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The Whorfian Hypothesis
Does our native language effect our mental abilities?

The Whorfian Hypothesis

slap
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Posted 10/24/09 - 10:56 AM: Subject: The Whorfian Hypothesis	#1
The Whorfian Hypothesis is the idea that our actions, thoughts, and beliefs are somehow shaped or influenced by the language we speak. So I want to put it to you, myself being only an egg on this subject, should we accept, reject, or modify this hypothesis?
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Cheshire
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 10/24/09 - 01:28 PM:	#2
slap wrote: The Whorfian Hypothesis is the idea that our actions, thoughts, and beliefs are somehow shaped or influenced by the language we speak. So I want to put it to you, myself being only an egg on this subject, should we accept, reject, or modify this hypothesis? In this form it is too general to deny wholesale. You could debate degrees of shaped or influenced, but that will most likely change with an example's context. Otherwise, it is a generally accurate statement. Language and meaning are certainly related in some significant way. If our actions, thoughts, and beliefs are considered to have a meaning, then the hypothesis appears inescapable.
Or not.

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Posted 10/24/09 - 07:28 PM:	#3
I think the hypothesis is a slam-dunk on the psychological side. It is clear that the vocabulary we use within a single language shapes the associations we make toward different subjects. We call one group of people "terrorists" and another "freedom fighters" and that shapes our allegiances. So languages, which may have different arrangements of grammar would have to be biased toward those conclusions. But maybe it wasn't really an appropriate school to present the theory. It seems, to me, to be making a fallacy by implying cause and effect. That the language is the cause for the thought processes of the individual, rather than the culture and locally evolved thought processes and assignments shaping the language. For example, in Chinese, there are 2 common ways of saying "to think". One is used exclusively for "to think correctly or not known yet" and the other, "to have thought incorrectly". "I think (correctly/unknown) eating rice is good" or "I thought (incorrectly) eating paste was good". Culturally there is greater emphasis on facts and correctness. There is no strict word to translate "yes" or "no", like English. Instead, "yes" gets replaced with various repetition of verbs, "to be" or "correct", and "no" is replaced with "to not be" or "not correct". But which came first? Did the concept evolve in their cultural traditions or did the language force them to think this way? There are some pretty old Chinese text, (back 5000 years), which give good examples of the vocabulary changing over time.
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Posted 10/25/09 - 09:42 AM:	#4
For example, English is a very bad language for expressing feelings and emotions. In a polite society words like shame are "forbidden". It can all lead to aggressive behavior.
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Posted 10/25/09 - 10:03 AM:	#5
There is a feedback loop between our minds and our language. They shape each other within the restraints of our brains and the opportunities of our environment.
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slap
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Posted 10/25/09 - 01:58 PM:	#6
So it sounds like a weak version of the Whorfian Hypotehsis is execeptable? What about a strong version? Which seems to claim that we literally cannot break out of the psychology our language places on it. That a tribal Piraha is incapable of understanding the concept of 10? This strong of a version seems to be almost like the theory laddenness of observation, just language laddenness of thought. I think there has been some research done showing that speakers of certain languages are better at certain cognitive tasks. For example english speakers are supposed to be better at assigning blame than chinese speakers. The supposed reason was that in the event of bob dropping the bowl English speakers say "Bob dropped the bowl" and Chinese(I don't know which one of the many languages) speakers say "The bowl was broken".
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Kelby
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Posted 10/28/09 - 12:37 PM:	#7
The Whorfian Hypothesis in the strong sense hardly has any bite. Of course people may behave differently according to certain categories rife within a language. Knowing certain words makes you aware of that which the word refers to, i.e. picking out defined patterns in an environment. But the language you use does not in effect isolate your cognitive capacities. It does not make your way of experiencing the world completely barred off. Besides, there are no inherent meanings to words, hence words cannot impose themselves on an individuals mind, in effect influencing behavior and cognitive classification. In other words, are words given meaning, or is meaning already tacked onto words which in turn affect or cognitive abilities? As far as I know, the former is correct. Someone learning a new language may become aware of new things, yes, but the capacity to become aware of the said "thing" is not a product of the intrinsic structure of the novel language. You already HAVE the capacity to be aware of things, and giving a new object a defintion in another language is no different than making up a word in an artifical language for the said object.

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Posted 10/28/09 - 01:39 PM:	#8
I never liked it much. It's too simplistic an argument for covering 3 or 4 different groups that only loosely relate to each other. Oh, and I don't often hear anything beyond what has already been said. Take the word "or" for instance.(from the question posed in post 1) For this topic we cannot agree with the concept while rejecting it's mechanisms. As such we cannot the 3rd option is already negated as a valid discussion.
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