Caledonian, Sapir-Whorf becomes trivial to abolish once you regard language in the correct way: as an evolved tool for inducing thoughts in others’ minds, rather than a sort of Platonic structure in terms of which thought is necessarily organized.
Phil, I don’t see how the argument is obviously incorrect. Why can’t two works of literature from different cultures be as different from each other as Hamlet is from a restaurant menu?
Sapir-Whorf becomes trivial to abolish once you regard language in the correct way: as an evolved tool for inducing thoughts in others’ minds, rather than a sort of Platonic structure in terms of which thought is necessarily organized.
Even taken this way, I don’t see how it abolishes Sapir-Whorf. Different languages are different tools for inducing thoughts, and may be better or worse at inducing specific kinds of thought, which will in turn influence “self”-generated thoughts.
Nope because the whole point is that thought is already existent. We use language to induce thoughts in other people. With ourselves we do not have to use language to induce our own thinking, we just think.
That might be true, but I’d want to see evidence of it. If you’re just appealing to intuition, well, my intuition points strongly in the other direction: I frequently find that the act of saying things out loud, or writing them down, changes the way I think about them. I often discover things I hadn’t previously thought about when I write down a chain of thought, for example.
I suspect that’s pretty common among at least a subset of humans.
Not to mention that the act of convincing others demonstrably affects our own thoughts, so the distinction you want to draw between “inducing thoughts in other people” and “thinking” is not as crisp as you want it to be.
Your verbalizations can affect your own thinking the same way the utterances of other people can. Your original thoughts don’t originate from or structured/organized by language however. They were already there, and when you hear what you said out loud, or read what you wrote down, your thoughts get modulated because language can induce thought.
Perhaps ‘induce’ is not a suitable word. ‘Trigger’ might be better. Like how a poem can be read many ways. The meanings weren’t contained in or organized by the words of the poem. Rather the words triggered emotions and thoughts in our brains. Nevertheless, those emotions and words can also be triggered by non-verbal experiences. ‘Language affects thought’ is then as trivial as ‘The smell of a rose can trigger the thought of a rose, as much as the word “rose” can.’
If you believe “the thought of a rose” is the same thing whether triggered by the smell of a rose, a picture of a rose, or the word “rose” then we disagree on something far more basic than the role of language.
That said, I agree with what you actually said. The differences between the thoughts triggered by different languages is “as trivial” (which is to say, not at all trivial) a difference as that between the thoughts triggered by the smell of a rose and the word “rose” (also non-trivial).
If you believe “the thought of a rose” is the same thing whether triggered by the smell of a rose, a picture of a rose, or the word “rose” then we disagree on something far more basic than the role of language.
Of course, usually different sets of thoughts get triggered by those different triggers. Can you express more explicitly what you think we disagree on?
I use ‘trivial’ in the specific sense of language being no different than other environmental triggers. Not in the sense of ‘magnitude of effect’.
For example, the cultural differences which usually track language differences are probably more explanatory of the different thought patterns of various groups. For instance, lack of concept for ‘kissing’ could simply be from kissing not being prevalent in a culture. ‘Language differences’ as an explanation is usually screened-off, since naturally language use will track cultural practice.
I just don’t see the point of focusing specifically on language. Sapir-Whorf’s ambition doesn’t seem to merely be including language among the myriad influences on thought. Rather it seems to say thought is somehow systematically ‘organized’ or ‘constrained’ by language. I think this is only possible since language is so expressive. If you say ‘language’ influences thought you seem to have in your hands a very powerful explanatory tool which subsumes all other specific explanations.
Can you express more explicitly what you think we disagree on?
OK.
When wnoise asserted that different languages influence thoughts differently, you disagreed, implying that the language we use doesn’t affect the thoughts we think because the thoughts precede the language.
I disagree with that: far from least among the many things that affect the thoughts we think is the linguistic environment in which we do our thinking.
But you no longer seem to be claiming that, so I assume I misunderstood.
Rather, you now seem to be claiming that while of course our language affects what we think, so do other things, some of them much more strongly than language. I agree with that. As far as I know, nobody I classify as even remotely sane _dis_agrees with that.
You also seem to be asserting that the idea that language influences thought is incompatible with the idea that nonlinguistic factors influence thought, because language is expressive. I don’t understand this well enough to agree or disagree with it, though I don’t find it compelling at all.
Put another way: I say that language influences thought, and I also say that nonlinguistic factors influence thought. What factors most relevantly influence thought depends on the specifics of the situation, but there are certainly nonlinguistic factors that reliably outweigh the role of language. As far as I know, nobody believes otherwise.
Do you disagree with any of that? If not, what did you think I was saying?
I was mainly addressing the topic Komponisto set up:
Sapir-Whorf becomes trivial to abolish once you regard language in the correct way: as an evolved tool for inducing thoughts in others’ minds, rather than a sort of Platonic structure in terms of which thought is necessarily organized. [emphasis mine]
You see that just seems to be what this whole Sapir-Whorf debate is about. For one, I don’t think there would be anything to talk about if it was simply asserting that ‘language occasionally influences thought, like a rose sometimes would’. Since language somehow seems so concomitant (if not actually integral) to thought this seems to show that we are somehow severely constrained/organized by the language we speak. So apologies if i’m getting this all wrong, but I just don’t think it is fair for you to say ‘of course I agree that other things influences thought’. You seem to be ignoring the obvious implication of language being so intricately tied up with thought.
We do have a substantial disagreement in that you seem to think that even though language is one of the many influences of thought, it’s impact is especially significant since language is somehow intimately dependent on thought.
I can simultaneously agree that language can influence thought and that speaking different languages has little influence on thought. This is because I think most of the time other factors, culture being the most obvious one, screens off language as an explanation for differing thought patterns among people who speak different languages. This simply means that the seeming influence of language on thought is actually the influence of culture on thought, and in turn of thought on language, and then of language on thought again.
I mentioned the expressiveness of language because I wanted to show how it can seem like it is language affecting thought, when it is simply channeling the influences of other factors, which it can easily do because it is expressive.
I’ll try to summarize my position:
If you somehow managed to change the language a person speaks without changing anything else, you will not see a systematic effect on his thought patterns. This is because he would soon adapt the language for his use, based on his existent thoughts (most of which are not even remotely determined by language). The effect of language on thought is an illusion, it is actually his/his culture’s other thoughts giving rise to the language which seem to then independently have an effect on his thought.
The phenomenon of language influencing thought, is more helpfully thought of as thought influencing thought.
For an English speaker, I expect that a picture of a rose will increase (albeit minimally) their speed/accuracy in a tachistoscopic word-recognition test when given the word “columns.”
For a Chinese speaker, I don’t expect the same effect for the Chinese translation of “columns.”
I expect this difference because priming effects on speed/accuracy of tachistoscopic word-recognition tasks based on lexical associations are well-documented, and because for an English-speaker, the picture of a rose is associated with the word “rose,” which is associated with the word “rows,” which is associated with the word “columns,” and because I know of no equivalent association-chain for a Chinese-speaker.
Of course, how long it takes to identify “columns” (or its translation) as a word isn’t the kind of thing people usually care about when they talk about differences in thought. It’s a trivial example, agreed.
I mention it not because I think it’s hugely important, but because it is concrete. That is, it is a demonstrable difference in the implicit associations among thoughts that can’t easily be attributed to some vague channeling of the influences of unspecified and unmeasurable differences between their cultures.
Sure, it’s possible to come up with such an explanation after the fact, but I’d be pretty skeptical of that sort of “explanation”. It’s far more likely due to the differences between languages that caused me to predict it in the first place.
One could reply that, sure, differences in languages can create trivial influences in associations among thoughts, but not significant ones, and it’s “just obvious” that significant influences are what this whole Sapir-Whorf discussion is about.
This is because I think most of the time other factors, culture being the most obvious one, screens off language as an explanation for differing thought patterns among people who speak different languages.
There is not a one-to-one correlation between culture and language of course. The screening off is fairly weak. Brazil and Portugal simply do not have the same culture, nor for that matter do Texas and California.
If you somehow managed to change the language a person speaks without changing anything else, you will not see a systematic effect on his thought patterns.
Even stronger separation happens for those who can speak multiple languages, and for these people culture does not screen off language. We can actually “change the language a person speaks” in this case. Do the polylingual talk about being able to think differently in different languages?
Brazil and Portugal simply do not have the same culture, nor for that matter do Texas and California.
I don’t think that has anything to do with the strength of the screening-off at all.
P(T|C&L)=P(A|C) means C screens off L, which does not mean P(T|L&C)=P(T|L) meaning L screens of C. Screening off is not symmetric.
Or in other words, I have not said that if 2 cultures are not the same but their languages are, then the thinking could not be different.
Even stronger separation happens for those who can speak multiple languages, and for these people culture does not screen off language. We can actually “change the language a person speaks” in this case. Do the polylingual talk about being able to think differently in different languages?
Nice one. My prediction is that their thinking would not be affected in any systematic way at the level of abstractions.
I can simultaneously agree that language can influence thought and that speaking different languages has little influence on thought. This is because I think most of the time other factors, culture being the most obvious one, screens off language as an explanation for differing thought patterns among people who speak different languages. This simply means that the seeming influence of language on thought is actually the influence of culture on thought, and in turn of thought on language, and then of language on thought again.
(...)
If you somehow managed to change the language a person speaks without changing anything else, you will not see a systematic effect on his thought patterns. This is because he would soon adapt the language for his use, based on his existent thoughts (most of which are not even remotely determined by language). The effect of language on thought is an illusion, it is actually his/his culture’s other thoughts giving rise to the language which seem to then independently have an effect on his thought.
The phenomenon of language influencing thought, is more helpfully thought of as thought influencing thought.
Excellently put. The view you express here coincides exactly with mine.
Does talking about or writing a thought down cause you to notice more things than if you had spent a similar amount of time thinking about it without writing anything? That’s the proper baseline for comparison.
I’m not sure it is the proper baseline, actually: if I am systematically spending more time thinking about a thought when writing than when not-writing, then that’s a predictable fact about the process of writing that I can make use of.
Leaving that aside, though: yes, for even moderately complex thoughts, writing it down causes me to notice more things than thinking about them for the same period of time. I am far more likely to get into loops, far less likely to notice gaps, and far more likely to rely on cached thoughts if I’m just thinking in my head.
What counts as “moderately complex” has a lot to do with what my buffer-capacity is; when I was recovering from my stroke I noticed this effect with even simple logic-puzzles of the sort that I now just solve intuitively. But the real world is full of things that are worth thinking about that my buffers aren’t large enough to examine in detail.
Caledonian, Sapir-Whorf becomes trivial to abolish once you regard language in the correct way: as an evolved tool for inducing thoughts in others’ minds, rather than a sort of Platonic structure in terms of which thought is necessarily organized.
Phil, I don’t see how the argument is obviously incorrect. Why can’t two works of literature from different cultures be as different from each other as Hamlet is from a restaurant menu?
Even taken this way, I don’t see how it abolishes Sapir-Whorf. Different languages are different tools for inducing thoughts, and may be better or worse at inducing specific kinds of thought, which will in turn influence “self”-generated thoughts.
Nope because the whole point is that thought is already existent. We use language to induce thoughts in other people. With ourselves we do not have to use language to induce our own thinking, we just think.
That might be true, but I’d want to see evidence of it. If you’re just appealing to intuition, well, my intuition points strongly in the other direction: I frequently find that the act of saying things out loud, or writing them down, changes the way I think about them. I often discover things I hadn’t previously thought about when I write down a chain of thought, for example.
I suspect that’s pretty common among at least a subset of humans.
Not to mention that the act of convincing others demonstrably affects our own thoughts, so the distinction you want to draw between “inducing thoughts in other people” and “thinking” is not as crisp as you want it to be.
Your verbalizations can affect your own thinking the same way the utterances of other people can. Your original thoughts don’t originate from or structured/organized by language however. They were already there, and when you hear what you said out loud, or read what you wrote down, your thoughts get modulated because language can induce thought.
Perhaps ‘induce’ is not a suitable word. ‘Trigger’ might be better. Like how a poem can be read many ways. The meanings weren’t contained in or organized by the words of the poem. Rather the words triggered emotions and thoughts in our brains. Nevertheless, those emotions and words can also be triggered by non-verbal experiences. ‘Language affects thought’ is then as trivial as ‘The smell of a rose can trigger the thought of a rose, as much as the word “rose” can.’
If you believe “the thought of a rose” is the same thing whether triggered by the smell of a rose, a picture of a rose, or the word “rose” then we disagree on something far more basic than the role of language.
That said, I agree with what you actually said. The differences between the thoughts triggered by different languages is “as trivial” (which is to say, not at all trivial) a difference as that between the thoughts triggered by the smell of a rose and the word “rose” (also non-trivial).
Of course, usually different sets of thoughts get triggered by those different triggers. Can you express more explicitly what you think we disagree on?
I use ‘trivial’ in the specific sense of language being no different than other environmental triggers. Not in the sense of ‘magnitude of effect’.
For example, the cultural differences which usually track language differences are probably more explanatory of the different thought patterns of various groups. For instance, lack of concept for ‘kissing’ could simply be from kissing not being prevalent in a culture. ‘Language differences’ as an explanation is usually screened-off, since naturally language use will track cultural practice.
I just don’t see the point of focusing specifically on language. Sapir-Whorf’s ambition doesn’t seem to merely be including language among the myriad influences on thought. Rather it seems to say thought is somehow systematically ‘organized’ or ‘constrained’ by language. I think this is only possible since language is so expressive. If you say ‘language’ influences thought you seem to have in your hands a very powerful explanatory tool which subsumes all other specific explanations.
OK.
When wnoise asserted that different languages influence thoughts differently, you disagreed, implying that the language we use doesn’t affect the thoughts we think because the thoughts precede the language.
I disagree with that: far from least among the many things that affect the thoughts we think is the linguistic environment in which we do our thinking.
But you no longer seem to be claiming that, so I assume I misunderstood.
Rather, you now seem to be claiming that while of course our language affects what we think, so do other things, some of them much more strongly than language. I agree with that. As far as I know, nobody I classify as even remotely sane _dis_agrees with that.
You also seem to be asserting that the idea that language influences thought is incompatible with the idea that nonlinguistic factors influence thought, because language is expressive. I don’t understand this well enough to agree or disagree with it, though I don’t find it compelling at all.
Put another way: I say that language influences thought, and I also say that nonlinguistic factors influence thought. What factors most relevantly influence thought depends on the specifics of the situation, but there are certainly nonlinguistic factors that reliably outweigh the role of language. As far as I know, nobody believes otherwise.
Do you disagree with any of that? If not, what did you think I was saying?
Thanks for the clarification.
I was mainly addressing the topic Komponisto set up:
You see that just seems to be what this whole Sapir-Whorf debate is about. For one, I don’t think there would be anything to talk about if it was simply asserting that ‘language occasionally influences thought, like a rose sometimes would’. Since language somehow seems so concomitant (if not actually integral) to thought this seems to show that we are somehow severely constrained/organized by the language we speak. So apologies if i’m getting this all wrong, but I just don’t think it is fair for you to say ‘of course I agree that other things influences thought’. You seem to be ignoring the obvious implication of language being so intricately tied up with thought.
We do have a substantial disagreement in that you seem to think that even though language is one of the many influences of thought, it’s impact is especially significant since language is somehow intimately dependent on thought.
I can simultaneously agree that language can influence thought and that speaking different languages has little influence on thought. This is because I think most of the time other factors, culture being the most obvious one, screens off language as an explanation for differing thought patterns among people who speak different languages. This simply means that the seeming influence of language on thought is actually the influence of culture on thought, and in turn of thought on language, and then of language on thought again.
I mentioned the expressiveness of language because I wanted to show how it can seem like it is language affecting thought, when it is simply channeling the influences of other factors, which it can easily do because it is expressive.
I’ll try to summarize my position:
If you somehow managed to change the language a person speaks without changing anything else, you will not see a systematic effect on his thought patterns. This is because he would soon adapt the language for his use, based on his existent thoughts (most of which are not even remotely determined by language). The effect of language on thought is an illusion, it is actually his/his culture’s other thoughts giving rise to the language which seem to then independently have an effect on his thought.
The phenomenon of language influencing thought, is more helpfully thought of as thought influencing thought.
For an English speaker, I expect that a picture of a rose will increase (albeit minimally) their speed/accuracy in a tachistoscopic word-recognition test when given the word “columns.”
For a Chinese speaker, I don’t expect the same effect for the Chinese translation of “columns.”
I expect this difference because priming effects on speed/accuracy of tachistoscopic word-recognition tasks based on lexical associations are well-documented, and because for an English-speaker, the picture of a rose is associated with the word “rose,” which is associated with the word “rows,” which is associated with the word “columns,” and because I know of no equivalent association-chain for a Chinese-speaker.
Of course, how long it takes to identify “columns” (or its translation) as a word isn’t the kind of thing people usually care about when they talk about differences in thought. It’s a trivial example, agreed.
I mention it not because I think it’s hugely important, but because it is concrete. That is, it is a demonstrable difference in the implicit associations among thoughts that can’t easily be attributed to some vague channeling of the influences of unspecified and unmeasurable differences between their cultures.
Sure, it’s possible to come up with such an explanation after the fact, but I’d be pretty skeptical of that sort of “explanation”. It’s far more likely due to the differences between languages that caused me to predict it in the first place.
One could reply that, sure, differences in languages can create trivial influences in associations among thoughts, but not significant ones, and it’s “just obvious” that significant influences are what this whole Sapir-Whorf discussion is about.
I would accept that.
There is not a one-to-one correlation between culture and language of course. The screening off is fairly weak. Brazil and Portugal simply do not have the same culture, nor for that matter do Texas and California.
Even stronger separation happens for those who can speak multiple languages, and for these people culture does not screen off language. We can actually “change the language a person speaks” in this case. Do the polylingual talk about being able to think differently in different languages?
I don’t think that has anything to do with the strength of the screening-off at all.
P(T|C&L)=P(A|C) means C screens off L, which does not mean P(T|L&C)=P(T|L) meaning L screens of C. Screening off is not symmetric.
Or in other words, I have not said that if 2 cultures are not the same but their languages are, then the thinking could not be different.
Nice one. My prediction is that their thinking would not be affected in any systematic way at the level of abstractions.
(...)
Excellently put. The view you express here coincides exactly with mine.
Does talking about or writing a thought down cause you to notice more things than if you had spent a similar amount of time thinking about it without writing anything? That’s the proper baseline for comparison.
I’m not sure it is the proper baseline, actually: if I am systematically spending more time thinking about a thought when writing than when not-writing, then that’s a predictable fact about the process of writing that I can make use of.
Leaving that aside, though: yes, for even moderately complex thoughts, writing it down causes me to notice more things than thinking about them for the same period of time. I am far more likely to get into loops, far less likely to notice gaps, and far more likely to rely on cached thoughts if I’m just thinking in my head.
What counts as “moderately complex” has a lot to do with what my buffer-capacity is; when I was recovering from my stroke I noticed this effect with even simple logic-puzzles of the sort that I now just solve intuitively. But the real world is full of things that are worth thinking about that my buffers aren’t large enough to examine in detail.