ABSTRACT
Much communication research invokes the concept of mindlessness-mindfulness under various guises. Mindlessness refers to both chronic and state conditions in which individuals consider available information and alternatives incompletely, rigidly, reflexively, and thoughtlessly. To the extent that communicators behave mindlessly and mindlessness contributes to maladaptive physical, psychological, and behavioral states, it becomes useful to determine what triggers or reinforces mindless and/or mindful behavior. The position forwarded in this essay is that one neglected factor in understanding mindlessness-mindfulness is language, which by its very nature may encourage mindless or mindful behavior. Although it does not inherently demand misuse, routine language use, by virtue of its abstracting properties and reliance on identities and categorization, can create a false appearance of completeness, promote stimulus generalization rather than discrimination, encourage word-object confusions, and abet heuristic reasoning rather than ratiocination. By functioning to hold things still so that they may be considered, described, or discussed, language may contribute to a lack of awareness of mutability, variation, or creative use of what is described. Through semantic and syntactic constructions that mimic sound argumentative discourse, language may also structure responses and prompt fallacious reasoning. However, language may also mitigate mindlessness. Novel use of language and linguistic markers of conditionals, context, and multiple perspectives in everyday speech are among the mechanisms posited to engender more mindful thoughts and behavior.
