Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

by Peter Hessler

“What is reality?” Galambos asks, during one of our conversations in Beijing. “It’s this huge amount of data. There’s this philosopher who had a lot of influence on me, Ernst Cassirer. He wrote this book called Language and Myth. Basically, his idea is that language itself creates reality. For example, in order to have words like nouns, you have to have concepts. When you form concepts, that’s when you’re creating stuff—it’s a creative process. You pick out certain things from the environment, and you give them labels, and you create this reality around you. When you’re a kid, you’re not just learning how to speak; you’re learning how to perceive a reality. It’s almost like a computer language, an internal code that makes you able to think. “From a linguistic point of view, this is a very old concept, and a lot of people nowadays don’t believe it. But I think it’s probably to some degree true. Perhaps if you don’t have a word for a certain feeling, or a certain color of the sky, then you don’t notice it. It doesn’t stick out from the background. That’s what words do: they make things stick out. Otherwise, it might just be a big haze of data. In a computer language, you’d call it uninterpreted data. So a language is your browser.”