FWD: Comment by Michael Silverstein on the '(Sapir-)Whorf hypothesis'

[Richard J. Senghas]

[Another forwarding from Alan Rumsey.... -RJS]

Since Michael Silverstein is not on the LingAnth list, I sent him all the
correspondence we have been having lately about the origins of the phrase
'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis', and he sent me back the following remarks, asking
me to post them on the net. I'm not sure if my last posting (on Dec. 20)
reached any of you, since it didn't come back to me via the list. Perhaps
the net is set up to work that way, excluding the poster from the list of
recipients, but just so I can be sure, could someone please send a message
back to me acknowledging receipt of this one?

Here's Michael:

Looking up something in the journal _Language_ vol. 40, no. 2 (1964) this
morning, I happened upon A. Richard Diebold's monograph-length review of
the old Sol Saporta, ed. _Psycholinguistics: A Book of Readings (1961),
with a most interesting discussion of part VIII of the book, "Linguistic
Relativity and the relation of linguistic processes to perception and
cognition," which starts out with Whorf's "Science and linguistics" and
then moves on to present Greenberg, Lenneberg, Brown, etc.  Dick's
discussion is most illuminating on the matter of how this whole area was
referred to, and thought about, and you might send in to LingAnth a note
for people like Rich Senghas to read it:  Lg. 40(2).249ff. (1964).  P.252:
"A decade after the publication of paper included in the reader, Whorf's
ideas were collectively (and loosely) referred to as his 'hypothesis' and
the topic of linguistic relativity itself as 'metalinguistics'.  There
followed at least one program conceived to systematically examine the
Whorfian hypothesis, the Conference... .  The most recent
phase...began...with serious attempts to formalize the Whorfian hypothesis."
So note Sapir doesn't figure in this discussion, despite Hoijer's paper
title at the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago conference
of 23-27 March 1953 that Redfield and Uncle Miltie sponsored in their
Comparison of Civilizations project (Ford Fdtn) and invited Hoijer to
preside over.  Hoijer's paper title clearly is a renvoi to the earlier
formulation published in A. L. Kroeber, ed. _Anthropology Today: An
Encyclopedic Inventory_ (U of Chicago Press, 1953), as Hoijer, Harry.  "The
relation of language to culture."  In A. L. Kroeber, ed. AT, pp.554-74.
(The papers were originally duplicated by May 1952, and the conference took
place in New York -- Wenner-Gren Foundation! -- on 9-20 June 1952.  These
were considered "Inventory" papers of particular areas of anthropological
concern.
Here we find Hoijer's position laid out:
p.558:  "The central problem of this report is, then, a thesis [N.B.]
suggested by Sapir in many of his writings and later developed in more
detail by Whorf and others [Dorothy D. Lee and H. Hoijer are elaborately
discussed as well].  In terms of this thesis, ... .  Sapir has stated this
thesis in the following words: ... .  Whorf, in a later study inspired by
Sapir's example, ... "
p.560: "The most important of the studies that document the thesis outlined
in section 3 is undoubtedly the work of Benjamin L. Whorf, specifically in
his paper on 'The Relation of Habitual Behavior and Thought to Language'
(1941c) [sic! H got the binomial backwards]."
p.571: "To conclude, there is much in the thesis we have outlined that
requires testing; the work of Whorf (on Hopi), Lee (on Wintu), and myself
(on Navaho) serves only to rough out a hypothesis on the relation of
language to culture, not conclusively to demonstrate it.  We must, as Whorf
has noted (1941c, p. 93), have many more contrastive studies ... ."
So note how Hoijer uses the term 'thesis' in its rhetorical sense, a
statable position on something, and then substitutes the more
science-discourse oriented term 'hypothesis' when he is specifically
denoting the formulate-and-test-and-infer logic of empirical scientific
work.  By the time of the next-year's conference, this caption had
apparently gelled sufficiently for Hoijer to be used forthwith.  In the two
famous papers of the late 1950s, Trager's and Fishman's, however, it is
Whorf alone whose "Whorf hypothesis" or "Whorfian hypothesis" constitutes
the title of the their "systematizations," that is, systematizations as
[Scientific, empirical] HYPOTHESIS.
Would you send this bibliographic information on to Rich Senghas for
LingAnth on my behalf, please?  It should supplement the other information.