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Comment by skytreader | Hacker News Reader

Has it? I'm genuinely curious to know. "Widely considered discredited" sounds like it's met the same fate as ether or alchemy.

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.

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When I took linguistics classes in school it was summarily brushed off, but here's how Wikipedia summarizes:

> 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.

Well, DUH! Did anybody put forward the first version which sounds like a strawman?

"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).

Well, based on my own introspection, the strong version looks obviously true to me - so I'm glad someone took time to disprove it.

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.

For a long time in human history people did not accept the existence of negative numbers; a Greek mathematician couldn't solve x+1=0 for example (this one also has "zero" in it, which also did not exist for some mathematicians). This seems like a decent example for linguistic categories limiting the thinkable categories. Other Greek examples: Zeno's paradoxes, irrational numbers, ...

>This seems like a decent example for linguistic categories limiting the thinkable categories.

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.

Seems like a bad one. New concepts are given new names, or borrowed names, when they’re introduced. The first guy to come up with zero didn’t speak a language with a word for zero at the time.

>I'm glad someone took time to disprove it

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 do you think "disprove" means in this context though?

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.

>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.

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.

> Only in such soft sciences you can "prove" any number of competing hypothesis, and have fractions arguing about them for decades or centuries.

It took millennia for spontaneous generation to be definitively disproven.

That's exactly my point, as that was before we settled on the scientific method.

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.

It was actually a few hundred years after the modern scientific method because scientists attempting to apply the method failed to spot confounding factors and interpreted their results incorrectly, something I think is hardly impossible even today in even the hardest of supposed hard sciences.

> Well, DUH! Did anybody put forward the first version which sounds like a strawman?

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.

Having actually worked with James Cooke Brown on Loglan (I wrote the first Yacc grammar for it), I have to say my recollection is that Jim's view was more tentative and nuanced than you've made it sound. While we certainly enjoyed finding things that seemed easier to say in Loglan than English, I don't recall him ever suggesting that there might be a thought that a non-Loglan speaker couldn't think.

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.

Thanks. My understanding was that Loglan was simply a mechanism to play around with the Sapir-Whorf theory among humans, but thanks for the additional context/correction.

Alchemy is a bit more reasonable.

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.

I'm not sure how the study you linked is an indictment of the weak version. It seems to fall well under my understanding of the consensus that the weak version is only true to a certain extent and definitely not to the extent Sapir and Whorf originally claimed.

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?

The study shows that differences in systems of direction words doesn't really affect spatial reasoning.

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?

Given that language is also created or modified by people in order to get their ideas across, wouldn’t it make sense if one can have thoughts arise that don’t fit into language but then they cannot be shared without the creation of appropriate language. I often have the experience of having ideas that I have in a sort of mathematical reasoning space (this here makes that there impossible) that I have to translate into English. (Eg If the the call is routed at the IP layer then they can’t reach this no matter what DNS they have access to)

People do, of course, create new vocabulary, but that's not modifying language on a deep level. And, in part that's a convenience: even when you don't have a "word" for something, you can generally describe it. But if it's something you're going to refer to frequently having a nice lexical entry for it is more convenient. We have memory limitations, so sometimes having convenient handles can free up resources.

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.

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