journal 2

2/23/2013

5 Comments

 
“By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in
solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and,
except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.”

• What is the
role of culture and language in the perceptual process? Given the partially
subjective nature of sense perception, how can different knowers ever agree on
what is perceived? Do people with different cultural or linguistic backgrounds
live, in some sense, in different worlds?
5 Comments
Zicong Gao
2/24/2013 09:20:05 am

How can the human live in the world for the whole life and communicate with each other, it is depend on the culture and language. So, in my opinion, the role of the culture and language in perceptual process is very important for human. Like people in the same country can perceived in the easy way. For example, in China, people in the restaurant, someone said “ it is too hot ”, the same culture of those people would perceived that he is means the food is too hot, but maybe the different culture an of other people would think he just fell that very hot and need to take off the clothes. So the perception of different culture and language is very important.

One more example, some country lack of the water, those people have a bath once a month, other country would feel them maybe is the habit of them and have a bad expression of them, but the truth is they lack of the water, so that would make the conflict of different country.

Different language would make the argument happened, also the different language still make friendly by each other. People perceived the “ love “ in different way because of the different culture. Some people think that to love just to show what his action meaning to let the lover feel the love, but some people would think that to say some language to express the love. This is the perceptual process of the culture and language.

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Le Minh Hoang (Bob)
2/24/2013 10:43:13 am

Culture and language are two of the very important factors in everyone’s perceptual process. Different people with different cultures and languages will have incongruent perceptions. For example, western societies believe that God created the world while eastern people do not believe so. This difference is caused by the different religions and cultures of the two societies.
Language also plays a great role in people perception. People can partly translate a meaning of a word or a sentence from a language to another one, but they can’t translate the feeling or emotion of the word. Because of that reason, if we speak a sentence with a same meaning in two different languages, the audience can understand that sentence differently.
However, knowers with different cultures and languages can still agree on what is perceived because we all have common senses and all share same values. Therefore, although people have different perceptions, but they still can share the same opinion of something is wrong or right, true or false, reasonable or unreasonable. For example, Christians or Buddhists, people who speak French or German, they can all agree that killing people is wrong or human need to drink water to survive, or so on.
Therefore to answer the question: “Do people with different cultural or linguistic backgrounds
live, in some sense, in different worlds?”, we can say that it is a yes and no. Yes because we still all live within the same world that, for example, has animals, plants, water, fire, air, etc. However, to some extents, we can say that people are living in different worlds as we have different perceptions, opinions, experiences, and so on; therefore, we have a private and unique perspective to view our own worlds.

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William Wijaya
2/25/2013 04:15:41 am

Culture and Language have their interrelationship between each other; certainly, together or separated, they affect the way people perceive things. In a way, culture describes human´s belief, because of culture we see/perceive things in a different way. For example, an American might think a relatio banship needs to be more physical and the sexuality seems to be high in content; however, an Asian (Stereotypical type) would think that a relationship needs a longer time, or to put it in another way, ¨taking it slowly¨ and the sexual content wouldn´t be too high. Similar to culture, language could affect our perceptual process in terms of understandng. As an example, a standard level English lang and lit student is going to interpret a poem in a simple manner while a higher level English Land and Lit would gives a much more subtle and sophisicated explanations. These has proven that we culture and language will dealt a huge impact upon the way that we perceive things.

Sense perception are truly more to subjective sides, but it doesn´t mean that we human will always disagree on what is perceived. In many cases, different knowers with different sense perception actually have similar perceptions. There are millions of facts in this world, that human have believed from many years ago, those facts can´t easily be changed even though our sense perceives it in a different way to others; in the end, not all, but some people will still agree and perceives it.
Literally, people who have different linguistic and cultural backgrounds usually lives in different countries, but the countries are a part the world. But, if the world is illustrated to describe our imaginative mind, it would be different. People with opposite lingustic and cultural backgound clearly have oppsite way of perceptions, they would see things in an absurd way to the others, this creates a barrier, in some sense, creates ¨different worlds¨.

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Matheus Paredes Gimenez
2/25/2013 10:57:54 am

Culture and Language are definitely the most effective ways of expression, and they can really change our perception. for example a muslin may think that a Burka is appropriate due to their culture while a person from the United States would oppose to it because their culture tells them to, and that is a very deceiving characteristic of perception because how can we know what is true? and more important, how can we agree on what is true? the reality is that it is impossible for everybody to agree even in the most simple subject due to the subjectivity of sense perception, and when more than one person agrees with something, there will always be another person that will be contrary to it, due to that, everything is subjective.

The fact that we have so many different cultures and backgrounds does mean that we live in different worlds, because if our perception is different, our language is different and our beliefs are different, the only thing we may have in common is the biological fact that we are human, although nowadays the world is more globalized so we do have more in common, but there are stil places where people still seem to be out of this world.

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Stephanie Arnold
2/27/2013 10:24:57 am

The perceptual process is very individual; everyone perceives facts differently. Many different things influence our perceptions, among them especially culture and language. Culture might change our attitude towards something or influence our understanding. For example if there is a crux in a story, it has high value for Christian people, since it is there most important symbol. People from a different cultural or religious background, might not understand the importance or significance of this symbol. Also language influences our knowledge and even the perception. If we read an article or hear a story and our vocabulary is too weak to understand it properly, we are going to get confused; we won’t understand the purpose of the text and remember the content only partially. Even worse it’s going to be if someone has to retell something. If he or she doesn’t use proper vocabulary, the audience’s perception of the content is going to be very different. But not only inadequate vocabulary leads to a different perception of something. Also different languages themselves cause different perceptions. Everyone who speaks more than one language, knows, that it is never possible to translate something word by word. Whenever something is translated, some feeling is lost and it sounds very different in the other language.

Sense perception is very subjective. But it is still possible to agree on what is perceived. Common experience and common sense help a lot. Already the fact, that we speak a language, proves that we agree on what is perceived. We all call the “bed” “bed”, in another language it might have a different name, but all speakers of the language call it the same way, so that it could be translated easily.

The quotation above is right. We “suffer and enjoy in solitude”. No one can look inside our brain. No one ever guesses, what we think. As long as we don’t speak and don’t try to convey ourselves, no one will ever be able to know us, to know our private world. Still, especially now through globalization, people from different cultural and linguistic background understand each other. We live in the same world, have differing perceptions, but are able to adapt to foreign cultures, languages and even perceptions.

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