”The vocabulary we have does more than communicate our knowledge; It shapes what we can know.” Evaluate this claim with reference to different are...

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Language is the way humans communicate either oral or written. Our vocabulary may shape what we can know but only to some extent. In the modern world we seem to make a connection between the naming of things and their existence. Our world does however not bend to our words. Language contains many values, but the influence of language is however much deeper. Many researchers and scientist have tried to find a connection between language, knowledge and thought.
In developmental psychology the cognitive developments plays an important role. It is focused on the development of children on a cognitive level (how data is processed, language learning etc.). Jean Piaget being a major personality in the establishment of the cognitive development field founded a theory concerning the stages of development. According to Piaget humans go through the sensorimotor stage from birth until the age of two. In this stage the behaviour lacks sense of thought and logic. Later humans are able to represent the external world. In important factor developed in the sensorimotor stage is language. Newer traditional views in this theory emphasize the role of social experience in the learning of language. Humans surrounded by many others humans will often have a more developed and broader language than those being raised more isolated.
According to Piaget knowledge is a cognitive structure or mental representation which changes over time. The mental representations, also called schemas, are integrated and modified as a result of experience. New schemas develop when current schemas are inadequate. The learning of new schemas can happen in two ways. One is through assimilation. When new information is integrated into existing cognitive schemas, knowledge is c...

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...l validity, which makes the theory weaker. Even though Humboldt who is usually seen as the founding father of the theory, his work on the subject remains problematic in English-speaking countries, despite him being the linguist to view the human language as a rule-based system instead of the until then thought to be collection of words and phrases.
While language is one of the most important things in the human world, the role of language in terms of knowledge still remains unclear and is a great question. We may never truly know if our vocabulary shapes what we know, because to do should we not be granted with unlimited vocabulary in order to know everything? There are always coming new words, slangs and abbreviations so it is almost impossible to keep up. If our vocabulary is the source of all knowledge, would dictionaries not be the limited source of knowledge?

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