eliminating bias through language?

English can distinguish between hear/listen/overhear/eavesdrop to distinguish different ways how people perceive sound.

As an English speaker it's however not easily possible to do the same with smell perception.

A language like Esperanto however has the ability to express the concept because you can combine syllables to make words in Esperanto.

A friend who who's deeply into Esperanto said that reasoning in Esperanto allowed him to understand things about meditation that can be expressed in Esperanto but not directly in English without making up new jargon this allowed him to understand things that would be harder otherwise.

Making up new words for a concept is always possible, but grammar that makes it possible to make up a term to express a concept that the listener hasn't heard before exists in some languages but not in others.

If you take math, not having to make up a new word to say 42 but be able to express the concept with existing building blocks is very valuable. If you would have a language that needs a new word for 42 you had a problem operating in modern society that you couldn't just fix by adding a lot of jargon for specific words.

Not easily being able to express the intentionality difference of hear/listen does make some conversations about meditation harder in English than in Esperanto.

If you would design a language for maximum intellectual utility you can look into systematizing fields of knowledge so that you can express concepts to without the need for making up jargon that has to be learned separately.

By "make its users more aware of their biases" I mean, for example, a language where it's really obvious when you say something illogical, or have a flaw in your reasoning.

Some ideas I had for this:

• Explicitly defined sematic spaces for every word, to dissolve questions [LW · GW] and help people agree on the locations of phenomena in thingspace. Mechanisms for searching thingspace (while, for example, you can say "red chair" to narrow the space of all chairs down to the space of all chairs which reflect red light, it would be nice to be able to express things like "thing such that there is no meaningful answer to the question 'is it a chair' "
• A fourth grammatical category which, alongside tense, aspect, and mood, indicates your relationship to the statement. For example, "Apples taste good" would have a relationship of "speaker's observation-derived opinion", and "Mars is a planet" would have a relationship of "property of speaker's consensus-derived world model". This would make the statement "Socrates is a man" feel more like "My brain perceptually classifies Socrates as a match against the 'human' concept"

• Distinctions between "logically true" (true in all possible worlds, i.e. 1+1=2), "Occam's-razor true" (~100% chance of being true in all minus a negligible amount of the worlds that could be ours, i.e. there is no God), and "empirically true" (~100% chance of being true in THIS world specifically, i.e. the sky is blue), and "illogically infinitely true" (true in this world but not in all possible worlds. This is impossible IRL and would only be used in thought experiments.)

   

That's a pretty big "somehow".