Did Dick Cheney "shoot his hunting partner," or did he "pull the trigger and then see his friend get wounded"? Live from the Marsh Theater in Berkeley, John and Ken discuss how language can affect the way we think about responsibility with Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky. John and Ken begin by pondering the infamous case of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction.” John argues that no matter how you describe what happened, it still happened in one way and, as such, we will assign responsibility uniformly. Disagreeing, Ken insists that how we linguistically frame the situation, in eitheragentiveorpassivelanguage, colors how we are inclined to assign blame to Timberlake. If language can shape thought, Ken continues, and different languages use different ways of speaking about the causes of events, then conceptions of responsibility could actually vary across speakers of different languages.

莱拉也参与了她自己的研究，即在考虑一种情况时，说不同语言的人会有不同的注意目标。她解释说，语言会影响我们对事件众多细节的记忆。例如，在西班牙语中，如果一个事件是一个意外，它更可能被描述为删除代理人:“书丢失了。”另一方面，英语通常采用一种更以主体为中心的责任模式，可能不太考虑情境因素。这些差异可能会影响我们对正义的直觉感受，我们解释科学发现的因果关系的能力，以及我们对文化和语言本身之间因果关系的理解。

在回答一位听众关于我们应该如何理解代理的问题时，约翰简要地评论了长期以来关于自由意志的哲学辩论。此外，本书还探讨了赋予事物单一名称而不是用短语描述的力量。Ken, John和Lera都同意，对某件事有一个紧凑的参考会使它变得突出，并有助于在未来对那件事的一个现成的解释。最后，一名观众表示，仍然存在一些普世的思维方式，不受语言差异的影响，比如宗教。但Lera指出，即使是宗教，也在某种程度上进行了修改，使其与当地文化保持一致;我们说话的方式和我们思考的方式是密不可分的。

• Roving Philosophical Report(Seek to 6:16): Reporter Caitlin Esch speaks with Hamish Sinclair, founder of Manalive, a program in Bay Area prisons designed to train offenders how to talk about violence and responsibility in a way that will allow them to peacefully integrate back into society.
• 60-Second Philosopher(见49:15):伊恩·肖尔斯(Ian Schoales)滑稽地评论了追究责任的主观性质，涉及从克林顿到英国石油公司(BP)的所有问题。