The Pirahã Experience: Exploring the Relationship Between Language and Reality

 

By Keith Tidman

 

Language paints a picture, however imperfect, of the world its speakers inhabit. Some aspects of that picture seem fixed and tangible, resistant to the changeableness of conditions around us. In other instances, speakers’ perception of the world must be repeatedly reframed as new evidence refutes the current model and forces adoption of a new one.

 

As the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quin has pointed out, “language is a social art.” This is especially the case in the everyday, experiential world where people live. And where knowledge and understanding, as precursors to people’s beliefs and convictions, build up like layered coral.

 

The subject discussed here may be summed up in this manner: What does a language concretely tells us about the reality its speakers inhabit? How does language bear on the reality we can conceive; and how does observation of the external world actively and reciprocally shape language and its uses? This link between language and reality is actively bidirectional: Language helps to pave the way to constructing a worldview and notions of reality. While reciprocally a worldview and notions of reality help pave the way to constructing language.

 

We might wonder how wide or narrow language’s aperture is—through which society peers—that gives speakers this view of reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that the limits of language define the limits of one’s world. That’s true, and must be kept in mind for the full picture, but the point carries only so much weight. I suggest that the bigger reality is that language and worldview symbiotically trade on one another, to the benefit and growth of both. 

 

What we call language extends beyond the world’s 7,000-plus natural languages: Xhosa, Farsi, German, Navajo, Mandarin, Gaelic, Greek, Dinka, Hindi, among myriad others. Language takes other forms, too, such as the visual arts, music, symbolic logic, computer algorithms, sign language, and mathematics. These languages describe reality very differently from one another, yet each does so with remarkable effectiveness in its own domain.

 

However, I want to focus on a very obscure language spoken by just a handful of people. Because I think that the indigenous natural language Pirahã will help clarify this reciprocal link between language and speakers’ conceptualisation of reality. Linguists have long been thinking about the systemic way language transmits information about the world. In that context, Wittgenstein further argued that meaning comes not from technical linguists, but importantly from social context and use. Meanwhile, a language’s features offer a way for speakers to know what the world must be like for a statement about it to be true.

 

By way of context, speakers of the Pirahã language comprise a community numbering just several hundred members. They live in the Brazilian lowland rainforest, along the riverbanks of the Maici river. This is a remote waterway that serves as a natural barrier, territory that remains isolated from Brazil’s urban centers, with difficult access. The community makes up for this isolation by enjoying close cultural connections to the richly diverse Amazonian ecosystem. Living simply, the Pirahã largely reject industrial and complex technologies, being equipped mainly with foraging tools and shelter.

 

As for heritage, Pirahã is a language isolate, a sole survivor from the Mura language family. All other members of the Mura have long gone extinct, similar to thousands of other languages. Pirahã does not share genealogical ties to former languages, or to living languages. By resolutely spurning modernity, the people secured their language and way of life. Speakers of the language emphasise that their interactions with the physical world are what lead to conclusions regarding what’s real and what matters to them..

 

Features of the Pirahã and its sister languages include the formation of words, rules for arranging phrases, grammar, speech sounds, social purpose, the denotative and connotative meanings of words, and so forth—in that social context. Familiar, common threads that stretch across all human languages. As the linguist Daniel Everett argued, language is shaped by history and culture, as a knowledge-sharing tool invented by humans, rather than existing as a fixed blueprint.

 

Since the Pirahã language is so tied to its speakers’ interactions with reality and their understanding of what’s around them, let’s first point to several of the language’s features and their real-world consequences. I will do so with an eye on how the reciprocal connections between language and reality serve as the seedbed for the Pirahã community’s acquisition of knowledge and understanding—their worldview. In turn, we will look at how the language is constructed and wielded in everyday life. Ultimately, this reveals the mutual influences between language and the speakers’ interpretation of their firsthand experiences that occur in the present.

 

The Pirahã language is unique in the way that it challenges notions of a theoretical universal grammar and common structure cutting across all languages, according to Noam Chomsky, the philosopher and linguist. To that point, the Pirahã language’s attributes should be approached open-mindedly. In other words, the approach should be disentangled from assumptions and conclusions drawn from other languages’ many-centuries-long life cycles. The Pirahã people guard for themselves choices as to how their language and conceptualisations of the world are indispensable.

 

Start with the claim that the Pirahã language is devoid of specific numbers: so, for example, 1, 2, 8, 64, 896, or any other number does not exist. The community deems such a precise numbering scheme as unneeded—that is, absent either linguistic or practical reasons to express such concise numbers. Instead, speakers resort to tonal words, or pitch changes, to convey relative size. Such as ‘hói (with a low/high rising tone) for smaller quantities, hoí (with a different tone) for larger quantities, and baágiso for many or a bunch.

 

Such general terms are what’s available for them to express some sense of quantity and size. So, even as hunter-gatherers, whose diet includes trading amounts of food, they see no need to track bulk or the exact number of items beyond eyeballing. The latter informality is enough to match or differentiate between, let’s say, a bag with 40 foraged wild nuts that someone brings back from the jungle and a bag with 50. These on-the-ground facts leave the Pirahã people nonplussed by the decision by outsiders to resort to more intricate numbering schemes.

 

In addition, the Pirahã language does not grammatically distinguish between single and plural things. The people have handy alternatives that suffice for these kinds of functions. It’s helpful to note, in this larger context, that Pirahã is a tonal language. Changes in pitch—which can be communicated even by whistling or humming, creating underlying melodies—convey changes in meaning.

 

The ways in which outside societies powerfully manipulate numbers in the course of mathematics are alien to the Pirahã community: as in, by way of examples, the natural sciences, engineering, technology, economics, health sciences, business, public policy, and otherwise. Such computational mechanisms are absent from how they personally conceive the world. This absence of mathematics, which I identified as among the various forms of languages, limits what else and how else the speakers of Pirahã might otherwise confirm reality. But that appears not to matter. What’s important is what attributes they perceive as essential in constructing a reality that makes sense to their daily existence.

 

In similar vein, the speakers of Pirahã lack precise words for colors. In conveying color, it suffices to use phrases comparing hues to something familiar in their surroundings. Such as comparing something red to blood, blue to the sky, green to leaves, and brown or black to dirt. That is, colors conveyed as tones are related to what their senses meaningfully pick up from their busy environment. It’s not a limiting practice. They still make their meaning clear and unambiguous, fully sufficient for their purposes.

 

Accordingly, these are verifiable points of likeness—that is, a taxonomy of hues—rather than the preset color spectrum familiar to other societies. At most, beyond hues the community requires words for just light and dark. Their leaning on such empirical descriptors is functionally enough for their needs, in going about their daily lives. It’s enough for expressing their reality. That is, the practice does not handicap them on any practical level, in their capacity as hunter-gatherers or in communication among the group’s members. That being said, not naming colors has led to the absence of art among the Pirahã, such as painting, drawing (beyond stick figures), or other abstract visual representation for aesthetic fulfillment.

 

Perhaps more significantly, the speakers of the Pirahã language also lack tense. They marginalise the past and future in conjugating verbs. In addition, they do not have precise words for “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” providing contextual clues instead—such as where the water level will be. They pay little to no attention to timeframes that stretch far into the past or far into the future. If something lacks relevance in the present moment, it tends not to matter much or not to enter the conversation. The Pirahã people prefer, therefore, to talk about what either they or trusted witnesses have directly experienced in the present or immediate past.

 

Daniel Everett coined the expression “immediacy-of-experience principle” to describe these preferences. As a result, they do not create narratives of deep historical accounts, mythological descriptions of creation, or calendar systems that chop up time into fragments. They have no need. Similarly, they tend not to project abstract visions of distant future worlds or far-reaching expectations and anticipatory plans. This same concept of immediacy also leads the community to base its sense of morality on pragmatic considerations rather than on abstract codes. A pragmatism that emphasises autonomy of the individual and equality rather than a tightly hierarchical structure, and where conflict resolution emphasises social isolation.

 

Notwithstanding the lack of standard verb conjugations for time, speakers of Pirahã turn to workarounds to communicate about events anchored to the past and future. This resort to an anchoring process, however, may well risk creating constraints on the community to evolve. There are surely important lessons from the past that should be extracted in order to better their community, as well as have the motivation to exercise curiosity about alternative futures that might reward them. These are matters not only of knowledge, understanding, invention, and discovery, but also of practical decision-making.

 

The Pirahã language also lacks words for spatial direction, like left, right, up, down, forwards, or backwards. And they have none for cardinal directions, like north, south, east, or west, which they associate disconcertedly with an invisible global grid. Instead, they use words tied to the physical, topographical landscape, such as upriver or downriver, into or out of the jungle, and up or down a tree. Even though this method would prove impractical in the outside world, their system aligns with their realities of place and locomotion.

 

In terms of grammar, the Pirahã language lacks dependence on what’s called recursion, where clauses are nested within sentences. Recursion is handy in many languages, neatly tying together related ideas. Here’s an example: “These are the berries [that Kaaxaoi gathered from plants [that grow close by the village [where his family patiently wait to eat]]].” The absence of recursion does not hinder the speakers of Pirahã, who instead use sequences of separate, short sentences to express thought and meaning. Ideas still get shared, a process key to any community’s cohesion and vibrancy and awareness of self.

 

The Pirahã people’s sense of reality hinges on their own personal interaction with things and events and the convictions they hold about their environment. Or, second best, reality hinges on what has been seen by someone they know and trust—a point to which Daniel Everett, who lived with the inhabitants for many years, has attested. Their reality is based on empirical mechanisms. The Pirahã language’s attributes tell much about the world that its speakers experience and value, with no compelling reason to alter their perceptions. Whereas other cultures might mistrust perception as an unreliably subjective path to knowledge and reality, the Pirahã embrace it.

 

Theirs is thus a captivating model of reality rooted in an experientially tested world that for them has persisted forever. Reality is baked in as human knowledge is rigorously limited to the physical world, which is to say the phenomenal world. To the Pirahã, concepts that transcend physical reality cannot be known and do not exist, rendering such grandiose notions pointless. Such abstractions merit no place in their language, their thoughts, or their daily lives. The very idea elicits a dismissive shrug. 

 

Observation and immediacy thus remain important to Pirahã society and knowledge of the world. But because of this emphasis on verifiability and credence, they have not woven mythologies that describe how they came into being. Without witnesses, such stories lack trustworthiness and are unworthy of telling. The world in which they live just is, and has existed eternally. To ponder otherwise would bring unnecessarily unfamiliar, abstract, shadowy ideas into their lives. 

 

For such reasons, the Pirahã people have no place in their notions of reality for a god in the sky to which creation of the world might be attributed. The people’s inability to tangibly interact with a transcendental god is a firm nonstarter, given the lack of sufficient physical proof of its existence. As a result, attempts over the many years by missionaries to instill belief in them of a monotheistic religion like Christianity have fallen on deaf ears. The fact is that traditional methods of conversion, with their hints of cultural hegemonism, do not align with the Pirahã people’s materialist worldview.

 

The Pirahã do allow for animistic spirits (Xigagai), but these are reduced to concrete forms—physical manifestations. That is, they are just another thing in the jungle taking the form of a particular animal or tree or river, which they encounter in their day. There are, similarly, no afterlife realms like heaven or hell, or invisible souls. They dismiss such conceptualisations of a final reward or punishment as unsubstantiated—content with their lot in life carved out of the rainforest. For them, the now is strategic, where “seizing the day” governs beliefs and behaviors alike, with no requirement for fables.

 

This emphasis by the Pirahã people on what they experience echoes the idea that people do not just observe and draw conclusions about reality from a position of remoteness. Rather, they are locally engaged with the phenomenal world. With this conviction, the Pirahã regard the individual as a unified, cohesive whole rather than conforming to a model that separates mind and body. A dualism that portrays the mind as sequestered—ghost-like, to borrow philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s metaphor—in control of the body as a compliant machine.

 

To sum up then: The features of languages in general, and of Pirahã in particular, exhibit how they serve as prisms that reciprocally shape and are shaped by one’s world view. It is recognised that speakers of a specific language are in measure bound by their grammar, vocabulary, sounds, meaning, and relationships among speakers, along with other attributes. All the while, we need to keep top of mind Chomsky’s expansive, ambitious notion of language as embodying “a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community.”

 

What is important are the structural variances within languages. These linguistic variances influence the community’s and individuals’ relativistic awareness of deep-seated realities within the world: perceptions, knowledge, understanding, needs, and values. In turn, these linguistic attributes mold the thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors of its speakers. A case where something spoken is valid only if it maps directly onto witnessed experience. The latter is what the Pirahã community esteems as empirically secured truth.

 

Their conception of the world, and their categorisation of experience into discrete happenings, helps them absorb and process information. The Pirahã language and the world in which it is spoken richly epitomise this pragmatic dynamic of anchoring language to things, ideas, beliefs, intentions, and experiences in the world. To speak Pirahã is to engage intimately with tangible reality—the phenomenal world comprising the river, monkeys, jaguars, tropical jungle, and the assorted hazards posed by the local ecosystem.