I came across this hypothetical exchange on the Net the other day: “Q: Why is linguistics important? / A: Linguistics helps us understand our world.” With my personal interest in the significance of everyday life and the real world in our education, as a response to the exchange, I immediately ...
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I came across this hypothetical exchange on the Net the other day: “Q: Why is linguistics important? / A: Linguistics helps us understand our world.” With my personal interest in the significance of everyday life and the real world in our education, as a response to the exchange, I immediately started contemplating the meaning of the world, and especially of ‘our world’ in the exchange. “Do we have a common world to call it ‘our world’”? “How big is this world?” “What aspects of it are we supposed to understand by means of linguistics?” “What is meant by ‘understanding the world’?” My assumption is that those behind the hypothetical exchange should be ready to answer such questions, regardless of whether the answers are agreeable or not. But what matters in this regard is that such general statements as “Linguistics helps us understand our world” should be rendered in the direction of the concretization of findings so that all scientific endeavours may turn out to be fruitful in the context of our everyday lives in the real world.
