Language, Thought, and Reality

"Benjamin Lee Whorf was a student of Edward Sapir , who was one of the most famous and influential linguists and anthropologists of the United States in the 20th century. Whorf was around in the first half of the 20th century and worked on Native American languages such as Hopi and Nootka. He was an accomplished linguist. He did work on deciphering Mayan hieroglyphs and some of that work is still cited within that literature. He had another life as an insurance inspector and some of his most famous writing talks about that part of his history. He was regarded as eccentric. He was a bit of mystic, into thinking about cosmic stuff. He gets a bit of a bad rap because of that, though today, when you pick up books by physicists , they’re all about the meaning of life. He was one of those unusual, genius people. He never really went on to have an academic career, he just published these papers that captured people’s imagination. He’s famous for arguing that languages affect your thinking and reasoning and behavior in different ways. It’s the idea that the language you speak determines how you think. He doesn’t ever really put it quite that strongly. As is often the case, a lot of those who critique him haven’t read the work that closely. But if you view him charitably—or even just objectively—you can see that he anticipated a lot of the themes of modern cognitive science through things like nudge theory, framing of language, directing your reasoning this way and that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the most interesting issues he raised that has not been taken nearly as seriously as it should have in cognitive science is the implications of linguistic diversity for cognitive diversity. A lot of this book is about laying out for you, ‘Look, here’s this language that describes a basic situation, like cleaning a gun barrel with a ramrod.’ He takes that simple action and unpacks it: ‘here’s how English construes that event.’ Then you look at a Native American language, which describes that event in a really different way. He has this lovely image of the monolingual person as somebody who can only see a single color. He says that if you’re one of the people who can only see blue, you wouldn’t even understand your predicament until you were shown other colors. That’s why we’ve got to go and study languages that are very much unlike our own, he says. That’s still something of a minority view but, very happily, in the last decade or two people are starting to take it a bit more seriously. Linguistic and cognitive diversity are taking more of a place in cognitive science. That’s in part due to Whorf. It’s not highly academic, although it’s mixed. There isn’t much else that you can get with Whorf’s writings. There’s a book by Penny Lee called The Whorf Theory Complex , published in 1996, where she collects unpublished papers, but that’s less readable than this one. You can dip in and out of Whorf’s book. You can have it on the table and just read a chapter or half a chapter. Some chapters have illustrations. He’s got these weird and wonderful little cartoons inside the book, which are probably the most accessible aspects of what he’s describing. What we’re talking about is becoming more aware of how our understanding of reality is being directed by language through things like framing. Framing is everywhere, that’s the bottom line. It’s about becoming conscious of how affected we are by language and by different languages. It clearly relates to post-truth, but as I said earlier, it runs much deeper. It’s a problem, but it doesn’t have to do with the internet or even television: it’s something fundamental that humans have always had to deal with that’s got a lot to do with our cognition. Absolutely. They scale it up in this crazy way."