I'm completely ignorant here - is it widely established that there's no link between how we think about things versus the languages we speak ? It seems intuitive that our ability to conceive of concepts would be dependent on having/creating language that can describe them, even in our own minds, but I have no idea how anyone could really know one way or the other.
As you point out, this is a hard thing to test. Add to this the fact that the question may be a sensitive one, similar to differences between men and women.
How can one go about testing the effect of language on thinking? Consider this example: English has an explicit grammatical structure for counterfactuals (CFs), e.g. "If I were a rich man ..." whereas some languages, e.g. Chinese (Mandarin) do not (they do have some other means but not as overt). One can then think presenting stories containing complex CF situations to native English and Chinese speakers, and somehow test how quickly they grasp them. This exact experiment was performed by Alfred Bloom in 1981 and indeed showed some differences. Later researchers noted some points that might have affected the results. You can see why this research may be sensitive, it may be mistakenly used to argue that Chinese speakers are somehow linguistically deficient.
I am no expert in this area, but I believe this is a fairly good example of the issue you are describing. According to the study, it appears as if the gender system used in some languages appears to bias individuals perception of the object.
so you're saying, it's not that there's no link, just that it's hard to pin down, and any real conclusions are inherently dangerous from a political/anthropological stance. that makes sense as I've heard from others that the field of anthropology has been in a semi-permanent state of apologism for eurocentric thought for the past thirty years.
I guess some forms of truth can't be released until society has fully prepared itself structurally for them (i.e., a society that could learn of inherent differences in thought based on language, without starting a new caste system based on that).
This is bullshit. Chinese language does not rely on "were" to make CF structure, but that doesn't mean it can't make CF statements. if you replace "were" with "am", the sentence still means the same thing.
I think it's widely accepted in linguistics (IA kind of AL) that language influences conceptualisation (sometimes called the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) but that it does not determine conceptualisation (the strong version).
right, I'm familiar with sapir-whorf...but the parent comment here specifically refers to sapir-whorf as "mumbo-jumbo". Seems like the linguists still aren't keen on it.
