On the other side of the ledger, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is widely considered discredited by linguists.
I commented on SWH a few months ago in HN too when another user, claiming background in linguistics, replied that it factors in your world view but not as huge a factor as other cultural considerations. That sounded reasonable.
So as of the last time I looked up SWH (a few months ago), my knowledge of its consensus is that:
- the weak form ("relativism") is true to a certain extent, and definitely not to the extent Whorf originally proposed.
- the strong form ("determinism") is largely debated and, personally, I think it's indefensible as a thesis.
> The strong version, or linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.
> The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions. Research on weaker forms has produced positive empirical evidence for a relationship.
"language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists"
The use of words like "determine" appears to make it look bogus. Whereas "influences" basically means the same thing (in practical terms, strongly influences is just as good as determines).
When I read the description, I understand "determines" as in, your thoughts internally work in terms of language processing, so their complexity is limited to the complexity of the language(s) you know. It sounds plausible, but also testable by checking if humans who never learned a language with complex grammar are capable of processing complex concepts.
As in absolutely limiting them, though? Like the Ancient Greeks, those who invented zero, didn't have it previously in their language, and couldn't do zero-based equations before either.
What do you think "disprove" means in this context though?
E.g. do you think they really settled anything, the way we can prove a math theorem or verify some physical theory to hold (as a predictive model) to the nth degree of precision?
>When I read the description, I understand "determines" as in, your thoughts internally work in terms of language processing, so their complexity is limited to the complexity of the language(s) you know.
That would mean that developing further language is impossible or even that developing the first languages would be impossible - as those nearly language-less peoples have no means to develop those more complex later concepts.
It's not like e.g. Europeans (let's take them as a model of "advanced" language) emerged in nature in fully formed ancient Greek, Latin, English, French, etc.
They started with the same or even more "constrained" languages (verbally and conceptually) as any primitive people, and - going back to our forefathers - even language-less.
What it means for every scientific hypothesis: it takes infinite amount of evidence to positively prove it, but it takes one counterexample to kill it. +/- the usual uncertainty caveats.
> That would mean that developing further language is impossible or even that developing the first languages would be impossible
Not necessarily. It would mean that you can't think about some concepts without first extending the language to support them. Languages still could be extended piece by piece.
Only in such soft sciences you can "prove" any number of competing hypothesis, and have fractions arguing about them for decades or centuries. And whether a "counter example" is valid and "kills" a theory, will be a matter of interpretation and endlessly debated as well.
>It would mean that you can't think about some concepts without first extending the language to support them. Languages still could be extended piece by piece.
If you can always extend a language to new concepts, the language is not limiting in the strong SWH sense. If it was it would be impossible to reach those concepts from a reduced set of concepts.
It took millennia for spontaneous generation to be definitively disproven.
So this might have been relatedto biology (or in other domains physics, chemistry, and so on), but the matter was debated in the soft sciences way, not in the way we do biology in the 20th century.
A lot of proto-linguistic (I say proto because linguistics want a real discipline yet) thought in the '50s-'60s did actually believe this. It was the informal basis for teaching lots of colonized peoples Western languages. It was the basis for the book 1984's Newspeak. It was also the hypothesis that motivated the creation of the Loglan (predecessor to the more well known, but still obscure, language Lojban) language. That you find this to be a strawman argument is a good testament to how widespread the knowledge of its disproval has become.
N.B. I also think in the pop programming language world (e.g. Twitter rants) that a lot of folks genuinely believe something similar to Strong Sapir-Whorf, at least as applied to programming languages.
I think it would be fairer to say that he was convinced that Whorfian effects were strong enough that there would be value in engineering a language to take advantage of them. But while value is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, I would say this hypothesis has not held up well either.
Even the weak version falls apart under scrutiny. Here's a nice example of this: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/web.sas.upenn.edu/dist/4/81/fi...
This is a good example of a case where there was a phenomenon (a language prominently using non-speaker-oriented direction terms, and correlations with real-world behaviour of speakers of that language) which seemed to support a weak version of SW, but it turns that seemingly supporting evidence was really just a by-product of the testing environment.
So this does present an interesting result, and one that (AFAICT---I am not a linguist by training) does run counter to the claims of SWH but, more importantly, the study is limited only to spatial reasoning. Surely there are more areas of thought than that?
Yes, this one study doesn't disprove every aspect of SWH, but it's a good example of how SWH claims, even in the weaker versions, tend to fare when subject to more rigorous investigation & analysis.
What area of thought do you think provides good evidence for (some version of) the SWH?
And your example, I think, also speaks to the point: you're able to reason in mathematical ways; being a speaker of English doesn't block this, even though English perhaps doesn't offer convenient vocabulary for this in all cases.
Though even in programming, there are e.g. non turing complete languages (e.g. simple regex languages), languages without certain high level facilities (making it much harder to organize your code in terms of certain concepts - analogous to organizing your thinking of the world around certain concepts -, which is a SWH-like effect), languages that can't express e.g. infinite loops and are certain to terminate (used e.g. for business logic, templating, etc), and so on.
Even if it all goes down to assembly, a language like Cobol might it much harder to write e.g. a 3D game. And that can be enough for games not be written in that language - it doesn't have to be impossible, just hard, which is enough to discourage most, aside from a few weirdos writing games in Cobol and compilers in bash.
You seem to respect everything labeled academic, but not all "areas of expertise" and not all "fields" are equally valid -- and surely not just because they are taught in universities, written about in "peer reviewed" journals, and so on.
Linguistics is closer to soft sciences than the opposite.
I assure you, I really don't.
> but not all "areas of expertise" and not all "fields" are equally valid -- and surely not just because they are taught in universities, written about in "peer reviewed" journals, and so on.
Fully agreed.
> Linguistics is closer to soft sciences than the opposite.
"Linguistics" spans a range of things from the humanities to the 'soft' sciences (in the sense that psychology and cognitive studies 'soft' sciences) to logic/maths.