Words Aren’t Real.

Truth, cognitive processes, and speech acts

Truth is a cognitive relationship. The philosophical definitions of truth you’ll see in the books and perhaps encounter in your college coursework are mostly terrible, though. The correspondence theory is almost okay, but then there turns out to be no way to verify the relationship between the theorem and the presupposed objective reality, rendering it functionally useless, a philosophical boondoggle. However, if the correspondence is posited to occur between human minds that we do have more or less direct access to if we work together, then things change. Words have a function, which, high-level, is to cause certain chain reactions in human brain tissues. By causing similar reactions in different minds, it becomes possible for individual conscious beings to experience a sort of interconnectedness we think of as communication.

I chose the title “Words aren’t real” for this article to parody the silly “birds aren’t real” movement that took pop culture by storm a few years ago because I thought it would be funny. Humor, like truth, is a cognitive relationship. My enjoyment of the silly article title is caused by a similarity between the old pop culture gag and the key, serious insight this article wishes to present: words are virtual objects that do truly exist in our minds, but they are not real because they lack…