Author: Nick Enfield
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THE PROBLEM IS NOT THAT PEOPLE DON’T CARE. IT IS THAT OUR CIRCLE OF REGARD FOR TRUTH IS IRRATIONALLY SMALL It is often said that “people don’t care about truth”. But is this really the case? Imagine you are falsely accused of cheating in a test: Would you not care? Or you are filling up…
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When we talk, we follow certain ground rules, which are set out in what philosophers call “language games”. Each game has its own set of rules – but problems arise when not everyone is clear which game is being played. Perhaps most important is the informing game, in which we use words to give people…
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Science can’t exist without telling a story. The question is not whether we should use it, but how we should use it best Image: ‘Even if an exemplary scientist has trained herself to be utterly objective, her audience will always bring their biased, story-gobbling minds’ Photograph: ijeab/Getty Images/iStockphoto Scientists often struggle to communicate the findings of…
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21 May 2018 A good number of Australians hate it when people refer to the letter “h” as “haitch”. They hate it with a passion. While the “haitch” pronunciation is often linked to Irish Catholic education in times when Australian society was divided along sectarian lines, no research has conclusively established its true history. But…
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Q and A A public lecture delivered at the Nanyang Technology University Date: 11 December 2017 Time: 2:00pm – 5:30pm Venue: Discovery Theatrette, Level 4, Matrix Building at Biopolis Address: 30 Biopolis Street, Singapore 138671 Jointly organised by:
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What are the moral obligations of a casual chat? Why is there value in every ‘ummm’, ‘mm-hmmm’, and ‘like’? And does the country you grew up in make a difference in how quickly you reply to a question? Nick Enfield is the author of a new book, How We Talk, and he explains the inner…
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In our new normal, experts are dismissed and alternative facts flagrantly offered. This suspicion of specialists is part of a bigger problem Image: March For Science In New York City, 22 April 2017. Photograph: Erik McGregor/Pacific/Barcroft We often defer to others’ expertise, and for good reason. The entire edifice of modern society only exists thanks…
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Language loss is a silent phenomenon – creeping and incremental like erosion. But what precisely do we lose when a language is no longer spoken? Perhaps we should be asking: what do we keep when linguistic diversity is maintained? Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Nick Enfield hosts a panel at the…
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Image: Public anxiety about the post-truth era inspired a New York Times advertising campaign. Nick Enfield, University of Sydney This article is the first in a series from the Post-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney. The series examines today’s post-truth problem in public discourse: the thriving economy of lies,…
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Do dolphins say ‘Huh?’ Do gorillas point out dropped bananas to other gorillas? Do ants quote one another? Human language is a a uniquely complex combination of social and cognitive capacities. Professor Nick Enfield explains the latest research on what distinguishes human language, from its cooperative tendencies to the fact that ours is the only…