Linguistic determinism is the idea that language shapes thought. There have been myriad arguments for and against this claim.
The main proponent of linguistic determinism was Benjamin Lee Whorf, a linguist who (like me) developed an interest in linguistics later in life. He graduated from MIT with a degree in chemical engineering; later on he studied Linguistics at Yale, working with his mentor, Edward Sapir. The idea of linguistic determinism is often called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. They believed that language has such a strong influence on thought that it determines your culture – your thoughts and behaviors. Whorf passed away in 1941 at age 44, and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis fell out of favor for a while. Interest was rekindled in the 1980s through the present day.
A major challenger of linguistic determinism was Steven Pinker, a contemporary linguist. Pinker is actually a cognitive scientist, but his main focus is language acquisition. He believes that language and thought are independent. He says that humans don’t even think in language; we think in something called “mentalese“, a kind of meta-language that is universal to all people. He says we are all born with and retain the same cognitive abilities; language has no ability to mold our thoughts.
Both of these positions are too extreme. We can’t say for sure that language determines thought; we can’t say that it has no impact. A better way of looking at it is this: if language keeps you from practicing thinking about something, then it succeeds in affecting the way you think. I’ll be writing more on this topic sometime soon, and giving some examples that I hope will illustrate what this hypothesis would mean.
So far, which side are you on? Do you think that language determines thought, or are they independent?
Nice blog. I do think that we are born thinking in mentalese because we haven’t acquired language yet. And I imagine there are hypotheses in the child development field about when humans typically switch over to thinking in words. Something else to consider, when we are in the midst of very strong emotions, I think we may switch back to mentalese.
ohhhh i studied this in one of my classes all those years ago. i give you props – you seem to understand this a lot better than i, but i think language and thought go hand in hand. call it simplistic, but without words, we would only have thoughts and no way to express them in a shared speaking language. language plays such an integral part in how we form thoughts, so if that makes any sense, they are definitely co-dependent.
love the new blog
I think they are inseparable. What does Language mean? Is it only the form what we utter? If it is not and includes the intuitive knoledge of language too, we think through language. We can’t have an idea about the thing we don’t know its name. Just when we exprience an idea (signified)we hand in hand familiarize about its form (signifier).
I think we speak and therefore we are.
See website above for detailed argument
The site address:
http://www.languageandthought.com
should have been given above
I definitely think that language shapes thought, though that is not the only thing that shapes thoughts. Sensory perception must be the genesis of thought and memory, but language, after a while, becomes like a sixth sense and seems to take over our thoughts for better or worse…