How does our language shape the way we think?
There is a fascinating hypothesis called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that says language has a profound effect on the way we see the world. Sapir-Whorf places the causal arrow at language, towards thought: we observe that speakers of different languages act and speak differently in many different ways, such as when it comes to spatial orientation, color, gender, social organization, and so on, and infer that these differences are decided by their languages. The strong version of this hypothesis says that language absolutely determines the way you see the world, perceptually and conceptually. A bit weaker, but still quite strong versions of Sapir-Whorf are currently back in vogue, as this article attests.
The problem is that most of those who argue that language has a profound effect on some aspect of thought mistake correlation for causation. When you observe that people speak a particular way and also act a particular way, there are three distinct possibilities: speaking that way caused them to act that particular way; acting that particular way caused them to speak that particular way; or some third, unrelated phenomenon caused both the behavioral and the linguistic patterns. Most S-W proponents jump directly to the conclusion that it’s the language that’s causing the thought patterns, and completely ignore the possibility that in fact the culture the speakers are living in is causing both thought and language.
This article pretends to address that objection, but ignores it completely in several of the examples:
Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”
The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space.
Very interesting, but this seems like a prime candidate for a cultural explanation. Consider this: how did the Kuuk Thaayorre language come to use north, east, south and west where we use relative terms like left and right? Did the terms just spontaneously emerge, and then the speakers learned to keep track of their absolute position at all times just to keep up? A more plausible explanation is that being able to keep track of absolute position was such an important trait for survival that it permeated the culture, including the language. Since no one is even attempting to empirically test whether the causal arrow is pointed from language to thought or the other way around, and since it’s unclear what would constitute an empirical test of the matter, we must fall back on a priori reasoning, and on the face of it, it seems to me that it’s more plausible that a culture collectively developed a good sense of direction because those who didn’t died, and then it spread into the language, than that the language spontaneously developed a different set of spatial concepts and then the culture was forced to use these concepts to communicate.
More plausible is the example with gender: speakers of gendered languages, such as Spanish or German, will tend to describe words that are masculine in their language with words for qualities associated with masculine traits, and similarly describe feminine words with feminine traits. This is a stronger case for (one instance of) S-W for several reasons: it persists in English, a language without grammatical gender; there is no obvious possible cultural explanation here; and, more importantly, grammatical gender is much more prone to randomness and not as closely tied to ways of living as for example spatial navigation. Generations of students have been puzzled that e.g., German das Mädchen, the girl, is neuter, not feminine. This is probably by analogy with other words that end in the diminutive -chen — -chen words are always neuter. This happens a lot when it comes to grammatical gender, but is hard to imagine when it comes to spatial concepts: a random fluke in the language that is not caused by any kind of cultural shift causes speakers to think differently about the concepts the word refer to. A grammatical shift that is purely linguistic caused shifts in patterns of thought.
The problem with this article is that it celebrates the above as an example of the huge influence of language on thought. “The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound.” Well, it is, but the effect isn’t as profound as some would have it. By this point in the article, we’re supposed to take this as one of a long series of examples that corroborate S-W. In fact, it’s the single example in the article that unambiguously supports an instance of S-W!
I think language affects thought, but I think thought affects language far more. So far, the evidence for the opposite has been underwhelming. (The color example, too, is more complicated than it’s made to appear.)
Of course, researchers who believe in S-W approach every correlation as if it were causation in their favor, and skeptics, like me, approach every correlation as if it were simple accidental and not in favor of S-W. More nuance is clearly needed, and less sensationalism.
