How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think? | Hacker News Reader

How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think?

lambda-the-ultimate.org

25 pointsswannodette5 comments

I'm surprised that the author of the article managed to make an entire essay without once referring to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Perhaps the simplest explanation of the SWH is "language cuts the grooves in which our minds move."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Lakoff has made this more popular and accessable to non-linguist with books like "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" (which I recommend reading, and the author mentioned briefly).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

I took a class from George at Berkeley. We used Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought as the text. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

The article (http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index....) is well worth reading. She explains that English speakers will usually refer to a "short movie" or "long movie," and that Spanish and Greek speakers will usually say "small movie" or "big movie." Then:

"Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)"

That one parenthetical sentence blew my mind.

Edit: Added some missing context to the article quote.

As I said in the other version of this:

Psycholinguistics research has repeatedly shown that the amount of influence is minimal, amounting to, in general, forcing you to pay attention to certain aspects of the world more so when you're describing using language than when you're thinking about things in other ways. E.g., you notice color differences more quickly or more accurately when you have to choose between two words that your language could have, than if you were picking a tee-shirt. Or you're more attentive to left and right orientation if your language has words for left and right when you're talking about something positioned relative to your body, but if you're just trying to navigate somewhere or looking for something, your language doesn't affect your thinking.

This effect is precisely what you'd expect, ofcourse, because you get it for absolutely everything else. If your culinary habits involve avoiding high fructose corn syrup, when you're looking for food you're going to be quicker to notice the presence of HFCS than if you're just talking to someone and they mention the corn industry's current HFCS production rates or whatever.

The generalization: when some cognitive task requires that you pay special attention to something, you will. Language is not special in this regard.

And that is how language influences the way we think.

The actual article by Lera Boroditsky at the edge.org:

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index....

Pretty interesting article, once I got past how hot the author was, and how young she was when she became a professor at MIT. Women like that used to fill my dreams.

I think it's self evident that language influences articulate cognition. It's a discrete index to a world of continuous phenomenon. But not all cognition is articulate. How far do our linguistic markers reach? Take math for example. When a mathematician intuits a proof, he's already conversant in the language of mathematics. He'll use that language to construct a formal proof. But did it also help in the first place?

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