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The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Linguistic Theory

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13 pointsleoht10 comments

I'm a linguist and my personal observation is that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (in its stronger form) is mostly thriving among non-linguists; it's usually psychologists (but there's also at least one instance of an economist) that make these "revolutionary" discoveries that have been considered disproved by linguists for several decades. Lera Boroditsky who's referenced in this piece is among those.

Linguistic determinism (aka. The Whorfian Interpretation, aka. strong linguistic relativity) hasn't been "a thing" among linguists for a long time but the light, bidirectional version, "linguistic relativity", has always—more or less—been in play. Here the issue is mainly answering the questions: "To what degree do language and thought affect each other? And how?"

One of the scientists I respect the most, Paul Kay[0], has been working with that in particular. He went from being a full-on universalist in the '60s to a relativist (now) because of new discoveries. He's done a bunch of research alongside Terry Regier et al. on linguistic relativity in the color domain (several great articles linked in [0]). Anyone interested in this topic would probably find those articles interesting.

[0]: http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/

Academics who push the strong S-W Hypothesis in spite of all the evidence against it are usually doing so for ideological reasons. Basically, the idea is to discredit liberalism by claiming it is based on a rigid idea of reality the SWH is alleged to have shown is wrong.

But these same academics then turn around and argue in favor of a Marxist ideology that is equally based on an absolute metaphysics.

Lately I've trying to learn Swedish. Sometimes EN to SE translations are fairly direct, but other times you have to adopt a different mode of thinking before you can properly translate what you wish to say. In English, we can use the verb "to think" in a fairly versatile manner:

- I think it's a good film (expressing a normative judgement)

- I think she is the SVP (expressing a value-neutral belief)

- I'm thinking about it (expressing the act of contemplation)

Yet if you're a native English speaker, I don't think it feels particularly versatile (at least it doesn't to me). This is just what thinking is about. By contrast, the Swedes consider these cases wholly distinct, and have different words for each.

- Jag tycker att filmen är bra

- Jag tror att hon är den SVP

- Jag tänker på det

Most English speakers have a very difficult time getting these straight. I don't really have a final word here. I just think this is a nice illustration of why the weaker version of this theory resonates with me lately.

This hypothesis is as widely accepted as it's unsupported by any evidence. It's also quite insidious as it underlies many "social justice" efforts to police language. Insidious, because while the benefits are very likely to be non-existent, the censorious consequences and the contentiousness they generate are very real.

This is the basis of the short story "The Story of Your Life" from which the film "Arrival" was adapted.

Also Heinleins Stranger in A Strange Land. Martian speakers unlock psychic powers.

Also Stephenson's "Snow Crash."

It's an interesting idea, but pretty thoroughly debunked.

And "Babel-17" by Sameul R. Delaney.

Debunked linguistics sure make for interesting sci-fi.

That's extremely overstated.

Ted Chiang, the author of the story, would disagree with you.

http://sf.geekitude.com/content/ted-chiang-interview-armadil...

"Original inspiration for the story was not about linguistics. Originally I wanted to write a story about someone who knew the future, but was unable to change it. What sort of emotions that person might experience, knowing that both good things and bad things were going to happen, and not able to do anything about it? I had to figure out how to grant this protagonist ability to know the future. I toyed with a couple of possibilities: through meditative experience, through mind-altering drugs, some other experimental treatments? None of those seemed particularly interesting to me.

Then I remembered Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Learning a language and then being able to know the future -- that seemed a very interesting idea to me. It was only then that it became a story about linguistics.

At that time I didn't know a whole lot about linguistics, and I realized it was going to be a very difficult story to write. I thought I wasn't a good enough writer to write this story. I spent the next few years reading books about linguistics and working on my writing, and then finally I felt I knew enough about linguistics to fake it, and I was going to give it a try."

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