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almost like a table or chair. Thus English and similar tongues
lead us to think of the universe as a collection of rather distinct
objects and events corresponding to words. Indeed this is the
implicit picture of classical physics and astronomy that the
universe is essentially a collection of detached objects of
different sizes.
(Ibid.: 240)
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The Linguistic Relativity Argument
According to Whorf, the most fundamental formative influence of
language operates not at the level of individual words (the lexicon),
but of syntax. For instance, a crucial aspect of the way Indo-
European languages shape reality is not by imposing this or that
lexical segmentation upon it although this is significant, too but
rather by imposing a subject-predicate structure. This makes the
world appear as composed of discrete objects, possessing various
qualities. Another important feature is the way our language projects
agenthood upon nature. Certain kinds of events are, in English and
related languages, described by sentences such as, A light flashed
or It flashed, conjuring up a wholly fictitious actor, the flash or
it , to perform the action of flashing. Other languages, such as
that of the American Indian Hopi, avoid any such fiction, but instead
use a sentence whose literal translation would simply be, Flash
(occurred) .
Thus language serves to define an otherwise amorphous reality,
cutting entities out of this continuous substrate. Sometimes, it even
projects wholly fictitious entities on to nature, such as the category of
agent as applied to certain subjectless processes. In these ways,
language generates a reality of a particular nature.
The preceding paragraph expresses an essential step in the
linguistic relativity argument, as I define it here, but is less
securely grounded in Whorf s writings than those earlier. Although
this paragraph seems to capture an element in Whorf s thought, he
also occasionally expressed the view that languages reflect the
world more or less adequately, thus apparently presupposing that
we can speak of the way reality is, as opposed to the way we
conceptualise it. Indeed, one of Whorf s favourite ideas was that
Indo-European languages, with their rigid subject-predicate
structure, are inferior to certain American Indian languages, which
are better suited to do justice to the processual nature of reality:
reality is essentially a patterned process, rather than a structure of
permanent, discrete objects. Hence, reality, at least physical reality,
apparently possesses a nature independent of language that
language ought to reflect.
To find a less equivocal commitment to the construction view, we
must turn to Edward Sapir. In the article Linguistics as a Science , he
wrote:
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The Broad Arguments
Language is a guide to social reality . Though language is not
ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of
social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about
social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in
the objective world alone, or alone in the world of social
activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the
mercy of the particular language which has become the
medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion
to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the
use of language and that language is merely an incidental
means of solving specific problems of communication or
reflection. The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a
large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of
the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be
considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds
in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely
the same world with different labels attached.
(Sapir 1973:162)
THE LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY ARGUMENT IN
THOMAS KUHN S WORK
The past couple of decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in
the linguistic construction view owing to the work of Thomas Kuhn.
We must briefly mention this work here in order to cast some
additional sidelight on the argument from linguistic relativity,
although Kuhn s concerns are significantly different from the ones
that preoccupy us in the present essay. Kuhn is a science
constructivist in the sense I defined on p. 13, only to set the topic
aside as irrelevant to our present undertaking. He is interested in the
way in which physical reality is generated through the way in which
it is conceived by man. Kuhn holds this construction to be the work
of scientific communities, not a mere product of commonsense
thinking.
For Kuhn, the framework within which the community of
scientists constructs the natural world is that given by the
paradigm. A paradigm is a set of shared assumptions and an array
of recognised techniques, centred around an exemplar , an
instance of the successful use of these techniques and serving to
demonstrate their efficacy in practice. Prominent among the shared
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The Linguistic Relativity Argument
assumptions is a language that is unique to those subscribing to
the paradigm. Each such paradigm-related language offers its
distinctive classification of the objects encountered in the world.
For instance, in the Ptolemaic system the earth enjoyed a unique
status in the universe, poised motionless at its centre; in the
Copernican system, it orbits the sun and is merely one planet
among others. Conversely, in the Ptolemiac system the moon was a
planet, whereas in the Copernican system it is a satellite of the
earth.
According to Kuhn, such differences in classification are not to be
distinguished from differences in the meanings of the terms in two
different paradigms. This blocks the translatability of languages across
paradigms, and renders theories which are couched in different
languages rationally incommensurable. For there is no neutral
observation language to which scientists may have recourse to settle
their differences; no pure language untainted by theory into which
theories may be translated and assessed according to some neutral
yardstick. Thus, in a sense, every theorist is trapped inside his own
theoretical universe. Another way of putting this is to say that the
paradigm creates its own reality. This is indeed what Kuhn implies
when he says, for instance, that scientists before and after a paradigm
shift live in different worlds (Kuhn 1972:118). Kuhn s position, in
other words, is a constructivist one.
I shall not go any further into the exegesis of Kuhn s work, nor
shall I attempt to review the large literature that has emerged,
debating the pros and cons of the incommensurability view. This
literature occasionally touches on Whorf and Sapir s position as well.8
For our present purposes, we need not try to adjudicate the thorny
issue as to whether such languages really are incommensurable or
not, or resist calibration , as Whorf puts it in making the same point.
We can bypass all these problems here and focus instead on the
second premise of the argument from linguistic relativity, since this is
by far the most controversial assumption of the entire reasoning. This
is to the effect that if languages are indeed incommensurable, multiple
realities will be engendered as a result.
AN EXAMPLE
To conduct this investigation, we should now leave the historical
sources of the linguistic relativity view and focus on a concrete
example instead. Here is a case from social anthropology that
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The Broad Arguments
illustrates and supports the thesis of linguistic relativism. In Dyirbal,
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