Oh boy, Chomsky vs Whorf round two hundred and thirty three. Time to grab popcorn. Some controversies never die and the impact of language on thought and perc

Oh boy, Chomsky vs Whorf round two hundred and thirty three. Time to grab popcorn. Some controversies never die and the impact of language on thought and perception is one of them. Anyway time to go grab a beer while my colorless green dreams sleep furiously. BTW the language/thought and language/perception interactions pose problems on both sides. There is some evidence that how a language refers to directions of relative objects impacts the perception of the speaker regarding direction (and that's a mark against Chomsky) but at the same time, if we accepted the Whorfian hypothesis uncritically than attempts to relabel "crippled" as "handicapped" would have been the end of it and we wouldn't have gone back to "disabled" and finally "persons with disabilities." Of those terms, "handicapped" is the least negative but changing terms did not change really how people related so it's not as simple as that. I doubt that large-scale and long-term patterns are that dependent on language. It may be that immediate, small-scale patterns are more dependent but as you scale out the sorts of solutions to problems we all have to navigate become much more restrained so I don't think the thesis can be as simple as it is put forward here.