The relationship between language and thought

Question: Why is the ruthless totalitarian regime, described in Orwell’s novel purging Oldspeak and imposing Newspeak? What assumptions are being made about the relationship between language and thought?

Answer: In Orwell’s novel, the people whom are supportive towards the idea of the imposition of Newspeak clearly state that the thought and language walk together 'hand in hand', and believe that destroying the oldspeak, would be more of an efficient way of communication. They serve the idea that in order to be able to understand a certain concept of a word the need of knowing its defintion/explanation is the only way in which we will be able to understand it or even bring it in our daily life or in other words, how can use something that does not exist?
For instance, in our minds we think in typical a language, we use different adjectives to describe our feelings, meaning that if these specific words to how we feel did not exist we would feel this way or basically be limited in our thoughts or even expressing our emotions. A great example is when the Spanish colony had took over South America in the 15th century. They claim that, when the people who have seen the Spanish ships heading towards their coast could not protect themselves since they did not know what they were standing against, they did not know all the concept of 'sailing' or what were 'Ships' therefore they could not THINK of it as danger, or in other words they were just staring at an unknown object coming towards them. This just shows that in order to think of something and have an opinion about it, knowing its concept is a must to really and fully understand it.

The affect of word choice

Question: In the example of foreign policy, how does word choice have an impact on the message conveyed?

Answer: To begin with, many politicians do not write their own speeches and that is because the importance of word choice. Each word symbolizes a different thing and could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Each word we speak or hear illustrates an image in our mind and our brain associates
this word with other words and images. For example, when we hear the word 'peace' or 'love', we immediately imagine calmness or think about the people we care about. However, the best example I could give is what I just wrote, that is because when my intention was only to write 'peace' the word love came up to my mind, proving how our diction has an affect to the feelings we experience and thethoughts we think about. In the case of foreign policy, each politician has chosen their words carefully in way to create a greater impact on our thoughts and making us think what they want us to think, just like in the case of Adolf Hitler where his excellent speaking has affected a whole nation. When Obama has used the term 'Slam-dunk' referring to the chaos in Syria, was in order to create an image of violence, or in the case of 'red-line' where we associate 'red' with 'danger' or even 'blood' or at least in my case. Therefore when the message conveyed is needed to be powerful or catchy enough to be stuck in our minds the play of word choice has a great impact on how we sympathize or not sypathize with specific occasions and how we link this words with our emotions and imagination.

Identifying a KQ from real life situation:

RLS: A survey that has been taken in the US shows the 51% of the Americans do not support an attack on Syria due to its use of chemical weapons.

KQ: To what degree of certainty do our emotions affect our ability to decide what is good and bad?

Creating a TOK Question - Using the ladder of abstraction.

1.Knowledge Claim: "Mr. Moussay's grandfather's says the fruits on his trees are ripening earlier and earlier in the year, and this must be due to global warming."

2. Topic: Global warming.

3. Implicit question about the situation: How does global warming cause the fruits to ripen?

4. Open-ended question about knowledge in the context of the real life situation: How does Mr. Moussay's grandfather can stop the fruits from ripening from global warning?

5. explicit open-ended question about knowledge using TOK concepts: To what extent, has Mr. Moussay's grandfather has used 'Memory', 'Experience' and 'Natural sciences' to identify the cause of the fruits ripening?