from
www.enformy.com (provided via copy/paste; pure as hell without
alteration)
It's serious reading for independent thinkers, for unwashed brains.
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The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax*
Sin, Suffering and Redemption in Academe
by Dan Moonhawk Alford
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the original Greek story of fire-stealing, Prometheus stole fire
from the gods in order to give to the humans; his punishment was to
have his innards eaten by vultures throughout eternity. With Whorf,
there was a new twist: linguists had already gotten away with the
fire-stealing for 300 years when the physicists crept in and stole it,
and Whorf was just trying to get it back -- but his punishment for
nearly half a century has been having his own verbal innards fought
over incessantly, but never truly devoured, by academic vultures,
blindly protecting their turf.
Since many major understandings have come from people who never quote
Whorf, what I would like to do right now is suggest that you stop
reading my book and go find a copy of Whorf's Language, Thought and
Reality. Many libraries have it, and the paperback edition is fairly
cheap. I advise my students to read the last essay first, then the
previous three essays, then the ones with "Universe," "Primitive" and
"Habitual" in the titles; the rest at will. Reading what he actually
wrote, and in his presumably 1930's Yale accent, is a great antidote
to the Hypothesis Hoax literature many of you are already familiar
with, since its creators seldom quote him.
Who was Benjamin Whorf and why do people say such bad things about
him? I claim Whorf as a linguist, as I claim for myself even though I
never finished my doctorate; but whereas I teach for a living, Whorf
made his daily money as a fire-prevention engineer for Hartford
Insurance Company and actually refused offers to teach linguistics. So
at the center of this huge academic controversy we have someone who
refused to join the old boys' club -- a 'dabbler' or 'dilettante' in
linguistics, some have called him. Why should anyone care about the
ideas of this outsider who never even claimed linguistics as his
profession?
After 40-some years of concerted academic corpse-kicking, with
respected academics claiming that they've disproved him in countless
ways, why haven't his ideas just … gone away? Perhaps bad publicity is
better than no publicity at all. Does that exhaust all that compels
this enduring attention? And what, exactly, are we to be telling
undergraduate and graduate students about Whorf these days, at the
dawn of a new millennium?
Why do I care?
As I mentioned earlier, Whorf was just one of innumerable authors on
language issues that I, as a typical undergraduate, was exposed to in
my linguistics training at UCLA -- in my very first linguistics class,
while I was still an English major -- and then not again during my
undergraduate or graduate classes, since we were learning Chomsky's
view of language. At the time, I didn't think much about his absence
after that first class. Very insidious -- in advertising, that's
called "bait and switch," but I think Whorf nonetheless got me into
linguistics. I think I thought, as other linguists have admitted to
me, "if this is what linguistics is all about, this is for me!"
It was not until I began retracing Whorf's steps -- until I actually
worked on an American Indian language myself, and had been reading
quantum physics insights for a while -- that his importance in the
History of Ideas became clear to me. Whenever I discussed Whorf's
insights with Native Americans, they resonated with his insights on
Native languages, and therefore those insights became increasingly
more important to me. Whorf had come closer than any other linguist to
explicating the worldviews and langscapes of Native America.
Yet on my return from the reservation environment to academe, I found
that no linguist at Berkeley or conferences seemed to be able to say
Whorf's name without an accompanying sneer on their lips! They
regarded Whorf as simply 'wrong', with no redeemable qualities
whatever. As far as I could remember, this was a new and different
environment than had surrounded Whorf when I'd left UCLA eight years
before -- where Whorf was basically ignored instead of actively
preached against.
Figuring out what had happened while I was gone consumed another two
years of my life, and by that point I was solidly hooked by the issue.
I realized there was something very simple but powerful that was being
covered over by a hoax -- by all of the trivial determinism, strawman
and ad hominem arguments(1) in the literature -- covering up something
so important that academics were fighting like crazy to win the right
to avoid ever having to talk or write about it!
Now this happens all the time within individual disciplines, but it's
seldom they put aside their differences to form a "global coalition
against academic terrorism" the way they did. As I tell my graduate
students from various disciplines, if you really want to know what
your chosen field is all about, find the fundamental issues by
discovering who the big guys are beating up and why they're doing it.
And if you're ever so lucky as me to find someone that four or five
different academic disciplines are beating up on, you'll know you've
hit paydirt.
The legacy of Benjamin Whorf
What if you had intimations of an idea SO BIG that it took a highly
improbable international combination of people interested in
consciousness and cognition issues -- quantum physicists, field
linguists, Native American philosophers and others -- to figure out
whether it had any validity? And what if the consensus of that group
was that it was important for cross-cultural understanding? As we saw
in Chapter Five, the perhaps most lasting achievement of disciplinary
synthesis that Benjamin Whorf created, which he called the "principle
of linguistic relativity" on taking it back from Einstein, has in the
1990s been de facto validated by just such a historic meeting and
dialogue.
This principle, seen now as a century-long dialogue between physics
and linguistics, occurs at the place where they agree, using
complementarity or respect thinking, quantum logic instead of English
logic -- and it's at exactly THAT principled intersection, which had
never happened before, where Native American philosophers could
finally join in dialogue and find Westerners for the first time in 500
years who would actually listen to their words, their insights, their
langscapes and worldviews; as a result, all participants then began to
explore together, after appropriate rituals, the logic and worldview
of the nounless quantum (spirit) realm, and went away with very
special new relationships.
Yet it is this very linguistic relativity principle, this pivotal
stage on which such history has happened, arbitrarily renamed a
hypothesis(2) by many social scientists, presumably "so as to be
better tested," that has sparked the amazingly acrimonious debate,
name-calling, and strawman argumentation that's gone on, until
recently, during the five decades since the publication of Whorf's
collected articles by M.I.T. Press.
Worse yet, the debate itself, their own Hypothesis Hoax, is all that
most social scientists and their textbooks ever focus on, not the
principle that underlies it. Students are urged to learn the
intricacies of the debate from all the current and historical players
-- although a close reading of Whorf himself -- in the original, in
English -- is not necessarily specifically encouraged. And that's the
education that most students get in the social sciences about this
topic, unless they actually dig deeper on their own -- which they may
be discouraged from doing because, they're told, they'll just be
'wasting their time' on a dead issue. At least, I was.
What are these academics so afraid of that they can't face and
contemplate and answer student's questions about Whorf's actual text?
Why the smoke and mirrors? I suspect that they fear, and rightly so,
that the entire Western worldview -- logic, reason, science,
philosophy, categories -- the entire 'civilization' enterprise of
which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake; or at least the
superior attitude that often accompanies it. It may be a fear that
what we're culturally heir to is 'just another worldview and its
langscapes' rather than exemplifying, as we tend to want to believe,
eternal and universal human logic, which we're simply 'better at' than
people who speak other languages outside of the Indo-European language
family. As John Lucy says, relativity "challenges assumptions which
lie at the heart of much modern social and behavior research -- namely
its claim to be discovering general laws and to be truly
scientific."(3)
David Abram eloquently shows in The Spell of the Sensuous that we long
ago disqualified ourselves from claiming anything 'universal' as a
culture when we adopted phonetic alphabets, which shifted the locus of
'interaction with the world' from Nature to the printed page --
thereby also transforming air into something empty instead of the
inescapable medium of all speech interactions and all life. All the
more reason then that we must now listen to the indigenous voices of
those who have resisted our cultural attitudes, and who come as
speakers from languages with different cognitive structures than our
own, which has become so divorced and alienated from Nature.
Whorf was the only linguist of his time who understood the advances in
modern physics well enough to understand that physicists had stolen
the fire from the philosophy of language camp; he staked his claim and
tried to take it back. He knew enough about Hopi to know that, in its
proclivity of turning our propositions about things into propositions
about events, its structure is more congenial to describing quantum
eventings than are the structures of Western languages; in his
writings he suggested Hopi as a human language candidate, a real life
example, that would demonstrate the quantum logic of nounless
realities perplexing physicists. Although Hopi itself has not been
considered as yet in the Science Dialogues (because we have had as yet
no native Hopi speakers as participants), the addition of Athapaskan,
Siouan and Algonquian languages to the 'quantum language list' at the
Science Dialogues and elsewhere are independent evidence that Whorf
was substantially on the right track.
Relativity in the History of Ideas
Although anthropologists and others prefer for their own reasons to
call it 'relativism', relativity may now be seen primarily as a larger
science dialogue outside the realms of social science itself -- except
insofar as the less conservative practitioners of social science are
trying to link their results up with complex modern concepts rather
than simpler Newtonian ones. Dana Zohar, for instance, has made
substantial efforts to link up psychology with the quantum realm in
The Quantum Self and other works.
In this realm of the history of ideas, just as in linguistics, words
have meaning only insofar as they participate in a system of
distinctions with other words. Relativity (or diversity, or pluralism)
and its linguistic complementary opposite, universality, have been
used together as a set, a system, for hundreds of years in
Euro-thought. Some people prefer to explore their own truth by
studying the diversity of things, and some people like to explore
their own truth by studying similarities between things -- and both
are okay, although they lead in different directions. If, at some
point, the two camps come back together and respectfully compare
notes, much can be accomplished in dialogue. And nobody has to do just
one kind of research to the exclusion of the other: although social
scientists branded Whorf as the relativist par excellence, my reading
of Whorf shows that he makes a large number of universalist statements
in his writings while only mentioning the same relativity principle in
different words three or four times. That is, he effectively balanced
both, unlike his critics, who apparently weren't intellectually
capable of such a sophisticated task.
Now if, however, instead of learning from each other, one camp
arbitrarily begins denying the validity of the insights of the other,
begins claiming that differences are only (trivially) superficial
while only universals are deeply real(4) , and begins trying to
logically prove the other viewpoint out of existence and rewrite
history so only that only their half of the truth will remain by
generational socialization, the delicate balance between the two ideas
is lost -- and a bewildering period of confusion begins, as happened
following Noam Chomsky's 1957 publication of Syntactic Structures , a
small book which set the stage for changing the course of linguistics
away from ideas of relativity and toward a fundamentalist-like embrace
of universals, in a dichotomous (win/lose) rather than the historic
yes/yes complementary manner and its balancing, more suited to a
search for truth.
The Chomsky Factor
Although Whorf had published a few articles in the 1930s and '40s, few
people saw his work until after 1956, when they were pulled together,
with some unpublished essays(5) , by John Carroll and printed by MIT
Press. A major conference had just been called by anthropological
linguists a couple of years earlier to discuss both Whorf's ideas and
those of 'Whorfians' such as Dorothy Lee, Madeline Mathiot and Harry
Hoijer (on whose varied interpretations of Whorf much of the blame for
the Hydra Heads of the Hypothesis Hoax ultimately rest).
The dominant paradigm of American linguistics at the time, called
structural linguistics, had been formed in the crucible of discovery
of the morphology-rich Native American languages -- where, because a
single word could be a full and complete sentence, the pieces of words
(morphemes) assumed greater importance than the order of words making
up a sentence (syntax). That is, when a "word" can also be a
"sentence," the boundary between the seemingly discrete levels of
Morphology (how pieces make up a word) and Syntax (how words make up a
sentence) become much fuzzier than in Western languages; from the
Native perspective there is only morphosyntax, with morpho- having
much more emphasis than -syntax.
It can be said that the distinction between anthropology and
linguistics was not as sharply defined in America prior to Chomsky,
when indigenous languages (real speakers in real communities) tended
to be a major focus of linguistics, in the way it became after Chomsky
called for autonomy and unleashed hordes of sometimes anti-social
linguists on academe, who felt empowered to just make up their own
data rather than painstakingly collecting it in character-building and
sometimes foreign social situations. BC (Before Chomsky), it was well
understood that cultural context was part of real live language use,
just as I myself had to learn, along with the pronunciation of the
word for "thank you" in Míkmaq, the context of when its use was okay
(as a response to a formal "would you please pass the X" at the dinner
table) and when it was not (when someone unexpectedly says or does
something from their heart spontaneously).
One year after the posthumous publication of Whorf's work, however,
Noam Chomsky began an end run around the then-dominant structuralist
paradigm, and began manufacturing consent (6) for his own paradigm
within linguistics. Chomsky's approach was syntactic rather than
morphological (which thereby backgrounded American Indian languages
and any insights about them), mathematical (context-free) rather than
anthropological (context-bound), and in its mathematical bias it
favored universals rather than diversity and relativity.
From the relativity stance, the universalist stance in and of itself
isn't 'wrong' in any way; however, along with the rise in popularity
of the universalist position there also appeared in some a new
attitude about the 'rightness' of universals and the absolute
'wrongness' of relativity -- a kind of fundamentalist demonizing that
had not been seen before in linguistics. Universals and relativity
became diametrically opposed to each other, in some minds, rather than
working together as a complementary set of ideas: both right in their
own way, depending on what you're looking for, just like the yes/yes
light experiments in physics. It was in the context of this
reactionary dualistic attitude that Whorf's fate was sealed in the
Chomskyan camp, not as a partner but a foe -- a person whose name was
most indissolubly linked with dreaded relativity in this past century.
As a way of outlining the Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax, I'd like to
present an overview of how Whorf has been misrepresented, since before
the publication of his collected articles to the present. The original
embracing of Whorf by anthropological linguists and others provides
one period of a pendulum swing; the heyday of Chomskyanism provides a
second period, and the current return to a careful reading of Whorf
marks a new and hopeful period of responsible scholarship. Afterwards,
we'll look at some fascinating issues that get left out of discussions
about Whorf when people waste too much time arguing about the Hoax.
The Pendulum Swings
Part I: What Whorf Wrote and How It Was Originally Received
First and most importantly, let's be clear on one simple fact: Whorf
did not write nor actively have anything to do with The Whorf
Hypothesis ; likewise, needless to say, Sapir and Whorf also never
teamed up to co-author something called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
Never happened. A hoax.
The Hoax was created and developed by perhaps well-meaning but mostly
universalist-leaning social scientists long after Whorf's death,
during the push for linguistics to become more of a 'science'. The
Hoax consists of a miniscule amount of relativity, a 20th-Century
physics idea which Whorf was extremely interested in, and a liberal
amount of Newtonian monocausal determinism(7) , which his critics
'weakly' believe in but which Whorf would have disavowed completely as
the big picture, had he been alive, preferring to use the
complementary logic of both physics and metaphysics as a better method
of scientific thinking.
Examining the volume of Whorf's collected writings, we find in his
earliest writing years, before taking linguistics classes from
Professor Edward Sapir at Yale, only two unpublished short pieces,
reflecting psychological concerns, neither of which fits into this
controversy in any significant way. Whorf was obviously interested in
language issues before studying with Sapir, the perhaps most eminent
linguist of his day and still revered today, but Sapir's influence is
quite evident in shaping the issues and terminology which Whorf began
to use in his published and unpublished essays from then on.
After beginning to study with Sapir, Whorf published three 'straight'
linguistics essays on Hopi in the preeminent professional journals of
his day (Language, International Journal of Linguistics, American
Anthropologist), one essay on Shawnee published in the appendix of a
book, one on decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphs published in a
Smithsonian Report, and another on more general topics of language
such as grammatical categories. These articles show his acquaintance
through Sapir with linguistic thought and the structure of American
Indian languages, and none of these are remarkably controversial.
While the above articles reveal that his technical grasp of
linguistics was of sufficient quality for professional publications,
Whorf's seven more controversial essays reveal his more speculative
side, which is fully in line with the Humboldtian influence in his
training through Sapir. These include two provocative essays never
published during his lifetime ("An American Indian Model of the
Universe" and "A Linguistic Consideration of Thinking in Primitive
Communities") and an equally provocative one that was published in a
book of tribute to Edward Sapir after Sapir's death in 1939 ("The
Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language").
And near the end of his life, cut short by "a long and lingering
illness" (as Carroll politely labeled cancer) at age 44 in 1941, he
embarked on a new mission: he stopped writing to just linguists (and
his desk drawer), and began addressing lay audiences as the first
major popularizer of a new linguistics. Whorf published three of his
last four articles ("Science and Linguistics," "Linguistics as an
Exact Science," and "Languages and Logic") in M.I.T.'s Technological
Review , appealing to the general educated audience of his day to
become linguistically aware -- to realize to what extent the language
you speak influences what and how you think. His most oft-cited
formulations of the principle of linguistic relativity are contained
in these popularizing articles not meant specifically for linguists
(though he kind of talks around the principle at the end of "Habitual
Thought(
"):
Figure 16 illustrates a similar situation: 'I push his head back' and
'I drop it in water and it floats,' though very dissimilar sentences
in English, are similar in Shawnee. The point of view of linguistic
relativity changes Mr. Everyman's dictum: Instead of saying "Sentences
are unlike because they tell about unlike facts," he now reasons:
"Facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for
unlike formulation of them." (p. 235)
We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds
that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the
same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are
similar, or can in some way be calibrated. (p 214)
From this fact proceeds what I have called the "linguistic relativity
principle," which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly
different grammars(9) are pointed by their grammars toward different
types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar
acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but
must arrive at somewhat different views of the world. (p 221)
Concepts of "time" and "matter" are not given in substantially the
same form by experience to all men but depend upon the nature of the
language or languages through the use of which they have been
developed. (p 158)
It was his final act of publication, though, "Language, Thought and
Reality," published in Theosophist, a decidedly non-academic
publication by the Theosophical Society in India, that in my opinion
really got academics scratching their heads the most about him --
although, to be fair, most academics who would care probably didn't
even know about this publication until Whorf's articles were collected
16 years later. Written probably on his deathbed, and written
specifically to people whom he knew were open to and excited about
'new ideas,' this final essay shows Whorf at his holistic, mystical
and poetic best, reaching at last an international educated audience
with his ideas about the power of language, and especially its
background role in creating our daily lived realities.
Dr. Sam I. Hayakawa, leader of the General Semantics movement and
later a California Senator, was perhaps the first linguist to reprint
one of Whorf's essays for a larger audience in his 1941 Language in
Action. This essay, "Science and Linguistics," the first of his three
Technological Review articles for non-specialists, was also the
leadoff essay when those three and a few others were gathered and
published as Collected Papers on Metalinguistics by the Foreign
Service Institute of the U.S. State Department in 1952. His final
essay, "Language, Mind & Reality," was also reprinted in 1952 by Etc.,
a Review of General Semantics . Within a decade of his death, people
in semantics (which deals with meaning) and in the State Department
(which deals with translation) were determined to get Whorf's ideas
out to a wider audience.
Then in the mid-'50s, Whorf's work fairly exploded onto the scene with
two dramatic events: a major linguistics conference in 1954 to discuss
his ideas, and the 1956 M.I.T. Press publication of Whorf's Language,
Thought, and Reality, the definitive collection of his published and
unpublished articles, collected and introduced by John Carroll (now in
its 22nd printing). Most American linguists during the '50s were
anthropological linguists, and many of the best-known anthropologists
and linguists showed up at the Conference on the Interrelations of
Language and Other Aspects of Culture, either attacking or defending
Whorf. The eminent Harry Hoijer vigorously objected at the time to
what he called the "vulgarization of Whorf's work(10) " which he saw
going on at this gathering a little more than a decade after Whorf's
death. This vulgarization would continue for decades, impelled and
intensified by the universalist followers of Noam Chomsky.
Part IIa: Chomsky takes on Whorf
In fact, I say 'the followers' because in my 30 years of reading in
linguistics, only once have I ever come across Chomsky actually
attacking Whorf head-on -- and that was in a Preface he wrote for Adam
Schaff's 1973 Language and Cognition, translated from Polish and
printed by McGraw Hill, which someone sent me by email a few years
ago. And the interesting thing is: although I don't remember finding
this Preface when I reviewed the literature in the late '70s and wrote
about "The Demise of the Whorf Hypothesis", it nonetheless contains
the same 'determinism' and 'circularity' arguments, cloaked as
'relativity', as in the literature I did review.
I think it is useful to study this Preface carefully, so I will
footnote some places I have trouble with, especially the hidden
assumptions behind Chomsky's words. Maybe you should read it straight
through (without footnotes) the first time, as I did -- and went: "Oh,
no! Chomsky's right and I'm wrong!" Then I thought it over.
Preface
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity as formulated particularly by
Whorf,(11) discussed here at length, is one that has given rise to
much interesting thought and speculation. Many of the inadequacies in
Whorf's formulation are sketched here; there are others that deserve
more prominence than they have received. Whorf argues that the
structure of language(12) plays a role in determining a world-view(13)
and supports his argument by contrasting the world-view characteristic
of speakers of Standard Average European (SAE) with that of speakers
of various American Indian languages. As Schaff notes, the hypothesis
practically rests on the treatment of categories of time and space in
Hopi.(14) The category of space is similar in Hopi to SAE, but the
Hopi, Whorf argues, do not have our intuition of TIME as a smooth
flowing continuum, with a past, present, and future, in our sense. The
basis for this distinct world-view is provided by the categories of
their language, which does not formally provide the
past-present-future analysis of verb forms,(15) as in SAE.(16) Against
this it has been argued that Whorf gives no evidence for a difference
in linguistic structure, but, rather, begs the question by postulating
the difference on the basis of the difference in the formal structure
of Hopi and SAE.(17) Here, then, is a point where further research
might be proposed, perhaps along lines that Schaff suggests, to bridge
the gap in the argument.
But there is, after all, a much more fundamental defect in Whorf's
argument, namely, that his description of SAE is incorrect.(1
In
English, for example, there is no structural basis for the
past-present-future world-view that Whorf attributes, quite correctly,
to SAE speakers.(19) Rather, a formal analysis of English structure
would show a past-present distinction, a set of aspects (perfect and
progressive), and a class of modals, one of which happens to be used
to express future tense (among other devices that serve this purpose).
Approaching English from a Whorfian point of view,(20) we would
conclude that an English speaker has no concept of time as a doubly
infinite line, he himself occupying the position of a point moving
constantly from past to future, but rather he conceives of time in
terms of a basic dichotomy between what is past and what is not yet
past, in terms of an aspectual system of a subtle sort, and in terms
of a superimposed and independent system of modalities involving
possibility, permission, ability, necessity, obligation, future (the
latter not being distinguished in any special way). The conclusion is
absurd, which simply goes to show that our concept of time is not
determined by the linguistic categories in any detectable way, but is
rather quite independent of them.(21) If this is true of speakers of
English, why not of speakers of Hopi?(22)
From consideration of these matters one is led to several conclusions.
First, the investigation of linguistic relativity presupposes an exact
analysis of linguistic structure of a sort that is not available for
SAE, let alone for American Indian languages.(23) This is no quibble
over tenth-order effects. Even an excellent linguist like Whorf was
able to misconceive the nature of such a basic part of English
structure as the system of verbal auxiliaries. What is more, it might
yet turn out that Whorf's quite naive conclusion about English is
actually correct. That is, further research might, in fact, show that
at a deeper level of analysis than can be realized today, there is a
past-present-future system underlying the formal structure outlined in
the preceding paragraph. I see no indication that this is true, but it
would not be a very great surprise. If it turned out that Whorf is
correct, this would further substantiate my feeling that studies of
linguistic relativity are entirely premature, since his correct guess
would have been based on no evidence of substance and no defensible
formal analysis of English structure.(24)
Now read it again consulting the footnotes so you can see how he does
achieves such a stunning effect while sounding polite as apple pie and
even complimenting Whorf as being an excellent linguist, even though
in a left-handed way.
But here's what troubles me the most: the smokescreen aspect. When you
finish reading Chomsky's Preface, what is it, exactly, that survives
of the very real possibility that the Hopis do not have and do not
live by our cultural notion of time? What happens to the possibility
that maybe, just maybe, there is something profound that we can learn
about the diversity of human thinking and experience, about different
systems of spacetime? (Native American systems I've worked with seem
to express integrated spacetime, like modern physics, not separate
Space and Time like us.) What happens to that felt sense of difference
that my American Indian bilingual friends describe as they go between
different languages and cultures? It just evaporates, becomes a
non-issue, because of this highly rhetorical style, shared by
Chomsky's followers, which reduces, simplifies, and discounts
important human and existential insights.
Would you, as a student of linguistics, think it would be at all
useful to you to read Benjamin Whorf's writings after reading what
Chomsky, the leading light of the profession, had to say about him?
This smokescreen aspect is the major challenge that I have with all
rationalist argumentation, and why I, with Whorf, prefer systems
thinking, which I call respect thinking. I'll try to stay respectful
in the next section, about a Chomskyan follower.
Part IIb: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct and 'Mentalese'
During the past decade, the book I've been most asked about by my
linguistics students, possibly because I have not included it in the
readings, is a popularizing book about linguistics by M.I.T.'s Steven
Pinker, called The Language Instinct. The cover even has a testimonial
by Chomsky prominently displayed at the bottom: "An extremely valuable
book." It is an excellent book in many respects, and I recommend it to
any thoughtful reader -- except, of course, when it comes to his
Chapter 3 on "Mentalese," where he takes on Benjamin Whorf and the
misnamed Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Here we almost need a score card in
order to see the old familiar players in action: utter confusion of
determinism with relativity, mixed with strawman and ad hominem
arguments, and even a soupçon of faulty scholarship.
Pinker starts out Chapter 3 by introducing us to "the famous
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that
people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by
their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating
that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of
their speakers (p57) ." Whorf immediately has two strikes against him
-- first, his principle about relativity reclaimed from physics which
had been stolen from linguistic thought, is cavalierly demoted to a
'hypothesis', as usual, but now it's primarily about 'determinism':
even the relativity is mired in monocausal determinism in Pinker's
formulation (which we might call "The Pinker Hypothesis of Linguistic
Determinism"). The magic transformation is complete: a principle of
relativity, modelled on 20th century physics formulation, becomes --
voila! -- a hypothesis about monocausal determinism, the mainstay of
19th-century physics. How retro! And, unfortunately, as usual, there
are no citations or footnotes to any writings by either Sapir or Whorf
to back up his claim, even though as an author he specifically chose
to use the word 'stating' -- so it must be stated by them somewhere,
mustn't it?!
Two pages later we find that "The linguistic determinism hypothesis is
closely linked to the names Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf." The
construction is closely linked is what we might call a "Passive of
Convenient Omission," so that exactly WHO has been doing the linking
incessantly for decades is conveniently omitted. (Pinker's use of this
is all the more bizarre because just two pages before he talks about
how constructions like Reagan's famous non-confession "Mistakes were
made" license an evasion of responsibility.) So who's the deleted
agent -- who's doing the linking? My research indicates that the agent
is the group of advocates of universal grammar who created, developed
and promulgated The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax in the first place as
a way of avoiding the more important implications of relativity and
quantum theories in their own work.
So, true to form, Whorf is the one being introduced to readers as a
rabid determinist, even though anyone who knows about relativity in
physics knows that relativity and quantum theories are what separates
classical Newtonian deterministic thinking from that of modern
physics; relativity, in fact, introduces structural linguistic
insights into the mathematics of physics, and demonstrates how
different starting points lead to different conceptions of the cosmos,
or worldviews. Euclidean geometry gives one view of a world of Space
and Time, and non-Euclidean geometry gives another view, of a universe
of spacetime. Whorf didn't only write about linguistics, he also
brought notions from physics, Jungian synchronicity, systems theory
and Gestalt psychology (with its foregrounding and backgrounding) into
his writing -- all holistic viewpoints which go against the
business-as-usual 'Old Science' standards against which he is normally
judged. In fact, he knew that our grammatical structures mitigate
against such insights:
Monistic, holistic and relativistic views of reality appeal to
philosophers and some scientists, but they are badly handicapped in
appealing to the "common sense" of the Western average man -- not
because nature herself refutes them (if she did, philosophers could
have discovered this much), but because they must be talked about in
what amounts to a new language. "Common sense," as its name shows, and
"practicality," as its name does not show, are largely matters of
talking so that one is readily understood. (p 152)
Pinker's determinism mischaracterization, which is quite effective for
building a familiar strawman opponent, is followed immediately by
undisguised scorn for anyone who finds something of intellectual value
in the celebration of cognitive diversity instead of smartly jumping
on the universalist bandwagon, characterizing it as merely a
pre-professional concern ("perhaps accounting for the perennial appeal
of the hypothesis to undergraduates"). And then the inevitable voice
of authority thunders out from the ivory halls:
But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as
language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity.
Again there is no citational backup, nor is any possible, to show that
Whorf ever stated that thought was the same thing as language (if he
thought they were the same thing, how was he supposed to have then
said that one determines the other?), but there it is -- Whorf's all
wrong, and he's committed a conventional absurdity. On the next page
Pinker tells us that "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less
sense they make," and then authoritatively and derisively intones,
[T]here is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape
their speakers' ways of thinking. But I want to do more than review
the unintentionally comical history of attempts to prove that they do.
Wrong? Absurdity? Less sense? Unintentionally comic? Does this promote
objective scientific reading of Whorf? You see how fun it is to take
shots at a strawman opponent and call it 'Whorf'? He then takes the
next few pages to help us understand WHY linguistic determinism, often
called 'the strong version,' is wrong, yet again without demonstrating
that either Sapir or Whorf advocated it -- and what's the point of
talking about it if nobody advocated it? What is the purpose of all
this muddying of the waters, this setting up of a strawman opponent
easy to tear to shreds?
In addition, Pinker either does not know about or is resolutely
disregarding the work of Berkeley cognitive scientist Dan I. Slobin
concerning a particular form of thinking that occurs simultaneously
while we are talking to ourselves or others. Slobin calls this
"thinking for speaking," during which process our thinking is very
much shaped by the grammar of our language. Interestingly, in order to
even think productively about this form of thinking, Slobin was forced
to move from monolithic nouns like "Language" and "Thought" --
processes so difficult to think of clearly as 'things' -- to more
verby, participial forms of English in 'thinking' and 'speaking'. As
we saw in the "God is not a Noun" chapter, one important way to tap
into creativity is to break up our cognitive habits (25) , and one way
to do that is to think of 'things' in a verby way, changing our
language.
Nothing displays Pinker's unremitting contempt for Whorf more than his
treatment of one of Whorf's American Indian language examples, which
explained how English "The boat is grounded on the beach" comes out
more like "It is on the beach pointwise as an event of canoe motion"
in the Nootka language spoken by some river peoples of the American
Northwest. Pinker, however, following his usual habit of shoddy
scholarship when dealing with Whorf, seemingly never actually bothered
to check Whorf's original writings and mistakenly attributes the
sentence as being from Apache -- from desert dwelling peoples, not
generally known for their canoe prowess. Why be accurate about someone
you've cast as your enemy, even though it leaves you yourself wide
open to ridicule?
Pinker's scientistic bias is clear when he says,
The idea that language shapes thinking was plausible when scientists
were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now
that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking...
With the exception of Slobin, evidently. This argument hearkens back
to the most important Newtonian argument going on here: whether
language shapes/molds our thinking or is a mirror/reflection of it.
Notice that the question is deliberate framed in a yes/no, monocausal
determinism mode of argumentation -- as if it couldn't possibly do
both at once in some proportion. In higher-order systems thinking,
which these critics have yet to bring to bear on the issue, a yes/yes
answer is quite acceptable: language shapes and reflects thinking
while thinking shapes and reflects language in a mutually
interdependent chicken-and-eggy historical way.
Pinker also attacks Whorf on the tired old "language and perception"
argument; again, nobody using this argument has ever shown, by proper
citation, that Whorf hypothesized that language shapes perception, yet
the bugaboo crops up in almost every discussion of the Hypothesis. In
showing the obvious absurdity of language having anything whatever to
do with influencing perception, Pinker contrasts the way physicists
and physiologists look at color: while to the former 'color' is a
continuous wavelength dimension without our familiar delineations
(that is, just frequencies in a certain range), to the latter it's a
matter of three kinds of cones in the eye wired to neurons, etc. "No
matter how influential language may be, it would seem preposterous to
a physiologist that it could reach down into the retina and rewire the
ganglion cells."
Well, how preposterous of Whorf to have even brought it up! Which he
didn't -- see how strawman argumentation works? This kind of language
is intended to silence the "true believers", or even casual
questioners, so they won't bring up touchy issues in class or at
professional conferences.
What Whorf DID talk about was how the habits of our language impel us
to think of a fist, or lightning, as a 'thing'; how a slight elevation
of land becomes a different 'thing' from the ground around it (hill),
or slightly higher water content of the ground qualifies it to be a
different 'thing' (swamp) from the ground around it. More like
conception than perception.
Besides, in his overly-physiological explanation above Pinker appears
to assume that whatever comes into the retina and through it into the
ganglia is what we see -- itself an overly simplistic direct view of
vision which overlooks the obvious constructed nature of vision. If we
saw 'directly', we would always be aware of the blind spot in our
vision where the retina attaches to the eyeball; instead, that is all
filled in by the magic of construction, blending the "direct seeing"
input with memory and meaning to produce a seamless visual field. Much
less, if we saw 'directly', we would see frequencies, not colors --
red, blue, and green do not exist as colors in the outside world of
atoms and molecules, but as frequencies, which are interpreted and
projected by the particular parameters of our human senses. We, as a
reaction to receiving certain frequencies, clothe the world with
colors -- and it even looks like the colors are really 'out there'
instead of projected from 'in here'.
On Pinker's page 63, in a discussion of the Hopi conception of time
(or, better, 'timing') drawn from Whorf's "An American Indian Model of
the Universe", we find his most virulent anti-Whorf attack of all,
which reduces to little more than a classic ad hominem attack against
the man and not his ideas:
No one is really sure how Whorf came up with his outlandish claims,
but his limited, badly analyzed sample of Hopi speech [even though
Chomsky had called Whorf an excellent linguist!] and his long-time
leanings toward mysticism must have contributed.
An excellent ad hominem tactic, especially in academe: brand him as a
mystic, brand his claims as outlandish, and no self-respecting
academic will come near him on pain of their reputation and possibly
employment! Luckily, like Whorf, I don't care.
Of course, Whorf had already pointed out half a century earlier that
our own notions of flowing time and static space are equally mystical
to the Hopi, in whose language "time disappears and space is altered,
so that it is no longer the homogeneous and instantaneous timeless
space of our supposed intuition or of classical Newtonian mechanics."
And modern physics seems to back him up, telling us for nearly a
century that our own particular cultural notion of time is, in fact,
but a linguistic construct. Relativity was outlandish when Einstein
promoted it, but physicists finally saw the deeper sense of it. And
when Einstein showed that spacetime is curved, that also included the
notion of time being curved, not linear. The notion of curved time, of
cycles being important, is indigenous and aboriginal at the same time
as being consistent with modern physics. The construct of manifested
and manifesting as cosmological foundations instead of space and time
crossed over from linguistics into physics and propelled Einstein's
co-worker Bohm into envisioning the implicate and explicate orders of
reality. Outlandish indeed! Pinker needs to brush up on
twentieth-century science if his quest is to make linguistics more
scientific.
And finally, in an effort to be strictly factual about Whorf being
wrong about Hopi time, Pinker cites the work of Ekkehart Malotki to
thereby assure us that Hopi does indeed have time terms. While
Malotki's linguistic work has seldom been read except by a few
specialists, a more accessible treatment of his work, using his own
image and words, is to be found in a video series on The Mind shown on
PBS -- especially the last part of a video chapter on "Language".
Part IIc: Malotki 'Disproves' Whorf about Hopi Time
In this video segment, we are introduced to Malotki in the following
way: "Whorf made various claims about Hopi language and thought.
Ekkehart Malotki has spent 15 years finding out whether they're true."
So he's an unbiased researcher without an agenda? In one of the very
rare instances of actual linguistic fieldwork ever being shown on TV,
a middle-aged Malotki is shown working with a Hopi speaker -- a woman
perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties. Now remember: not only
did Malotki authorize the depiction of this fieldwork, but others,
from filmmakers to linguistic consultants and network executives, must
have agreed (on some basis!) that this looked like good fieldwork.
Here's a transcription of one part:
Malotki: Okay, let-let-let's interrupt here for a minute. I just heard
one expression...what was that, kui-vun-sut?
Hopi: Mm-hum. [clear throat] kui-vun-sut.
Malotki: kui-vun-sut. In other words, to go and pray to the sun with
corn meal, and that's why kui-vun-sut, that means the TIME when you do
this?
Hopi: Yes, uh-huh. [quietly] The sun's ... barely sunrise.
First off, no lawyer in the land would ever get away with those
tactics in a court of law ("Your Honor, he's leading the witness!").
And notice that, in this unequal whiteman-expert/native-woman
sociological imbalance, "Yes..." probably means "That's the way you
would say it," while barely sunrise is the real answer. But more
importantly, this documentation of fieldwork then allows narrator
George Page to call Whorf "wrong" a few minutes later -- all because
of Malotki hearing what he want to hear ("Yes") instead of the REAL
answer: that the phrase described a particular growing lightening of
the morning sky, not our Western abstract notion of TIME with past,
present and future! What can past, present, and future possibly have
to do with describing the quality of light at 'barely sunrise'? How
does this fieldwork make Whorf 'wrong'? Fifty-some years before
Malotki tortured this time-confession out of that poor Hopi woman,
Whorf wrote that
In Hopi however all phase terms, like 'summer, morning,' etc., are not
nouns but a kind of adverb... It means 'when it is morning' or 'while
morning-phase is occurring'... Nothing is suggested about time except
the perpetual 'getting later' of it. And so there is no basis here for
a formless item answering to our 'time'.
Malotki's Hopi consultant actually gives an even better gloss, having
to do with a gradual lightening of the sky characteristic of early
morning.
Other phrases in the video however make clear an obvious hidden
assumption: that a universalist has come to disprove the claims of a
relativist. "Deep down," Malotki says, "we're all the same -- it
couldn't be otherwise." Obviously, being both the same and different
at the same time hasn't occurred to him; it must be one or the other
-- preferably the universalist answer.
How could it be that there are people out there that live, that get
through the world, completely divorced from this phenomenon of time
that we all experience?
Again, these are classically universalist statements, uttered in a
kind of fundamentalist, true believer way, taking as true exactly that
which is being questioned. Is it just ME? Do these sound to you like
statements of faith, almost fundamentally religious, or like the
statements of an unbiased researcher? The best is yet to come: Malotki
follows quickly with,
They [Hopis] are living with time at every point of their lives, but
not necessarily of course in the way we perceive time today. Before
the encounter with the whiteman, there had never been a need for
naming hour or minutes or seconds. In the Hopi society, time is
probably experienced as a more organic or natural phenomenon.
Maybe it's just me again, but do you see any contradiction between
this statement and the previous one? There's "this phenomenon of time
that we all experience," and then there's the Hopi experience of time
as "a more organic or natural phenomenon" -- which, ostensibly, WE as
Westerners don't experience in "this phenomenon of time that we all
experience."
More insidiously however Malotki (and later narrator Page, who is
reading someone else's script) above uses a rhetorical trick that I
didn't mention 20 years ago in my "Demise" article because I didn't
see it happening then the way I do now -- and I don't know exactly
what the technical term is for repackaging your opponent's position as
your own and then calling your opponent 'wrong'.
Let's take this slowly now: On the one hand, Whorf argues that
American Indians, indigenous and less technological than Westerners,
traditionally have a curved rather than linear concept of time, geared
to the diurnal and annual cycles of Mother Earth (the same day coming
around again rather than different days). On the other hand, Malotki
states that the Hopi experience time as "a more organic or natural
phenomenon" rather than our hours, minutes, and seconds. Is it ME?
Aren't they arguing for the same view?
Narrator George Page, uttering an invisible writer's words that accept
Malotki's fieldwork at face value, continues:
Page: So the Hopi grammar does possess words and grammar for time, but
the Hopi concept of time naturally springs from the environment with
its naturally perceptible seasons, slow movement of the sun across the
sky, rhythms of planting, of a culture that lives from harvest to
harvest. Like all languages, the Hopi language holds a mirror to the
world its speakers live in.
Gosh, could it be that Whorf was really arguing that American Indians
were more supertechnological and divorced from nature than Westerners
are, and so their view of time was more unnatural than ours and really
weird instead of being tied to the rhythms and cycles of Nature the
way Malotki and Page agree it is? What kind of sleight of words is
this? Minutes later, Page intoningly concludes the segment with:
Page: Benjamin Whorf's notion that language molds our thoughts, our
minds, is seductive. And though he was wrong about the Hopi language
in particular, that doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong about
language and thinking in general. But most people searching for the
link between language and mind think Whorf's question is the wrong one
to ask. Maybe our minds ARE in part molded by language. Maybe language
merely reflects the workings of brain and mind. Or maybe, it's all in
how we look at it. For brain and mind, like biology and psychology,
form a continuum, an unbroken line that sometimes may be almost
impossible to tease apart.
Perhaps I should mention that the word 'wrong,' though uttered three
times in fifteen seconds here, isn't otherwise uttered a single time
throughout the hour-long segment. Does the word 'wrong' used in
conjunction with Whorf's name three times in quick succession convey
anything to you personally? What would you naturally think about Whorf
after seeing this superbly produced video on language, and hearing
that at the end? Does it seem, given this narration, that there is any
useful reason whatsoever for reading Benjamin Whorf's actual writings?
Seems like it would be an exercise in futility, which might lead you
astray from 'real' linguistic thought.
Part IId. Kicking the Corpse
Perhaps you can now fully appreciate why this continual -- and for
decades increasing -- academic smokescreen around Whorf disturbs me so
much. And these are only the most recent examples of an essentially
vapid yet acrimonious debate that stretches back for half a century as
Whorf's critics have systematically simplified his elegant and complex
thoughts into fodder for the antique Newtonian shredder, making it up
for him as they went along -- and staying anonymous -- when they
couldn't pin him down to saying what they had characterized him as
saying. And then they trashed their own simplifications, apparently
clueless about the larger and staggering implications of what they
were trashing -- or were they?
These fairly recent examples of out-and-out Whorf-trashing by Pinker
and Malotki, regardless of the excellence of the rest of their work,
gave an unmistakably loud and clear message to linguistics students
and professionals and non-linguists alike: It's perfectly okay to talk
about the ideas of Benjamin Whorf as long as (1) you make sure to
muddy the waters by stuffing him in someone else's 'determinism
hypothesis' straightjacket, and (2) when you're done, you ritually
kick his corpse, turn out the lights, and close the door. Only then
will the universalist gods of modern linguistics and the other social
sciences be properly appeased, it seems.
Underlying this perhaps unintendedly deceptive scholarship and public
reporting is a deep fear that the logic of Western European languages
doesn't really match the logic of reality after all, or that it's only
one of many that are equally true -- a bitter pill to swallow for
those raised on the 'natural' superiority of Western European thinking
over that of less 'civilized' indigenous peoples. I hesitate to call
this 'racist,' since I really can't get behind a term less than a
hundred years old with this meaning which has done nothing but
needlessly further divide humanity (religion and place of origin have
always been enough to pit people against each other sufficiently), but
it can at the very least be called colonializing -- part of the
'superior' colonialistic mindset which has been wreaking havoc on the
Americas for over 500 years: beginning with a sad history of physical
slavery for this continent's original inhabitants, moving on to
'civilized' economic slavery in a reservation system, culminating in
cognitive imperialism, the last stage of cultural imperialism, with
Indian children being kidnapped by the federal government and sent to
'English-only' boarding schools thousands of miles away from their
families in order to destroy Native culture, knowledge and languages.
Many or most Native Americans of 'baby-boomer' age and older -- people
you may know! -- were actual victims of this barbaric bureaucratic
carrying out of the will of the descendants of the Invaders which
tried to wipe out the 'differences' between Native Americans and
Europeans. Native Americans are also presently experiencing spiritual
terrorism as disrespectful 'wannabe's, like Mickey in 'The Sorcerer's
Apprentice," appropriate millennia-old spiritual rituals and then
teach them to others for profit.
Part III: The Pendulum Swing Back to Respect for Whorf
David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous
Some changes happen only gradually, as thinkers steeped in one way of
thinking gradually give way generationally to those raised with a new
way of thinking, perhaps first as an option and then as a preferred
way. Such is beginning to happen now regarding Benjamin Whorf, I
believe, as what my friend Ray West calls 'pre-atomic' thinkers give
way to 'post-atomic' ones. I felt for years that I was the only person
who was giving Whorf a fair chance -- okay, the only one defending him
-- but these days you can find physicists, mathematicians,
philosophers, American Indians, and even other linguists treating
Whorf with respect again.
The phenomenological methods of Continental philosophers such as
Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty have for decades been perhaps
the only Western mode of philosophy (besides Whitehead, perhaps)
congenial to the insights of Whorf, and David Abram pulls the best of
that tradition together in a masterful way in The Spell of the
Sensuous -- a joy to read, which I just did while I was writing the
early part of this chapter, and was pleased to find him writing the
following:
Whorf's fascinating disclosures were often taken simplistically, by
researchers in other disciplines, to mean, among other things, that
the Hopi people have no temporal awareness whatsoever, or that the
Hopi language is utterly static, and has no way of distinguishing
between earlier or later events, or between occurrences more or less
distant from the speaker in what we would call time. Such misreadings,
doubtless encouraged by Whorf's occasional propensity for vigorous
overstatement, have led various linguists in recent years to decry
Whorf's findings. Several researchers, working closely with the Hopi
language, claim to have refuted Whorf's conclusions entirely. Such
refutations, however, are themselves dependent upon an oversimplified
reading of Whorf's conclusions, upon a crusading refusal to discern
that Whorf was not asserting an absence of temporal awareness among
the Hopi, but rather an absence, in their discourse, of any
metaphysical concept of time that could be isolated from their dynamic
awareness of spatiality. (26)
While I can't agree with the 'vigorous overstatement' phrasing, though
I know many think so (though how many of them understand the
phoneme/quantum/spirit analogy, I can't say), I admire Abram's general
stance on the Whorf issue, and I think his explanation above is
correct; today a unitary 'spacetime' notion is not as 'outrageous' as
it might have seemed in earlier decades of last century, and more
thinkers are recognizing the oversimplicity with which Whorf has been
treated, thereby hiding insights important for us to know.
John Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought, Vols. 1 & II.
I also admire John Lucy's solidly empirical approach to Whorf (even if
he does succumb to calling it a hypothesis), because no matter whether
the issue is argued on purely empirical grounds or a more balanced
systemic way, the empirical evidence is important. Lucy has learned,
as Heisenberg states, that the particular question you're asking is as
important as anything else when questioning reality (as the
matter/energy character of light shows). Lucy understands that ways of
thinking, such as the Newtonian views of reality, are deeply
entrenched in common, academic and scientific thinking, and that
relativity "challenges assumptions which lie at the heart of much
modern social and behavior research -- namely its claim to be
discovering general laws and to be truly scientific."
Language Diversity and Thought is a massive undertaking, with the
first volume discussing many of the issues I've discussed here and
more, and the second volume actually undertaking the empirical
research that he calls for in the first volume, contrasting grammars
of American English and Yucatec Maya, and concluding with the
identification of "distinctive patterns of thinking related to the
differences between the two languages." (27) This has been a goal of
some linguists in this past century, going back to Saussure, who saw
linguistics as a branch of semiology or semiotics, a field which he
created and described to be "A study which studies the life of signs
in a society." (2
Lucy rightly brings to our attention, as I also will later in this
chapter, many of Whorf's insights that get overlooked in the brouhaha
over the Hoax, such as the deeper implications of Whorf's writings,
Throughout his later writings, Whorf made ... statements arguing that
to the extent that science, philosophy, logic, and mathematics emerge
in a culture, they are dependent on (and frequently little more than)
specialized extensions of language patterns." (29)
or that Whorf was most concerned not with the innate possibilities of
language and thinking so much as with the daily habitual thought world
we live in (in Whorf's terms, "the microcosm that each man carries
about within himself, by which he measures and understands what he can
of the macrocosm" (30) ) and our 'fashions of speaking':
[T]hese specialized forms of thought are really secondary reflexes of
the more basic phenomenon, namely that languages influence everyday
habitual thought. (31)
Whorf showed that it was the 'simplest' of English, which some people
feel adherence to will solve all problems, that is fraught with the
most hidden assumptions. His insurance investigation work showed him
that words like 'empty,' 'waste water,' 'spun limestone' and others
were fraught with careless possibilities in the real world when linked
with notions of fire safety ('empty' gasoline drums being more
dangerous than full ones because of explosive fumes, 'water' burning
when the waste in it is flammable, the 'stone' part of 'limestone'
suggesting that it won't burn).
Thus, speakers unwittingly accept much of the suggestive value of the
linguistic analogies in their language even when, upon reflection,
they might recognize that they are misleading. (32)
As Lucy rightly comprehends, Whorf was concerned with "the everyday
ordinary confusions resulting from overreliance on a linguistic label
in responding to experience." (33) In the terms I've used in this
book, it's an overreliance on that word-world that is our guide to
experiencing reality, assuming it to be a better guide than it often
is, that's the problem.
According to Lucy, Whorf "emphasized that speakers have the view that
language reflects an independently organized reality and thought
rather than shapes or affects them in a significant way." ...(message truncated)
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