December 26th, 2006 Posted in Psychology
Linguistic Relativity, what a mess….
Had to write a very short essay on “arguments for and against the strong Whorfian view with respect to the way we think” over the last few weeks. Read a shitload of papers and book chapters on the subject of language influencing thought. Findings:
- Nobody agrees on the terms “linguistic relativity” and “linguistic determinism”
- Nearly all the authors misquote Whorf and misunderstand his ideas
- Some (especially Steven Pinker) go off on emotional rants :ermm:
- Whorf seems to have been ignored because he wasn’t in the right gang
- Cognitive science slated the idea that language influences thought, then has had to eat it’s words as it is now a basic assumption of theirs that it does…
And on it goes. I’m getting really sick of so called scientists misquoting and misunderstanding each other, bitching about each others backgrounds and generally acting like children. This is supposed to be “science”, the pinnacle of human reason. It reads more like a bunch of insecure children, or “insecurely attached individuals”, to use a more “scientific” phrase.
The end of all this is that there is no evidence for Linguistic Determinism. There is lots of evidence for Linguistic Relativity, the so called “weaker” version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The hypothesis has been hashed and restated so many times, it might be time to just throw it all away and start again…