mhnurse1Not so long ago I found myself returning to ideas that I feel relate to my niggling mental companion – that of anadialectical materialism (AdM). I have yet to fully formulate and explicate what that mental companion is, other than to produce this website as a vehicle to articulate what this resident in my mental psyche might mean and maybe, at the risk of significantly anthropomorphising my own thoughts, what it wants. I was pondering my mental companion when a recent tweet of mine seemed to largely attract affirmation and it went like this:
Some interesting threads of observations, and mainly comforting validations started to emerge. Some interesting and rightly uncomfortable questions also arose. One reply was an observation that “language matters”. Intuitively I feel this to be true, but as ever being a serial and terminal academic the urge to interrogate this intuition arose.
Which led me to review the status of the infamous “Sapir-Whorf” (S-W) hypothesis. And then down the rabbit hole. I’m not going to claim any particular great intellectual or academic authority in terms of my apprehension of the various incarnations of the S-W hypothesis. I only intend on exorcising some of the ideas I have in relation to my mental resident: AdM. The S-W hypothesis is something of a misnomer because there are indeed a variety of hypotheses and they make a variety of claims about the relationship between thought and language, and world-view (Kay and Kempton 1984). It is hard to pin down exactly what both Sapir and Whorf were claiming about these inter-relationships, primarily because of the delightful floridity of their prose. I turned to the seminal paper of Kay and Kempton (1984) who discuss what empiricism at that time made of their work. Make of this what you will, here’s some vintage Whorf:
“The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena because they stare every observer in the face. On the contrary the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which have to be organized in our minds. This means, largely, by the linguistic systems of our minds.” (Whorf 1956:212; cited in Kay and Kempton 1984).
I mean that’s beautifully put but also hard to grok and both Whorf’s and Sapir’s writing if you delve into their writing (as I have) has such a strong metaphorical bent. This can make it a challenge to formulate into a testable hypothesis for empiricism which necessitates prosaic clarity. Kay and Kempton (1984) assert that Brown (1976) endorses the view that Eric Lenneberg made the most precise re-statement of the S-W hypotheses in 1953.
“I. Structural differences between language systems will, in general be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the two languages.
II. The structure of anyone’s native language strongly influences or fully determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the language” (Brown 1976:128; cited in Kay and Kempton 1984).
Kay and Kempton (1984) go on to assert that a great deal of the empirical research into the S-W hypothesis includes the “tacit postulation” of hypothesis III. The semantic systems of different languages vary without constraint.
Kay and Kempton (1984) go on to explore through psychological experiments that centre on colour naming and discrimination the above three hypothesis and present some elegantly constructed experiments that tease apart the more radical from the weaker sets of hypotheses. The bottom line of their investigations then led them to assert that at best a weaker version of the S-W hypothesis, originating in hypothesis II is defensible and supported by empirical evidence. Specifically they say that:
“Thus, employing the name strategy, the English speaker judges chip B to be more similar to A than to C because the blue-green boundary passes between B and C, even though B is perceptually closer to C
than to A. The name strategy seems to demand two facilitating conditions: (1) it must not be blocked by the context, as in experiment 2; (2) the original judgment must be in some sense hard to make.” (p. 77).
This conclusion stems from research experiments where English speaking participants are shown three coloured chips and asked to make discriminations of the similarity of the colours. When given blue-green distinctions to make, where the chips are around the blue-green lexical boundary English speakers exhibit a distortion, whereas Tarahumara speakers do not. This effect can be blocked by careful structuring of the experimental design, which Kay and Kempton (1984) unpack in considerable detail and is not reducible to some kind of vision aberration. So, we are not hopelessly at the mercy of language, to paraphrase Sapir (1951), and the implied hypothesis III is also not upheld. What we are left with, according to Kay and Kempton (1984):
“there do appear to be incursions of linguistic categorization into apparently nonlinguistic processes of thinking, even incursions that result in judgments that differ from those made on a purely perceptual basis.” (p. 77).
In other words language can influence differences in our thought and indeed perceptual discriminations in certain domains, but these can be recovered in appropriate contextual circumstances.
Ok so that’s state of the art 1984, but what about where we are now? A foray into contemporary research into variations of the S-W hypothesis and the ideas of linguistic relativism and linguistic determinism takes me through a series of fascinating papers looking at the impact of language on cognitive processing (CP) across a wide variety of domains. I’ll be writing further essays on these fascinating papers as time allows, and seeing how well Kay and Kempton’s (1984) analysis of the classic work holds up when we look at more recent experimental work. Until then I offer up a final thought – what does the finding that language can shape perceptual discrimination offer us for when we are working with people whose perception is radically irrupted?