprisingly similar question: does language merely describe reality, or does it help shape how minds experience it? From Orwell's Newspeak and Ted Chiang's alien language to Miéville's Ariekei and Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphors, each work approaches the boundary between words and thought differently. Look beyond language, however, and an even bigger conversation emerges about perception, truth, power, consciousness, time, identity, and the difficulty