[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Arlo Bensinger]

Matt, All,

I'm just jumping in here, just to make a point I feel worth making about 
"language as a tool".

Matt, I think you are correct in your assessment that language is not 
something that can get us closer or further away from an external 
"reality". What I would like to quickly comment on, however, is the idea of 
language as mediator in another sense. Within socio-cultural theory (to 
risk broad generalizations) the idea that experience is "linguistically 
mediated" emphasizes a reciprocity in structuring between "language" and 
"being". That is, humans use language as a tool, but in so doing are 
fundamentally oriented towards the saliency of the linguistic structures 
they create. While this is true of all tools, including a hammer, it is 
perhaps most true of language, as language is a near pervasive, ubiquitous 
part of our existence. Thus, tools are not simply objects by which we act 
on an external world, but create "us" as much as they create "things". This 
may be what you're getting at when you say that language IS the static 
world, but I think this co-relation (the idea of Vygotsky's "mediated 
being") is important to emphasize.

Arlo