gcanth103cspring2013

The idea that thought is the same as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity[

The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works, or even how to study it. Now that scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate[thinking]with language. (pp. 58–59, italics added)

Experimental work since Whorf's time has suffered several additional problems. Pinker noted that some apparent behavioral differences between language groups have turned out to be artifacts of clumsy translation.

Chinese speakers are less capable of reasoning counterfactually than English speakers because Chinese lacks subjunctives, which serve as counterfactual markers in English

The Orwellian idea that people think (mostly or entirely) in the medium of natural language, and therefore that language can be equated with thought, is unsupported empirically and is also problematic in principle, given what is known about language and about thought

Languages differ in the extent to which they describe duration in terms of distance as opposed to amount of substance.

Is this conflation of distance and duration universal to humans, or does it depend in part on the conflation of distance and duration in language?

Why should we continue to do Whorfian research? One possible reason is that cataloging crosslinguistic cognitive differences could be a step toward charting the boundaries of human biological and cultural diversity

crosslinguistic cognitive differences could be tools for investigating how thinking works and, in particular, for investigating the role of experience in the acquisition and representation of knowledge: If people who talk differently form correspondingly different mental representations as a consequence, then mental representations must depend, in part, on these aspects of linguistic experience. If discovering the origin and structure of our mental representations is the goal, then crosslinguistic cognitive differences can be informative even if they are subtle and even if their effects are largely unconscious. Whether or not they correspond to radical differences in speakers' conscious experiences of the world, Whorfian effects can have profound implications for the study of mental representation.

Korean, in contrast, conflates Motion with Path and elements of Figure and Ground in transitive clauses for caused Motion, but conflates motion with Deixis and spells out Path and Manner separately in intransitive clauses for spontaneous motion.

sensitivity to language-specific patterns in the way they talk about motion from as early as 17–20 months.

learners of English quickly generalize their earliest spatial words — Path particles like up, down, and in — to both spontaneous and caused changes of location and, for up and down, to posture changes, while learners of Korean keep words for spontaneous and caused motion strictly separate and use different words for vertical changes of location and posture changes.

suggest that they are influenced by the semantic organization of their language virtually from the beginning.

In another experiment native English speakers were taught to talk about time using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin.

language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains and

one's native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time) but does not entirely determine one's thinking in the strong Whorfian sense.