Values: How Language and Thinking are Interrelated

A scene from the movie Pocohontas depicts what folklore tells us was the experience of Native Americans upon the arrival of English settlers. In this scene we watch large ships approaching the new land. But the Native Americans do not see the ships, instead they see ‘strange clouds’ approaching. They are unable to see the ships because they lack the mental frameworks needed to comprehend the idea of a ship. Likewise, we too often fail to see impending dangers or lurking opportunities due to insufficient mental frameworks that cause us to misperceive what’s going on.

How we think determines what we see and what we see determines how we act.

Given this simple truth, it behooves us to pay attention to how we think. Yet, over 95% of our thinking is unconscious and operates below our level of awareness. So how can we become skilled at understanding our thinking and how it impacts what we see?

One way is by drawing insights from the field of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics explains the relationship between language and cognitive processing in the human brain. It explains how we have unconscious conceptual structures (also known as mental models) that shape how we automatically and unconsciously comprehend what we experience and how we talk about our experience. What we often think of as “common sense” is actually our worldview overlaid upon what we see.

Our worldview can be thought of as the framework through which we see and make sense of what’s going on in the world around us. This is often shaped by metaphoric conceptions rooted deep in our unconscious conceptual systems. And it is constituted by our values.

Understanding and working with values provides the path to producing shared understanding with others and awakening latent resources within ourselves and others. And this is where cognitive linguistics can be especially helpful. The way we talk, the language we use, helps us understand our values and the values of others. Once we’ve identified the underlying values that drive our thinking, we can skillfully work with these values to ensure they are supporting our goals. We can determine the degree to which they are aligned with what we are trying to accomplish. And we can shift them to support and accelerate our endeavors. The key to doing all this is understanding our language and how we frame things.