Maggie's Farm

I suggest this is incomplete. they're speaking of mind and language, but there's really a triad here: mind, language and sense perception. the mind perceives the world only through the physical senses, expresses ideas only through language. and just as important, these three have evolved together. the human mind has evolved influenced by the five primary senses, and so has language. so if I say "cat" then every reader here, having the same shared sensory experience of x years of knowing cats understands completely the concept of "catness" through that word. thus mind, experience and language are comfortably united.

now consider "photon" or "quark". its not the constraints of language that limits our understanding of these, but our inability to perceive them directly in the way we experience cats. the mind isn't constructed to comprehend the nature of photons directly. the mind has created the word (language) "photon", but that is an incomplete expression of a what actually is quantum having particle/wave duality with mass 0, spin 1, charge 0, etc. Its an awkward language construction because the mind through the sense can not perceive them directly and hence cannot develops the language to describe them with the simple elegance it does with the word "cat".

in other words, among an intelligent species that could directly perceive the subatomic world, the word "photon" would convey the same degree of direct knowledge as "cat" does for us.