3 ms·

Just to really emphasize the point -- the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been essentially disproved. It comes up a lot because it's a very attractive idea, but it d

• TallGuyShort 9y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your comment is saying the hypothesis itself has been disproved, and the parent is referring to a book about the hypothesis with the same name that emphasizes criticisms of that hypothesis. Right?
  • Osmium 9y ago
    I haven't read the book the parent mentioned, I'm not sure what the book contains. But I agree with the parent's "TL;DR: no, language doesn't determine how you see the world." There is a lot of literature on Sapir-Whorf, including many pop linguistics books. Note I'm not a linguist, I just know a few and they're very vocal about this :)
    • FabHK 9y ago
      yes, you're both right: the book basically presents and examines Sapir-Whorf, and rejects it (with some very minor exceptions, as mentioned). It's really a zombie/cockroach meme (to use Paul Krugman's terminology) - it's dead, but keeps coming back, just like the Eskimos and their 100 words for snow etc.
      • rspeer 9y ago
        So I'm fully aware that people have experimented with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis for decades, and if it were true it would have been conclusively demonstrated by now. But isn't color names one of the last refuges of Sapir-Whorf, one of the places where the weakest form of Sapir-Whorf might be having some sort of effect, because color names are one tool (out of many) that we can use to consciously distinguish colors? As an example, these Munsell tiles are supposed to be perceptually uniform, so just based on the mechanisms of vision, each tile would be as easy to distinguish from its neighbors as all the others. If you showed me tile A5, then later showed me C5 and asked if it's the same color, I would know it isn't. One is red and the other is orange. But I'd have a much harder time with K3 and M3, or J6 and L6 -- and these are colors that the article points out are harder to distinguish in words.
        • deleted 9y ago
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        • dorchadas 9y ago
          Except you could still perceive the differences. You'd just have to resort to other modifiers, i.e. 'light', 'dark' or 'bluish', to describe them. And you could easily invent a word if you needed to. It really doesn't have anything to do with distinguishing them but more to do with describing them.
          • rspeer 9y ago
            I don't think you really addressed my example. I'm talking about a difficult case of distinguishing colors, where you don't get to look at them next to each other, and hypothesizing that it would help if the colors were described with completely different English words. Yes, if I knew I were being tested on this, I could invent a description to try to remember what K3 looks like. But I don't have to invent anything to recognize the difference between red and orange. But maybe jacobolus is right that this is just an effect of RGB monitors and not of language. These tiles are in the cyan range, which RGB screens don't display faithfully, so maybe the actual difference between the tiles is more obvious when you're looking at them.
        • jacobolus 9y ago
          I made a chart representing the WCS’s color chips as accurately as possible on an sRGB computer display and sent it to Kay a few years ago: http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/images/jrus-20100531/wcs-chart-4x.png http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/images/jrus-20100531/wcs-c... You can’t get a complete idea of what the original color chips looked like, as quite a few of them are outside the sRGB gamut (so what you get in this picture is a less colorful representation of the same lightness/hue). But it should give you a reasonable impression. Here’s a more continuous picture of the full sRGB gamut in Munsell space, along with some points of interest: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ed/Color-map-2.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ed/Color-map-2.p... (For example you can see that the ISCC–NBS labels for sRGB primaries are “reddish orange”, “greenish yellow”, and “purplish blue”, respectively) If you actually look at a chart where a bunch of Munsell color chips of different hues are all presented at the same lightness (value) and chroma, and you have standard color vision, then they should look pretty well equally spaced. (Or the same story for holding any pair of attributes constant and varying the third.) One significant problem with trying to glance at and interpret these kinds of more limited hue–value charts (i.e. not the full set of Munsell chips) is that the chroma varies from one part of the chart to another, and chroma differences are often more salient than hue differences. But some named categories are certainly larger and fuzzier than others.
• woodandsteel 9y ago
  You're right, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been thoroughly disproved. A good book on this is The Language Hoax by linguist John McWhorter. The main reason it still hangs on is that it is used by people to try to support the left-wing ideological idea that human nature is entirely a product of socialization, and so can be formed to produce a perfect socialist society. And let me add that, as Marxist writer Norman Geras explains in his book Marx and Human Nature, this is not at all what Marx himself thought.
  • dmreedy 9y ago
    There are a number of books, throughout history, on either side of the conversation. I would not call the issue settled by any measure. It's hard to settle any issue when it comes to tricky, sneaky, intangible things like qualia, and semantics.
    • dorchadas 9y ago
      You wouldn't call linguistic relativity a settled matter? Because it pretty much is, especially the strong form. And evidence for the weak form is quite lacking, relying mainly on the work of Boroditsky, whose main article has never been published and who doesn't control for culture, education, etc. in her others. It seems to me that culture has much more influence on how someone things/perceives things than language ever could... Which also explains why very different cultures can use the same language -- if language determined your thoughts, wouldn't, say, Quebecois and French culture be fairly uniform, not to add Algerian or Cote D'Ivoirean (is that even a word?) in.
  • dang 9y ago
    > to try to support the left-wing ideological idea Could you please not take HN threads on generic ideological tangents? Those are against the HN guidelines (regardless of which ideology, of course) because such discussions are so repetitive. They're black holes from which no light emerges. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• throwaway7645 9y ago
  Not proved or disproved as I understood it (I'm not qualified).
• dmreedy 9y ago
  Strong Sapir-Whorf is likely untrue. Sapir-Whorf is contentious. Linguistic Relativism in general is by no means disproved. It just goes through phases of popularity, like any ideas about human experience. At any given time it has some number of critics and some number of advocates, and the majority floats between
• mindways 9y ago
  I've had friends, linguists, and linguist friends all tell me that Sapir-Whorf has been disproved (at least in strong form), but I find it really hard to believe them, because it contradicts my own experience of the world. I'm by no means perfect at introspection, but I can notice the effect learning new words has on my own thought processes, and it seems about as obvious as the effect of, say, my mood. When I learn words for colors - what "fuchsia" or "teal" or the like actually mean - I mentally distinguish them from similar shades in day-to-day life whereas before I didn't. (And it's not just "hey, new word, let's use that!"; I learned both of those colors about halfway through my life.) When I learn a specialized term in a field that chunks a bunch of complex concepts together in a particular way, I can think about that topic more fluently (letting me go further with those thoughts), but only if I accept the particular chunking of that term. Sure, I have some thoughts which are more visual or spatial or musical and don't involve words as semantic pointers-to-structures-of-meaning. But not _all_ of them. (It's also possible I'm simply fundamentally misunderstanding Sapir-Whorf.) [Edited to fix italics.]
  • acjohnson55 9y ago
    Languages most certainly helps us hone the way we perceive the world. But on the other hand, it's common for me to have concepts in my mind that seem crystal clear, and yet very difficult to capture in words. Sometimes to the point where it feels like once I manage to start describing it, the concept becomes permanently watered down. Some easy examples are the perceptual effect of looking at my infant daughter, or the experience of hearing certain pieces of music. But often, it's much more mundane. See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability. In that sense, language gives us a way to approximate concepts that we already have, to varying extents. But it's extremely useful, because we can then manipulate those approximations to generate novel concepts. I don't believe anybody would suggest that that's not the case. But strong Sapir-Whorf would suggest that this is how all thought originates. On another anecdotal note, I used to consider my internal monologue to be me, full-stop, and I have always thought of it as being a stream of words. But I've come to realize that it's not actually real words. Furthermore, at best, its the version of me when I'm under zero stress. However, if I'm upset or threatened, it's clear that "linguistic me" only has illusory control of my behavior, or even my thoughts. In fact, I have realized I often behave first, and then come up with the narrative to understand my own behavior. I posit that this is universal. I think we shape our thoughts to conform to much more primeval motivations, which are surprisingly complex in nature. The entire media industry exists to try to give us linguistic narratives to explain and shape these urges. And I say "shape" because it's not a one way process. I think we train our own behaviors with our thoughts, and when unstressed, we can even exercise linguistic self-control.