Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism

[Jonathan Lighter]

JHC!  Not Sapir-Whorf and linguistic determinism again!  (It's frequently
presented as "lexical determinism," which is even more bizarre.)

The "strong interpretation" of S-W - that our understanding of reality is in
thrall to and crippled by the syntax and lexicon of our language - is almost
certainly nonsense. ( Of course, it's also very popular in postmodernist
circles (cf. recent thread on "transgendered").  If it were true, though,
accurate translation would be impossible. New "paradigms" (relativity, for
example, in the context of an Indo-European language like German) would be
virtually impossible as well. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine any
nonlinguistic behavior that is dictated by syntax. (It may be that the
strong interpretation does apply to infants, whose world is necesarily very
limited.)

The "weak interpretation" is more credible and generally held by linguists:
the idea that syntax, plus the extent of our personal lexicon, *may*
influence our expectations and can encourage merely conventional patterns of
thought. Some experimental evidence seems to support this hypothesis.

An effective combination-of-ingredients remedy exists, though, for many of
the limitations language may impose. The ingredients are "logic " and
"interaction with other human beings because no two minds are identical."

OTOH, my post of July 31, 2009, seems to show that lexicon alone
can dramatically determine behavior.

JL

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 5:52 AM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  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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