to me this suggests that language strongly influences behavior
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Usually it results in an "equal and opposite backlash". Once they started calling children "Special" in school, "Special" became the ultimate insult.
EDIT: For a neuroscience reference that also argues why the general perspective is obviously false: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4874898/. But really, these things ought to be obvious from introspection.
There was a fad called "structuralism" that liked to imagine that such and such is "structured like a language" but then when we got a paradigm for language it was one of those "normal science" paradigms that Kuhn warned you about, like you could write papers grounded in the Chomsky theory for a lifetime but it wouldn't help you learn to read Chinese more quickly or speak German without an accent or program a computer to parse tweets. That is, the structure of language is absolutely useless except for writing papers about linguistics -- and the "language instinct" becomes some peripheral that grafts onto an animal but you need the rest of the animal for it to work.
Now LLMs may not be a model for how we do it but they are certainly going to bring back structuralist and "wordcel" positions because they do seem to show, somehow, that "language is all you need" to accomplish whatever it is LLMs accomplish.
People will try to bring back these obviously false models of cognition, but, so far, the dismal performance of LLMs on e.g. SpatialBench [1], and, almost certainly ARC-AGI-3, or e.g. the kind of data and effort required to get something like V-JEPA-2 [2], will be strong counter-examples to this. And, yeah, obviously animal cognition, esp. smart animals like birds, or the crazy stuff we see in chimp and gorilla ethology (border patrols, genocides, humor, theory of mind, bla bla bla).
Agents who only speak Rust have no conception of what runtime errors are, for instance. Fascists won't understand concepts like "universal human rights" as in their worldview there is nothing universal about humanity as a whole.
This is also sort of a wordcel take, in that it neglects that there are plenty of mental structures that are not solely linguistic. I.e. visuo-spatial models, auditory models, kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, emotional, gustatory, or even maybe intuitive models, and symbolic models (which have both linguistic and visuo-spatial aspects). Yes, your models constrain your perception of reality, but it is not clear how important language really is to many of those models (and there is strong evidence it may not matter at all to a lot of cognition [3]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/relativi...
> evidence from neuroimaging and neurological patients
Has "neuroimaging" successfully modelled those "universal human rights" the OP was mentioning? If yes, how did it look?
More generally, positing that all languages are, in the end, interchangeable (because that's what the opponents of something similar to Sapir-Worf are saying) is very reactionary and limited in itself, and its telling them me calling those anti-Sapir-Worf people "reactionaries" will for sure tickle in them something that wouldn't have happened had I used a different "neuoroimaged" concept which, supposedly, should have meant the same thing for them (but it doesn't).
See any of my links, but especially the third. Animal cognition and human neuroscience studies strongly disprove the importance of language to cognition. Conflating language and thought is so obviously false in 2026 it is extraordinary that people still think like this.
I was ignoring the comment about fascists because it is simplistic and low-quality, and will similarly not be responding to whatever you (incorrectly) think I was claiming about universal human rights. I only wanted to correct the extremely false (or at least hugely overstated) assumptions about language and perception of reality.
This extra abstract reasoning capacity absolutely does constrain your ontology -- you don't know what you don't know (the graph doesn't witness its substrate).
This is obviously deeply incorrect, and the kind of thing that people call "wordcel" thinking. Mathematical intelligence is highly visuospatial, and often requires constructing images and/or imagining motion (arguably invoking also either proprioceptive and/or kinaesthetic qualia).
Is it possible you are aphantasic? This seems to me to be the only way one could think that one cannot have non-verbal internally generated representations.
I have a fine mind's eye and a functional inner voice. I'm speaking to the difference between, say, a reactive perception model (which is a model) and an abstracted cognition model (which is also a model, but one that can be interacted with without external input). It is clear almost all animals have the former, and a couple might have the latter, but this distinction is a core concern for usage of abstract systems such as linguistics.
This distinction seems perfectly fine and clear to me, so I suspect we probably actually don't disagree that much on specifics, and that this was maybe a semantic / violent agreement thing.
I still don't think this distinction helps defend your statement "Language constrains your perception of reality to only the set of concepts conceivable within that language.", because, obviously, you can have abstract cognitive models ('concepts') that are non-linguistic, and thus, your perception of reality is not constrained only by language. I.e. remove the "only" and I have no real substantive disagreement.
So it seems we can probably mostly agree on something like "Your abstractions constrain your perception of reality to only the set of concepts [ideas, representations] conceivable from those abstractions".
It is tricky because "concept" can strongly imply a linguistic model, and "model" is really the term we want here, e.g. a "visuospatial concept" is unusual, I admit. But, still, linguistic models are definitely not the only game in town re: perception.
It's the opposite. People make up new concepts all the time for which they have no words, to then give it a name. Language is composable, words and names are just a mean to improve communication, make it faster, more efficient.
> Agents who only speak Rust have no conception of what runtime errors are, for instance.
Agents don't really learn. They have a fixed set of data and everything new has to be pressed into the prompt. This is unrelated to language.