Re: [ontolog-forum] language and thinking

[Ali Hashemi <ali@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

Ferenc thanks for the pointer! This reminds me of a discussion on these boards from a few months ago, whereby one participant was asking for measurable differences in how culture (and technology) can affect the way people think.

Leaving that particular discussion aside, I think anyone who finds value in the article linked to by Ferenc would also find the paper below of interest (and in case you are short on time, there is a link to media-ized version following). It provides a nice, thorough overview of, well, read the abstract - I'm having difficulty describing it any more succinctly :P (emphasis, mine).

article: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf

The weirdest people in the world?
Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine & Ara Norenzayan

Abstract: Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based
on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often

implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as
representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative

database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across
populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The

domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral
reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of

WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about
humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and

behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on
sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing

questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close
by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

media gloss version:  http://www.nationalpost.com/Westerners+World+weird+ones/3427126/story.html#ixzz0xoWQRf1Q

Best,
Ali

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:12 PM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ferenc,

Thanks for the reference:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html

The author makes some good points, but he's much too harsh
on Whorf in the opening paragraphs.  Whorf actually had quite
a strong background for his observations, and linguists and
psychologists drew much finer distinctions about the Whorfian
hypothesis, which they were analyzing for years.

Whorf himself never made the very strong claim that it's
impossible to learn new categories that go beyond what is
encoded in one's native language.  In fact, he explored
ways of teaching people to think in categories beyond
the ones encoded in their habitual verbal patterns.

At the end of this note are some excerpts -- the first two
are from the beginning of the article, and the last one is
from the conclusion.  The concluding paragraph is very close
to what Whorf actually said.

But I would also like to mention the following article
about the Pirahã language and culture:

http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/EverettPiraha.pdf

If the "strong Whorfian hypothesis" applies to anybody, the
Pirahã tribe would be prime candidates.  As far as anybody
has been able to determine, none of the adults of that tribe
have ever been able to break out of the mind set imposed by
their language (which is extremely difficult for foreigners
to master, even for Everett who spent years living with them).

In any case, Deutscher's article is interesting, but it would
have been better if he had presented a more balanced view of
Whorf in the opening paragraphs -- especially since he largely
agrees with Whorf in the conclusion.

John

_____________________________________________________________

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

By GUY DEUTSCHER

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short
article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the
20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to
augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and
Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most
people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked
for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at
Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international
superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea
about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a
whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we
are able to think....

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common
sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any
evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe
that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother
tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute.
But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us.
And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn
our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought
that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways...

The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy
shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the
objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what
has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked
impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how
to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their
contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first
step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending
we all think the same.



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