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Note | Fritz Heider: Language as a Conceptual Tool and Naive Psychology (1958)
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The text below is quoted from Fritz Heider’s 1958 book titled The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations
3:05 PM
The fact that we are able to describe ourselves and other people in everyday language means that it embodies much of what we have called naive psychology. This language serves us well, for it has an infinite flexibility and contains a great number of general concepts that symbolize experiences with the physical and social environment. After all, it is ordinary, nonscientific language that has served as the tool for writers in their representations of human behavior. However, this instrument lacks one important feature — a systematic representation — which is ultimately required by science. Ernst Cassirer, who was greatly concerned with the way in which reality is represented in myths, art, literature, and science, writes as follows about language:
In language we find the first efforts of classification, but these are still uncoordinated. They cannot lead to a true systematization. For the symbols of language themselves have no definite systematic order. Every single linguistic term has a special “area of meaning.” It is, as Gardiner says, “a bean of light, illumining first this portion and then that portion of the field within which the thing, or rather the complex concatenation of things signified by a sentence lies.” But all these different beams of light do not have a common focus. They are dispersed and isolated. (Cassirer, 1944, p.211)
In other words, though nonscientific language in the hands of a master is unsurpassed for the description of even the most subtle relationships, it lacks the features of a real system. It is true that philology, whose purpose is to ascertain the elements and laws of language, has brought some order into the concepts that language expresses…
