Do We Think and Communicate in Quantum Ways? On the Presence of Quantum Structures in Language

While some of the properties of quantum mechanics are essentially linked to the nature of the microworld, others are connected to fundamental structures of the world at large and could therefore in principle also appear in other domains than the micro-world. The aim of this article is to show the presence of genuine quantum structures in human language. More in particular, we will point out the violation of Bell's inequalities in specific situations encountered in language. The first sections of this article explain why the violation of Bell's inequalities is proof of the presence of genuine quantum structures, and how over the past decades this insight has increasingly made itself felt in the foundations of quantum mechanics research. This article also contains an overview of earlier work of ours discussing the detection of quantum structures in other domains than the micro-world.

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