Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism

[Victor Steinbok]

  Well, not exactly. The article by Lera Boroditsky claims that
"language profoundly influences the way people see the world".

http://bit.ly/bC2FwP
Lost In Translation (Does Language Influence Culture?)

Interestingly, the question here appears only to go one way. The
suggestion that culture influences language is left for another day--or,
more likely, for another publication. Otherwise, WSJ might appear
questioning Constitutional originalism, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

But I am also rather bothered by the "explanatory" side column:

> Use Your Words
> Some findings on how language can affect thinking.
>
> Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are
> better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
> Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than
> left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
> The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like
> few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
> In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the
> agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why?
> In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase
> broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase."

All of these strike me as peculiar. The first one is vague as to what is
meant by "better able to visually discriminate shades of blue". Are they
better at differentiating at two different hues side by side or do they
simply name them differently when encountered in the wild? If it's the
former, there may be some interesting neuropsychology involved. If it's
the latter, it's just another version of 30 words for snow. I expect
this to have been added by the editor.

But the author is responsible for his own howlers too. I'm dumbfounded
by the claim, "The idea that language might shape thought was for a long
time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and
wrong." This is followed by a comment about "a flurry of new cognitive
science research". I wonder what qualifies as "new". Hasn't this kind of
research been around /at least/ since the early 1970s? (I have reprints
of articles on the psychology of color perception to prove it.)

I'll leave the rest of the criticism to experts.

     VS-)

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