Even if he genuinely is thinking in the other languages, that doesn’t go very far in showing usefulness. I bet if I spent years memorizing Scholastic metaphysics, I’d fall into occasional Scholastic patterns of thought or vocabulary even if it was completely useless. (And let’s not talk about the size of the marginal returns, if we can’t even decide on the sign.)
Even if he genuinely is thinking in the other languages, that doesn’t go very far in showing usefulness. I bet if I spent years memorizing Scholastic metaphysics, I’d fall into occasional Scholastic patterns of thought or vocabulary even if it was completely useless. (And let’s not talk about the size of the marginal returns, if we can’t even decide on the sign.)
I agree with you, he was, after all, responding to my calling “General Semantics” an extension of the “strong Sapir-Whorf mistake”.