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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

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

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