Here’s my (rather proto-scientific, I admit - take it with a grain of salt) take of linguistic relativity / Sapir-Whorf:
There are two types of thought: verbal and non-verbal. Non-verbal thinking is messy, not fully reliable and quite costly, but we use it quite a bit in our everyday. That part of the thought shouldn’t be affected directly by the languages that you speak, and it’s potentially in large part biological. (And perhaps not too different from what chimps think.)
On the other hand, verbal thought is far more structured, and relies on the languages that you speak. This means that they will influence how you think in some situations, making some concepts and ideas slightly easier to reach depending on the language.
If my hypothesis is correct, then strong Sapir-Whorf (language dictates thought) is false, but weak Sapir-Whorf (language influences thought) is likely true.
This seems intuitively correct to me. I like it because it extends in a more general way which includes mathematics and pretty much any learned skill. I was certainly not able to think about statistical problems effectively before I learned the language of statistics, for example. I mean, you certainly could, but the effort required would be incomparably large.
People continue learning for their entire lives. They learn what they practice. They practice with the tools they have available. They choose what to practice based at least in part on those tools. The tools inform the questions they ask as well as the answers they reach. Like the old saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It seems to me like denying the “weak” Sapir-Whorf hypothesis basically means denying the influence of culture and circumstance on development, which is…uh…a bit outdated, to say the least.
Here’s my (rather proto-scientific, I admit - take it with a grain of salt) take of linguistic relativity / Sapir-Whorf:
There are two types of thought: verbal and non-verbal. Non-verbal thinking is messy, not fully reliable and quite costly, but we use it quite a bit in our everyday. That part of the thought shouldn’t be affected directly by the languages that you speak, and it’s potentially in large part biological. (And perhaps not too different from what chimps think.)
On the other hand, verbal thought is far more structured, and relies on the languages that you speak. This means that they will influence how you think in some situations, making some concepts and ideas slightly easier to reach depending on the language.
If my hypothesis is correct, then strong Sapir-Whorf (language dictates thought) is false, but weak Sapir-Whorf (language influences thought) is likely true.
This seems intuitively correct to me. I like it because it extends in a more general way which includes mathematics and pretty much any learned skill. I was certainly not able to think about statistical problems effectively before I learned the language of statistics, for example. I mean, you certainly could, but the effort required would be incomparably large.
People continue learning for their entire lives. They learn what they practice. They practice with the tools they have available. They choose what to practice based at least in part on those tools. The tools inform the questions they ask as well as the answers they reach. Like the old saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It seems to me like denying the “weak” Sapir-Whorf hypothesis basically means denying the influence of culture and circumstance on development, which is…uh…a bit outdated, to say the least.