Benjamin Whorf
Benjamin Whorf was an American linguist known for his theory of linguistic relativity, which suggests that the structure of a language influences the way its speakers perceive and think about the world. This idea, often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, has had a significant impact on the fields of psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science, shaping our understanding of the relationship between language, thought, and culture.
8 Key excerpts on "Benjamin Whorf"
eBook - ePubLanguage, Culture, and Society
An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology
- James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But such quotations show the concern people historically have had about how language reflects the culture of the society it is spoken in, and the thought processes of those who speak it. In this chapter we will look at some of the relationships between language, thought, and culture, in particular, the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues, first, that the language one speaks determines how one perceives the world, and, second, that the distinctions encoded in each language are all different from one another. Thus, in its strong form this hypothesis claims that each society and culture lives in its own “linguistic world,” perhaps incommensurate with the linguistic worlds of other societies and cultures. If true, this has profound philosophical, social, and even political implications. THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD OF THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS: LINGUISTIC DETERMINISM AND LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY Whereas Boas’s and Sapir’s ideas concerning the relationship between language and culture primarily influenced only their students and other scholars, the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) caught the attention of the educated public. Whorf, a chemical engineer by training, was a fire-prevention inspector and later an executive in the Hartford Fire Insurance Company in Connecticut. Although he continued to work for the company until his untimely death in 1941, he enrolled in a course at Yale University to do graduate work under Sapir, who had just been awarded a professorship at Yale. Among Whorf’s numerous subsequent publications, the best known are those in which he expounded on what some have referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see Box 12.1). The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Not So) in a Nutshell Expanding on Sapir’s ideas, Whorf wrote that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas...
eBook - ePubLanguage As Social Action
Social Psychology and Language Use
- Thomas M. Holtgraves(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...The basic idea is that language, and especially language use, can influence the manner in which people process information in specific situations, rather than determining in an absolute manner how people think in all situations. This idea has been demonstrated in several areas of research, three of which I review in this chapter: language use, implicit causality, and reasoning and pragmatics. In this way, many of the phenomena discussed in prior chapters—speech act production and recognition, politeness, impression management, perspective taking, and so on—may have additional social psychological consequences. EARLY TESTS OF THE WHORF-SAPIR HYPOTHESIS The idea that language affects thought is most closely associated with what has generally been referred to as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (which will be shortened here to the Whorfian hypothesis). Benjamin Whorf (1956) is generally given credit for articulating this view, though it is a (more extreme) view consistent with ideas espoused by Edward Sapir (1921) and others. Whorf was a very atypical contributor to the linguistics and anthropology literature. He was trained as a chemical engineer at Yale where he took classes from Sapir. He then spent his career (he died young, at age 44) as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. His ideas regarding language and thought were derived from his lifelong interest in, and study of, Native American languages and culture. It was Whorf’s contention that cognition is malleable and conditioned by language; our experience and representation of the world is a function of the language we speak. According to Whorf: We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe signify- cance as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language...
eBook - ePubTheory in Social and Cultural Anthropology
An Encyclopedia
- R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Sean O’Neill Sean O’Neill Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Neo-Whorfianism Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and neo-whorfianism 745 748 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Neo-Whorfianism The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that language plays a powerful role in shaping thought, perception, and action, especially in relation to the worldview of an associated culture. Historical Perspective The idea that language guides perception is often associated with the writings of Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. While both had much to say about the role of language in the coordinating perspective during social interaction, many writers throughout history have commented on connections between language, thought, and perception. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) observed that political rhetoric, when phrased in gripping poetic terms, has the potential to stir an audience to action, even in the name of some absurd slogan, a phenomenon that reaches its height when reason is overpowered by emotion. Subsequently, many philosophers granted language a prime place in human social cognition. The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was one of the first to advance a theory of conceptual relativity, holding that humans universally build imperfect models of the world, which take on the status of a kind of virtual reality, as revealed by the changing face of science or religion throughout the ages—and as reflected in figures of speech. In Germany, this assessment was echoed by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who proposed that language functions as an organ of thought, with diverse languages leading speakers to different observations about the world, a phenomenon that Whorf later called the linguistic relativity principle. At the same time, von Humboldt proposed a theory of universal grammar, seeing traces of a common architecture behind the linguistic structures of the world—the differences arising as the historical products of creativity...
eBook - ePubLinguistic Relativity Today
Language, Mind, Society, and the Foundations of Linguistic Anthropology
- Marcel Danesi(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 The Whorfian Hypothesis Prologue Benjamin Lee Whorf became a major figure studying linguistic relativity in the 1930s—a term that he himself coined (Chapter 1). He graduated from MIT in 1918 in chemical engineering, and started working right after as a fire prevention inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. In one incident, during his time as an inspector, Whorf noticed that a firm had labeled a bunch of gasoline drums as empty (Whorf 1956: 134–159). As a chemical engineer, he realized that the drums were full of gasoline vapor, making them highly flammable, although he noticed that the workers did not handle them carefully, even smoking in the room with the empty drums, but not in the room with the full ones. Whorf concluded that by habitually speaking of the vapor-filled drums as empty, the workers came to perceive them as inert, being oblivious to the risks posed by smoking near them. The incident became both a key anecdote for both the supporters and critics of linguistic relativity (Edwards 1991, 1994). Apparently inspired by this event, Whorf enrolled at Yale University shortly thereafter to study linguistics with Edward Sapir. It was Sapir’s courses that influenced Whorf to study the relation between language and thought. He became particularly interested in the Hopi language and how different it was from what he called Standard Average European (SAE) languages. Whorf died very young from cancer in 1941, leaving many of his works to be published posthumously (Whorf 1956). In homage to his contributions the linguistic relativity hypothesis was renamed the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in the 1950s (Hoijer 1954), abbreviated a little later to the Whorfian Hypothesis (WH). As mentioned previously, in the 1960s, the WH fell out of favor, as linguistics veered towards the Chomskyan model of language, with critics even attributing to Whorf ideas he had never expressed...
eBook - ePubVerbal Minds
Language and the Architecture of Cognition
- Toni Gomila(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Elsevier(Publisher)
...A privileged area of research in this regard was the documentation of the Amerindian languages as their speakers were being exterminated or “reserved” (Boas, 1911 ; Sapir, 1924). Melded with the traditional view of the isomorphy of language and thought, this work naturally gave rise to the linguistic relativism hypothesis: what one can think is constrained or molded by the language one speaks. Whorf’s originality (1956), in this regard, lies in his particular way of arguing this view and in his effort to provide evidence for this approach, instead of taking it as an obvious postulate of anthropology. Whorf’s reasoning belongs with the functionalist American tradition. Following William James’ views, Whorf describes the infant development as the process of getting the “booming, buzzing” confusion of sensory experience to be organized categorically by our minds. Language provides us with a set of “ready-made” categories. By learning a language, then, we acquire a categorical system that allows us to make sense of our experience: to organize it, rather than just lexically label it. If different languages “carve nature at distinct joints,” speakers of different languages will come to experience the world differently. To put the point in anti-realist terms, as sometimes Whorf did, they will come to experience different worlds. Language, from this point of view, is not just a communicative tool but also a representational one. Thus, for instance: [L]anguage produces an organization of experience. We are inclined to think of language simply as a technique of expression, and not to realise that language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order… In other words, language does in a cruder but also in a broader and more versatile way the same thing that science does. (Whorf, 1956, p...
eBook - ePub- Alan J. Parkin(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Whorf noticed that the Navajo language tended to concentrate more on the form of objects than English did. Observations such as these led to the formulation of the Sapir–Whorf or, more commonly, Whorf hypothesis, that language determines perception and thought. Evidence for a strong version of the Whorf hypothesis In its strong form, the Whorf hypothesis states that the language we have available directly determines the way we perceive and think about the world. This issue has been most extensively developed within the area of colour perception and memory. Languages vary greatly in the way they provide verbal labels for colours. At one extreme, for example, is Italian which has four different words relating to what we would call “blue” in English. At the other end of the spectrum, the Dani tribe of Papua New Guinea has only two colour words: “black” and “white”. All colours have variants but we show widespread agreement about which particular shade of a colour is typical—these are known as focal colours. In one experiment, people from the Dani were compared with English people on their ability to remember colours that varied in how close they were to their focal colour. Both groups recognised focal colours better than non-focal colours and, in a subsequent experiment, both groups also learned associations to focal colours more readily (Heider, 1972; Heider and Oliver, 1972). These findings appear to provide strong evidence against the Whorfian hypothesis because, if language determined perception, one should have expected the Dani, with their minimal colour vocabulary, to perform much worse than English speakers. There has been criticism of these experiments on the grounds that the focal colours are simply more perceptually distinct and thus easier to remember. However, Lucy and Schweder (1979) pointed out that the focal colours used by Heider were more saturated (stronger) than the non-focal colours...
eBook - ePub- David E. Kieras, Marcel A. Just, David E. Kieras, Marcel A. Just(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 The Influence of Methodologies on Psycholinguistic Research: A Regression to the Whorfian Hypothesis 1 Patricia A. Carpenter Carnegie-Mellon University Benjamin Whorf once proposed that the properties of a natural language influence the thought processes of the speakers of that language—that linguistic structures are the molds into which molten thoughts are poured, making some thoughts almost impossible and others almost inevitable. A frequent example concerns the Eskimo language, which is reported to have seven different words to describe various types of snow. The psychological question often asked is whether Eskimos perceive snow differently from those of us who have an impoverished lexicon with which to label the cold, white stuff. While the strong version of Whorf s hypothesis found little support, the weaker version continues to hold some intellectual attraction. But my main interest in this paper is not in either the strong or weak version of the Whorfian hypothesis. Instead, I would like to use the Whorfian hypothesis to make an analogy. In several important ways, the research methodologies used in a science are a large part of the language of the science. In this paper, I will discuss how methodologies influence the content and theories of any science, and consider the specific instance of the methodologies used in the study of comprehension. The physical sciences provide striking case studies in which the methods and technology determined the theories, as much as the theory determined the development of new methods and tools. In biology, the quantum improvement on the microscope by Leewenhoek and those who followed him in the early 18th century led to the concept of the cell, and the rise of the theory that gave the cell prominence as the fundamental building block of biological structures...
eBook - ePub- Robert D. King(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Austin Macauley Publishers(Publisher)
...Or is the very world that they see out there somehow not quite the same world we ourselves see? Is ‘the lake’ in English the same thing as ‘the lake’ in Japanese? And if we do see the world differently, is it because of the different cultural backgrounds Japanese and Americans bring to the table, or because we were raised differently, or because they somehow think about things differently; or is it because the Japanese and English languages are so different structurally that language itself is forcing the speaker to see the world differently? Does language determine our view of the world, filter the world differently, and tyrannize our perception of the universe and even of other people and what they are doing? The idea that language is a kind of prism through which we see and interpret the world around us is a very old one. Whether it is true or not is still very much an open question, and one to which we may never have a definitive answer. I should say in advance that most linguists today do not believe the ‘Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis’ (or to give it another name it goes by, the ‘Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis’) is true. They may believe, as I do, that language conditions our behavior in certain ways, that we may have slightly different personalities in different languages when we speak two or more languages fluently, but this is trifling alongside the view that the world we see or experience ‘out there’ is different in different languages. The strongest form of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis—that our view of the world is constrained by the structure of the language we speak—is not believed by very many of us. Linguists, when wearing the laboratory coat of the scientist, do not find the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis ‘interesting’ because it lacks the one clear thing an hypothesis requires, in the eyes of the scientist: a way of disproving it empirically (cf. Karl Popper)...
