Reading Comprehension

PT108 · S1 · P4 · Q23 What is Language

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What it means to “explain” something in science often comes down to the application of mathematics.

Passage Summary

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Topic

The relationship between mathematical language and scientific explanation; how language shapes scientific knowledge.

Framework

Present Debate (with some Highlight Noteworthy)

Main Point

The way science “explains” the world through mathematics depends on ongoing debates about whether language (including math) truly reflects reality or is simply a matter of convention, and though many in science accept useful mathematical statements as true, it's unclear what function these statements really serve if they don't inherently correspond to the world. ( - Paragraph 2. Also see final lines of P4.)

P1: Introducing Math as Scientific Explanation

Some people think that mathematics, like language, is just a tool with internal rules, and when science "explains" something, it’s about finding accurate mathematical descriptions.

P2: The Language vs. Reality Debate

There's a big debate among linguists: does language (and by extension math in science) truly match up with real things, making knowledge solid? Or is it merely a set of conventions, making knowledge uncertain?

23.

Which one of the following statements, if true, lends the most support to the view that language has an essential correspondence to the things it describes?

Correct
The categories of physical objects
Why this is right
This is supporting that language is a more universal, solid, reliable commodity. People who developed language separately (they each invented their own words to correspond to things) ended up making remarkably similar categories of objects. That makes it sound like there's something fundamental / inherent / innate about how we're generating language to correspond with things. If language had some relative, inexact, purely customary relationship to things, then we'd expect different languages to be very different, since they're not tethered to the common things being described in any essential way. But if isolated cultures are using language in similar ways to describe the same things, then it seems like certain things have some essence about them that corresponds to certain language.
Skill tested: Strengthen · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
69% picked this
The categories of physical objects
Too Weak: derives from the first
This one is decent, but since the two languages are connected (one derives from the other), it's less compelling that similarities between them are essential to the things the languages describe. The people who think language is a random, arbitrary, culture-by-culture decision with no fixed connection to things, would say, "Of course the 2nd culture had similar language. That's not because language has an essential connection to things. It's because the 2nd culture derived its language from the 1st culture, so they were just using very similar, but nonetheless random / arbitrary, language."
5% picked this
The categories of physical objects
No Impact: same language
The fact that speakers of the same language have similar categories for physical objects isn't really going to help us choose a side in the debate. We know that speakers of the same language will have similar words / thoughts / categories, but is that because those words have an essential connection to things or just because these speakers are both making use of the same random, arbitrary, agreed-upon conventions of their language?
11% picked this
The sentence structures of languages
No Impact: sentence structure
This is somewhat tempting because it's also pointing to something universal across many languages. However, "sentence structure" is drifting from what the debate is all about. We're supposed to be figuring out whether "language corresponds in some essential way to objects and behavior". Sentence structure is more about grammar and logic, but this debate is about words and what objects they refer to. Sentence structure doesn't have that sort of property of a symbol and the thing it refers to. Sentence structure is more the rules for how you can organize symbols within a given language to output grammatically complete ideas. But it doesn't relate to the topic of whether the words that get chosen to put into a given sentence structure are words that have some essential or merely agreed-upon connection to an object or action.
2% picked this
Native speakers of many languages
No Impact: believe
LSAT does not have much respect for "beliefs", when we're trying to ascertain actual factual truth. The fact that native speakers believe their language corresponds in an essential way is very weak support for the idea that it really does correspond in an essential way. We can say that speakers of many languages think that there is an afterlife. That's not evidence supporting that there actually is an afterlife. That's just an opinion.
13% picked this

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