Page "Linguistic relativity" Paragraph 8

In the philosophy of language the debate has relevance for the question of the relation between language, knowledge and the external world, and the concept of truth.

Some philosophers see language as representing directly entities that already exist in the objective world, and that categorization is therefore not generally variable but to some extent pre-given.

Other philosophers argue that categorization and conceptualization is learned and basically arbitrary, and that the objects in the world can be categorized in multiple ways, giving rise to different ways of describing or understanding the same phenomena.

Philosophers also vary in the question of whether language is basically a tool for representing and referring to objects in the world, or whether it is a system used to construct mental representations of the world that can be shared and circulated between people.