Reason Has a Mother Tongue
- Jaidis Ameer
- May 26
- 6 min read
By Jaidis Ameer
We often assume obstacles related to interlingual dialogue can be surpassed effortlessly. Many people have access to live translation apps, automatic subtitles on videos, multilingual chatbots, and real-time voice interpretation tools like Google Translate or Zoom’s live transcription, which promise seamless exchange. But translation only works when the logic behind the words carries over, too.
At the AI Action Summit in Paris on February 11, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance warned that “excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off” and that “AI must remain free from ideological bias, and that American AI will not be co‑opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship” (Vance).
Across French commentary, which ranges from tech blogs to Euronews’ analysis, many observers lamented the rapid‑fire succession of claims without an explicit argumentative framework, calling it “déconcertant” and a “missed opportunity” for its lack of clear logical progression (Davies).
Yet English‑style rhetoric often relies on enthymemes—compressed arguments that trust listeners to supply unstated premises—whereas French political discourse insists on a clear-cut syllogistic structure: a stated premise, methodical development, and decisive conclusion.
Leading French experts—from Cédric Villani, noted for his insistence on rigor in public argument (Villani), to Sorbonne AI‑ethics professor Laurence Devillers, who studies the social dimensions of machine reasoning (Devillers)—parroted this critique, observing that Vance’s speech would have fallen flat in France without the explicit logical format their discourse demands.
Le Monde assigned Alexandre Piquard and Philippe Ricard to reproach the address for “lacking the structured, step‑by‑step reasoning expected in French political debate,” arguing that its piled‑on assertions fell apart without a formal argumentative backbone (Piquard and Ricard).
This wasn’t a misunderstanding of English—it was a clash of rhetorical logic. We translate words. But we rarely translate the culturally influenced reasoning behind them.
It’s easy to think of logic as universal—like perpetual rules of reason that surpass linguistic limitations. An assumption like this one overlooks a deeper reality.
Our perception of rationality is conditioned by the languages we speak. Grammar and rhetorical habits don’t just express thought—they structure it. Language is soaked in history, culture, and worldview—every logical framework it supports is already carrying persuasive assumptions.
In other words: logic speaks with an accent.
The idea that logic is influenced by language may seem abstract, but it becomes patent once we think about how people actually reason across cultures. First, the grammatical structure of a language dictates how its speakers organize relationships between ideas. Second, every language carries its own rhetorical patterns, signaling what kinds of persuasion are considered credible. Third, in the aggregate, it becomes clear that what one culture calls “logic” is often a reflection of its worldview—not a universal law, but of cultural design. These three layers—grammar, rhetoric, and cultural style—form the architecture of rational thought.
Grammar is logic’s first teacher. The way a language arranges subjects, objects, and verbs trains us to sequence thought in a few select ways. In this manner, English maps neatly onto classical Western logic: Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
But not all languages share this way of sequencing thought. In topic-prominent languages like Japanese or Korean, the focus often falls on what is being discussed, not who is doing what. These languages often omit the subject and rely on context. As Japanese linguist Susumu Kuno notes, “topic-prominence reflects a fundamentally different way of organizing information” (Kuno). That difference isn’t just stylistic—it affects how logical relationships are formed. Instead of favoring linear deduction, these languages use a circular, context-sensitive logic.
If grammar is the sequential arrangement of thought, then each language builds its logic on different orderings.
Each language encodes its own sense of what counts as persuasive. These rhetorical styles aren’t just matters of flair—they’re endogenous expectations about how truth should be presented. In mainstream, everyday English, popular rhetoric often resists logical rigor, favoring what feels immediate or relatable instead.
Contrast this with Arabic, which employs a poetic and associative rhetorical style. According to Edward Said, classical Arabic argumentation tends to favor repetition and allusion over linear logic (Said; Kaplan). In Arabic discourse, persuasive power comes from moral resonance and cadence—a kind of rhetorical beauty. Similarly, Chinese writing often follows the qi cheng zhuan he structure, which delays the main point until later in the argument (Scollon & Scollon).
What counts as a “convincing argument” isn’t universal—it’s encoded in linguistic and cultural norms. When we dismiss unfamiliar reasoning styles, we’re not judging logic; we’re reacting to unfamiliar rhetoric.
Stepping away from grammar and rhetoric, it becomes clear that entire cultural worldviews dictate which forms of reasoning even register as possible. Take the Buddhist catuṣkoṭi—the “four‑cornered” reasoning of the Madhyamaka school, which insists any proposition P can be true, false, both, or neither. This four-valued logic dismantles the Aristotelian law of excluded middle, inviting practitioners to grapple with aporia—a state of puzzlement or impasse found in both Western philosophy and the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā, or ‘emptiness’—rather than force a choice of one or the other (true or false).
Contrast that with the colonial matrix of power described by Aníbal Quijano. Eurocentric modernity codified a “specific rationality” that equated Western abstraction with universal reason, dismissing other logics as irrational. Quijano argues that this coloniality of knowledge produced dichotomies—“primitive/civilized,” “irrational/rational”—that enforced cultural domination.
Logic, at its center, is not a neutral mirror of reality but a cultural artifact. Whether it welcomes paradox or enforces binaries, a society’s “logic” always carries the imprint of its values.
Assuredly, proponents of formal logic will argue that mathematics and symbolic systems reveal a universality that transcends any particular tongue—that Gödel’s theorems apply whether you think in English, Swahili, or Sanskrit. Some may point out that human cognition shares common neurobiological structures. Others insist that once ideas are translated into a formal language, any remaining differences are superficial. And in domains like engineering or mathematics, shared standards are indispensable.
But acknowledging these universal aspects doesn’t negate the wider implication: even the act of formalizing a problem depends on linguistic and cultural conventions. Translating a real‑world scenario into formal symbols involves choices about what counts as relevant, what gets measured, and what gets ignored. Any such translation compresses reality through the lens of abstraction. Consider how an economist models human behavior as rational self-interest or how a political theorist reduces collective conflict into variables like utility or consent—each model simplifies, omits, and assumes. These aren’t purely technical decisions; they’re interpretive acts grounded in specific intellectual traditions. What appears to be “logical” starts looking more like a reflection of the worldview behind it.
The world’s most persistent misunderstandings aren’t caused by poor translation—they’re caused by the appealing notion that there’s only one way to think clearly. Beneath every sentence lies a structure of thought built not just by grammar, but by cultural reasoning. What sounds evasive in one language may be wisdom in another.
If we accept that logic wears an accent, we open the door to genuine intercultural understanding. What might happen if translators—and thinkers—stopped seeking a universal logic and instead celebrated the plurality of reasoning styles? Could accepting many “accents of logic” become our greatest tool for collaboration and innovation?
Works Cited
Davies, William. “AI Summit: French Analysts Critique Vance’s Speech.” Euronews, 12 Feb.
2025.
Devillers, Laurence. “Ethical Issues of Generative AI.” CLARIN, 2023,
Kuno, Susumu. “Evidence for Subject Raising in Japanese.” Papers in Japanese Linguistics,
vol. 1, no. 1, 1972, pp. 24–50. ERIC, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED069185.pdf.
Piquard, Alexandre, and Philippe Ricard. “At Paris Summit, the US Charges Against AI
‘Censorship’.” Le Monde, 12 Feb. 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/02/12/at-the-paris-summit-the-us-
Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Coloniality at
Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique
Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 181–224.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Penguin Classics, 2003.
Scollon, Ron, and Suzanne Wong Scollon. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse
Approach. 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2001.
Villani, Cédric. “For a Meaningful Artificial Intelligence: Towards a French and European
Strategy.” AI for Humanity, 2018.
“Remarks by the Vice President at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris,
France.” The American Presidency Project, 11 Feb. 2025,
Jaidis Ameer is a freshman at CT State Tunxis.
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