Within the past year or two, I began to see references to the “Overton Window.” Hmmm. . . intriguing. What is it?

Hmmm . . . “Window of political possibilities.”  What happens if we deepen its reach to include psychological, sociological, cultural possibilities? What would that look like? And why does it matter?

Think of yourself going around the world with a set of glasses on. These glasses measure your (deepened) Overton Window. Furthermore, you have no idea that you are wearing glasses. You think you are seeing “reality.”

Indeed, beyond the frame everything is blurry, or even, non-existent. You simply don’t see anything clearly except what’s basically, “right in front of you,” or, I should say,  visible to your eyes, which, however, don’t move very far right or left, up or down. Nor does your head swivel. You’re chained to the Overton Window. Yuck.

Now deepen that thought. What if, everything you perceive in your particular Overton Window (the boundaries of which are shaped by all the influences in your life — both conscious or unconscious, subtle or overt, formally educational or otherwise) goes into your brain which itself has been shaped by the particular language you speak! So that what might be visible to a person who speaks Hopi, for example, is not by an English-speaking person. And it’s not just names, says Jean Piaget among others, with which we learn to denote “objects” out there, it’s also the very grammar that structures them into ways of making sense. The Hopi, for one, does not use the linear-causality-implying Subject-Verb-Object sentence structure. For them, “Billy throws the ball” is something like “there is a ball throwing.”

For linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose book Language, Thought, and Reality, was first published in 1956:

“the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world.” — Wikipedia.

I remember how stunned I was to come across his writings, back in graduate school. And yet, I had been priming myself for just such a revelation, for years.

 

Back in “grammar school” (yes, that’s what they called it then, do they still call it that? Aha! Just looked it up. Originally designated as the type of schooling received by supposedly gifted students from the ages of 10 through 14) I loved diagramming sentences. (Just looked that notion up, too. Aha! while popular when I was young, by the 1960s and 1970s diagramming sentences began to be abandoned.)

I loved diagramming sentences because I truly wanted to grasp how language is structured to convey meaning. I could have asked a deeper question: what is the relationship between language and thought? But even the idea of that question didn’t rise up to awareness until graduate school. Not that I ever learned how to answer it! Frankly, that question is still there, making nonsense of any supposed bottom-line assumptions about how the world “should” be perceived. Nevertheless, my Sagittarian tendency towards dogmatism persists! Mea culpa!

Back to grammar. Hmmm. Are all grammar’s structured the same? According to linguist Noam Chomsky, yes. Their “deep structures,” while “surface structures” may differ, do not. In this view of a priori mental structures, Chomsky echoes the philosopher Immanuel Kant, for whom the framework of space/time was innate. 

In other words, according to Chomsky, John Locke is wrong. There’s no such thing as a tabula rasa, a mind that is blank.

Okay, so what’s the difference between Chomsky and Whorf?

The point is, not only does each of us likely see through our own particular Overton Window (generalized from merely political), but our minds are structured by our own personal history to only see in certain ways.

And with that, all pretense at Objectivity disappears into the mist. As it should.