From: Kharin (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 03:46:43 MDT
"First, my apologies to everyone for the long rant which is going to follow. It is just one of my latest toy-obsessions."
I'm afraid you're largely preaching to the choir, since Sapir/Lee Whorf is demonstrably flawed, at least in its strong aspect (incidentally, this is also why I'm sceptical of the Dawkins idea, given that such concepts are typically a means of engineering social change through linguistic adaptation, which seems a little awkward to me).
The discovery of language formation by a group of deaf children in Nicaragua should have ended these debates. Given that the discovery made it abundantly clear that a genetic basis for language formation exists, it seemed fairly clear that the notion of the signifier is logically prior to the sign. The other problem is that the Lee Whorf hypothesis has little explanation of language change. The entire basis of socio-linguistics is the observation of language change in response to social change; it doesn't easily work in reverse.
For example, there was a recent piece (NY Times if you want to go and pay for it) suggesting that since Asian languages have each character correspond to a syllable of sound, and in Chinese, at least, a basic unit of meaning (i.e. a morpheme), they lack the abstract character of Western languages which inhibits the development of analytical thought. Excerpt as follows:
"Alfred H. Bloom... argued that the lack of a subjunctive tense in Chinese made it extremely difficult for native speakers to explore "counterfactual" conceits... When Mr. Bloom tested Chinese and American students on a series of counterfactuals, he found that the Chinese students were typically unable to distinguish between events that really happened and false hypotheticals. The implication, Mr. Bloom argued, is that Chinese is more concrete than English, and, as a consequence, Chinese speakers have more trouble with abstract thought than Americans. "
The issue here is that this has nothing to prove a deterministic connection between language and thought, and it could as well be argued that such is what we would expect from Chinese subjects in any case. For example, some psychological research a few years back came to these conclusions;
"Easterners, the researchers find, appear to think more "holistically," paying greater attention to context and relationship, relying more on experience-based knowledge than abstract logic and showing more tolerance for contradiction. Westerners are more "analytic" in their thinking, tending to detach objects from their context, to avoid contradictions and to rely more heavily on formal logic. "
That said, there is some evidence to suggest that a weaker version of the Lee Whorf hypothesis may have some currency, particularly since if language and thought could be described as having some form of interactive relationship, proving the nature of that relationship is fraught at best . I think the studies related to terms concerning gender and attitudes expressed by subjects in response to certain phrases. I haven't seen these studies, but I suspect it would relate to these sort of linguistic anomalies;
"The sentence "Jon refused to be my master, and returned to his wife" quickly demonstrates that the terms master and mistress are not interchangeable, as in Jill refused to be my mistress, and returned to her husband "
Incidentally, as an afterthought, I'm not really sure that Fodor and Pinker make for natural allies. For example, I can hardly see Pinker finding this especially congenial; http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n19/fodo01_.html
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