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Bobertron comments on Help with understanding some non-standard-LW philosophy viewpoints - Less Wrong
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I have heard in particular that this is true of German. "German has no word for 'mind'" is how I have heard it put.
As you are a native German speaker, could give us, as a case study in the phenomenon, an account of how one talks in German about the range of things that in English would be called mental phenomena? Google Translate suggests for "mind" the words der Geist, der Verstand, die Meining, der Sinn, die Gedanken, die Sinne, das Gemüt, das Denken, das Gedächtnis, and das Gehirn, but a dictionary, still less Google Translate, can't tell me the nuances being expressed here. (However, the first two seem to be of similar breadth to "mind", the others being more about specific faculties.) Are there differences in what can be easily said, or are English and German on this subject as interchangeable as rectangular and polar coordinates?
A different German speaker here.
In English you have a whole cloud of related words: mind, brain, soul, I, self, consciousness, intelligence. I don't think it's much of a problem that German does not have perfect match for "mind". The "mind-body-Problem" would be "Leib-Seele-Problem", where "seele" would usually be translated as "soul". The German wikipedia page for philosophy of mind does use the English word "mind" once to distinguish that meaning for "Geist" from a different concept from Hegel that I never heard about before ("Weltgeist").
Then again I don't have much need to discuss philosophy of mind with the people around me, so maybe that's why I don't feel the need for a German word is more like "mind".
But I do have massive problems with talking about epistemological concepts in German. Help from other German speakers would be very welcome. I don't know how to talk about "degrees of belief" in German. Or how to call those things that get updated when we learn new evidence ("beliefs" in English).
If you translate the noun "a belief" into German ("ein Glaube") and back into English, it will always come out as "faith" (as in " the Buddhist faith" or in "having faith in redemption"). A different candidate would be "Überzeugung", but that literally means conviction (something you belief with absolute certainty). Hardly seems like a good word for talking about uncertainty. Wikipedia uses "Grad an Überzeugung" to translate "degrees of belief", but gives the English in parentheses to make sure the meaning is clear. I don't like it. "Eine Überzeugung" sounds wrong.
"Evidence" is another difficult one. The closest might be "Beweis", but that means "proof". Then there is "Evidenz", but I've only ever seen that word used to translate "evidence based medicine". The average German would be unlikely to know that word.
But I wonder if Less Wrong has given me a skewed view of the English language. Maybe the way LW uses "belief" wouldn't feel so natural to the average native speaker. Maybe the average native speaker has quite a different notion of what "evidence" means.
Native English speaker, so I may be way off... but surely 'beliefs' would be 'Verständnis'? And for 'evidence', wouldn't you usually use a verb ('to provide evidence') instead of a noun, something like 'unterstützen'?
"Verständnis" seems totally wrong to me. It's from the verb "verstehen" (to understand, to comprehend). It usually means "understanding" ("meinem Verständnis nach" -> "according to my understanding"). Maybe if you use it in a sentence?
I think "Vermutung" (and it's synonyms) is pretty much what I was looking for. Maybe it's even better than "belief" in some ways, since "belief" suggests a higher degree of confidence than "Vermutung" does.
"unterstützen" (to support something) seems right, thanks. But it's useful to have nouns. Also "das unterstützt deine Behauptung nicht" is much wordier than "that's not evidence".
"Evidenz ist all das, was eine Vermutung unterstützt."
I don't usually make a mental distinction between understanding and belief, but that is probably not common.