80-184 Disagreeable Language: talk in the age of polarization
9 units, Carnegie Mellon University
What do you do when confronted with opinions that to you are obviously wrong supported by facts that are not even based in your reality This is a situation we more and more find ourselves facing, or would if we ever ventured out of our own ideological bubble which is constantly replenished by Big Tech and only with information prematched to our biases. It is held in place by human language itself our supposed primary means of communication. While it is true that pictures can lie one hundred years ago Arthur Conan Doyle got taken in by the Cottingley pixie photographs, and now theres CGI and Deepfake language has always been the premier instrument for the conveyance of untruths. And when the facts themselves are up for grabs, the traditional approach going outside of language for confirmation and factchecking doesnt work either. Can anything be done about this precarious situation Disagreeable Language explores a possible solution through linguistics, the study of human language. A subfield of linguistics is the study of language structure, an enterprise which is selfcontained and relies on no information outside of language and speaker intuitions. But this independence from reality may make linguistics the right tool for the detection of reality. If patterns of untruth leave their mark in language itself, linguistic techniques would be the way to reveal them. That could provide an escape route out of the matrix. At the very least, students in this course will learn basic methods for interrogating the language we use to get through to one another, that is, basic methods for doing linguistics.
Prerequisites: none listed
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