Subject: re : sapir - whorf and what to tell students these days

here 's what i tell my undergrad and grad students about that same chapter in language files . i . e . , it 's difficult to even judge what 's going on with whorf unless you are simultaneously conversant with linguistics , american indian languages , and at least the insights of modern physics . first , the conclusion that is appropriate is that , as i showed in " the demise of the whorf hypothesis " ( berkeley linguistics society , 1978 ? ) , what whorf said has little or generally no relation whatever to the entire body of discussion that comes under the name " ( sapir - ) whorf hypothesis " . he showed decades before the critics came up with their own hypotheses , which they failed to name after themselves , that he would never have agreed with their characterization of his thoughts . simple test : read the lf chapter and then ask , " who created the whorf hypothesis ? " and a quick way to answer this is : what did whorf himself call it in his two or three references ? he called it the " principle of linguistic relativity " or the " linguistic relativity principle " . my own reading of whorf never finds the word " hypothesis " at all . so - - right off the bat , and this is a good way to teach scientific nomenclature , who turned whorf 's ' principle ' into a ( n ) ' hypothesis ' , and why ? it was n't whorf , because his designation was clear . so what is the difference between the two ? well , a principle is like an axiom in geometry : a starting point which is theoretically unverifiable - - it 's just a starting point . you want something else , you begin from a different starting point , and then you develop your hypotheses from there . next : what does whorf 's " linguistic relativity principle " have to do , if anything , with einstein 's " relativity principle " ( which i covered in my also bls , 1980 ? , paper , " is whorf 's relativity einstein 's relativity ? " ) . ah , now we ' ve gotten to the crux of it - - much against pinker 's stand ( which was copied and intensified in a lingua franca short bio of suzette elgin hayden recently , where a digression found its author saying that whorf cobbled together his theory from a few ill-translated snatches of apache - - echoing a pinker statement and relying on pinker 's quoting whorf correctly , which he did n't , about a canoe on a beach pointwise : which pinker identified as an apache sentence , but which whorf knew quite well was nootka in the pacific northwest rather than apache in the beachless desert ) , whorf was upping the ante on einstein , who argued that euclidian geometry , far from being universal , was applicable only to flat surfaces ; that for round surfaces , which most of reality is made up of , you need non - euclidian geometry . i . e . , when the phenomena change significantly , you have to change the tool you ' re using . well , that 's what whorf said too ( see heisenberg 's lament below ) , except he moved its domain from mathematics to natural human language ; hence : the truly aptly named " principle of linguistic relativity " as whorf himself named it . admittedly , this does n't make any sense until you see it in action , in " an american indian model of the universe , " where he posits a worldview without our tense / time ( past / present / future diorama or river of time ) , using manifested / manifesting ( plus other synonyms ) instead . that is : sae grammars / cultures give that aforementioned notion of " time " , which is supported and maintained by their tense systems ( though , admittedly , english is weird and gets it through the culture side of the language / culture system ) ; the hopi language / culture system has no such image of time , working from a different worldview principle that sees only cyclical , not linear , time - - round , not flat . most of the world 's grammars that have broken out of the latinate mold show that the particular time / tense system of sae is pretty much peculiar to western european languages - - hence a linguistic / cultural ontology of " time " as we know and practice it , and not the supposed universal we have so fondly believed it to be . side note : for one who reads whorf closely , he makes five or ten times more universalist statements than relativity statements in his writings , yet he is seen ( and reviled in a chomskyan universalist attitude ) as the relativist par excellent . so right from the get-go we see that 1 ) whorf did n't write and would n't agree with the hypothesis that someone ( s ) named after him ; 2 ) rather than being some deranged crackpot , he was merely literate : whorf was one of the few interdisciplinary thinkers between physics and linguistics in this century ; 3 ) whorf 's relativity principle had something important to do with einstein 's ; and 4 ) whorf was a universalist as well as a relativist - - he just had them in balance , a notable enough rarity in current academe , you must admit . if i may be so bold , alluding to your posting that " no one has disproved whorf 's mild version of linguistic relativity ( let 's leave ling . determinism aside , or the stronger version . ) " , even the mild version was n't his ! trace back like i did and you will find that whorf espoused neither strong nor weak versions of determinism , and relativity has nothing to do with determinism when you see it from the physics viewpoint above , as he did . if you read carefully , writers about the whorf hypothesis admit that even whorf did n't hold a strong version of determinism ( so if he did n't , who did ? and if nobody did , why bring it up ? ) , and that all the critics hold the weak version that they dreamed up ( even though whorf would n't hold it because it 's at least weakly deterministic and therefore newtonian ) . so what 's going on ? the problem is that whorf had already , from his acquaintance with physics , moved from newtonian monocausal determinism as an ideal into systems thinking - - where sometimes the opposite of one profound truth is another profound truth , where everything is interdependent , multicausal , interconnected : language shapes culture while culture is shaping language ; language shapes thinking while thinking is shaping language . the cumulative effect of the ( humboldt / boas / sapir - ) whorf hypothesis literature has been primarily to throw up a smokescreen around his ideas so that people , including grad students in linguistics , psychology , anthropology and sociology , won't read him in the original ( english ! ) . i tell my grad students that if they want to really find out what their discipline is about , go find out who their discipline is beating up on and read them ; and if you are so lucky as me to find someone that four major academic disciplines are ganging up on - - you know you ' ve hit a goldmine ! what in the world could be so important that four academic disciplines create a combined smokescreen ? because so few linguists in this century have availed themselves of the changes in thinking about reality that physics has been broadcasting during this entire century , few linguists are even qualified to step into what they did n't realize was an interdisciplinary debate in the history of ideas which whorf felt so comfortable in . i ' ll explain . i ' ll give you a synopsis of a talk i intend to give at a 100th birthday conference for benjamin whorf , which i intend to get funding for and hold in the bay area in spring 1997 . i call it " heisenberg 's lament . " you see , early in this century , that ' uncertain ' heisenberg was among the first to gain a ' glimpse ' into the subatomic world ; and , having done so , he rendered his opinion that , regarding the subatomic realm , " we have reached the limits of our language . " he said this for two reasons : 1 ) no matter how glibly western scientists talk about electrons , protons , neutrons , quarks , etc . , when we look into that realm there are no ' things ' , only processes and relationships ; but in order to make sense ( i . e . , complete sentences ) in sae languages , we need nouns - - and there 's nothing in the subatomic realm that you can , except willy-nilly , attach nouns to . and 2 ) given that , our most fundamental scientific terms such as " same " and " different " are useless . he did n't know then , and physics does n't know now , whether there are gazillions of electrons or just one electron with gazillions of manifestations . we have reached the limits of our language . fast - forward a few decades and whorf hears this in his physics classes at yale ( he has unpublished manuscripts on gravity in the yale archives ) , and ponders : hm , i wonder if this has anything to do with what prof . sapir said the other day about hopi not needing nouns to express ordinary propositions - - just " rehpi " , " flashed " , instead of " it " or " the / a light flashed " : because when you come right down to it , how is the flashing different from the light ? is " light " just a convenient grammatical fiction foisted upon us by sae grammar ? and as he pondered ' light ' being noun or verb , particle or wave , depending on how it 's viewed , he saw the universe in the same way , with different cultures taking different positions on the question . in this case , since hopi did n't seem to take too seriously the absence of nouns , perhaps , whorf surmised , hopi could be of use for physicists in exploring and reporting back about the quantum world , that realm that did n't have thingy nouns . fast - forward another few decades and physicist david bohm reads whorf ( which i confirmed personally in talking to him ) , and then , * in response * ( my attribution ) , writes _ wholeness and the implicate order _ , in which he , among other things , tries to make english more verby and performative in the " rheomode " - - a brilliant flop ; and then launches on the scientific community a view of the universe which does not contain our familiar notions of past / present / future time , but instead an implicate and explicate order of reality - - an " inny / outty " notion where the future is inside us working outward instead of some vague distant goal we are headed toward . an email acquaintance pointedly asked me what the difference was between bohm 's terminology and whorf 's terminology ; it took me 6 months to finally answer that there was none , except the hopis had had theirs for millennia longer . and then it hit me ! bohm , in his own maverick way , appropriated whorf 's answer to heisenberg 's lament in " an american indian model of the universe " and substituted more scientifically acceptable terminology ( implicate / explicate rather than manifesting / manifested ) to see how the notion of a universe without linear time would fly in the modern physics and academic community - - and it had qualified success . but - - bohm was no closer to knowing whether whorf had been accurate in his description of hopi than he had been before writing the book . and there had been so much bad press on the guy ! how was one to know , ultimately ? and here 's the part that almost no-one knows so far . in 1991 , in the last few months of his life , david bohm launched his most ambitious thought experiment to date : with some other physicists and a few psychologists and linguists , and sponsored by the fetzer institute , he enticed recognized american indian intellectual leaders ( and some of their elders ) to join in dialogue together in what i can only describe as a roundabout way of asking american indians whether whorf was accurate in his description of the ' timeless ' hopi worldview . but it became so much more ! the american indian leaders there had previously read bohm 's book and others , but the physicists knew nothing about native american worldviews and native american science methodologies , so the indians had to build a bridge over to them in private meetings before the three public days on the themes of time , space and language . during the day on time , whorf 's description of hopi came up , was read out loud , and discussed , though i do n't remember any hopis being present ; nevertheless , the other american indians present , mostly of algonquian tribes , gave what can only be called ' independent verification ' in scientific terminology by saying essentially : well , i can't speak for the hopi people , but that 's pretty much the way we do it . in fact , of the many whorf passages read or discussed in these dialogues , the physicists and the american indians present were usually willing to give whorf his points ( proving again , perhaps , the difficulty of being a prophet in one 's own country / discipline ! ) . but we ' re not done yet - - the best is yet to come - - the actual conclusion of heisenberg 's lament ! at the beginning of the first dialogue it was clear that the quantum physicists had their favorite realm to explore and talk about , and the american indians also had their own favorite realm . as we dialogued , it began becoming clear that those favorite realms had some fundamental principles in common : the only constant is flux ; everything that exists vibrates ; everything is interconnected such that the part implicates the whole . in fact , it became crystal clear that the last major obstacle to these realms being the same realm was really only terminological : the physicists are used to calling it " the subatomic realm " whereas the american indians for millennia have been calling it " the spirit realm " . now that 's a big enough surprise - - that modern physics is knocking on the door of spirit without really meaning to - - but not big enough , so now let 's take it home ! it puzzled the physicists just how the american indians should have foreknowledge of a realm they should n't know about , that the western scientific infrastructure had just recently led us to - - and the indians had no such scientific infrastructure ! and as the physicists gradually understood that , like hopi , the algonquian grammatical structures do not demand nouns , do not demand fictitious actors to embody actions ( that , as my mikmaq and blackfoot friends tell me , they can talk all day long in those languages and never utter a single ' noun ' ! ) , they finally had to admit that such languages were indeed much better suited to exploring that realm and reporting back than sae languages - - whorf 's reply to heisenberg 's lament was verified and agreed upon . when the phenomena of reality change in a dramatic way , you need to change the tool you ' re using . now , of course , the physicists were left with an even larger puzzle , to wit : how is it that these american indians have a language much better suited than sae languages to investigate and describe the inner workings of the subatomic realm - - a realm they are n't even supposed to know about ! ? ! as you can see by now , pinker - - like all other facile critics and unindicted co-creators of the so-called hypothesis - - is out of his league altogether in attempting to characterize a major player in one of the most important interdisciplinary discussions ever in the history of ideas . pinker , like chomsky , loves logic ( which grows out of the grammar of sae languages just as the philosophy of ' karma ' grew out of the grammar of ancient sanskrit , where it was used earliest as the linguistics term for 'd irect object ' ! ! ) , but has never really gotten with the program this century to replace binary / dualistic thinking with multivariable / multicausal / interdependent systems thinking . whorf heard the call , way back then , and may yet prove to have been an entire century ahead of his time in linguistics . even though we can think in systems for phonology and grammar , we have a tough time doing it for " language and thought " ; we feel we have to make them bipolar opposites such that they are distinct and one causes the other invariantly ; that 's why i so admired how slobin finally lost those monolithic terms and framed the question instead in terms of " thinking for speaking " - - the at least one kind of thinking where your thinking is very much at the mercy of the forms and categories of your language , per whorf . so tell your students , as i do , that the only way to get to the bottom of what whorf did or did not say is to read his essays in _ language , thought & reality _ for themselves , perhaps with the above thoughts as a guideline , and then figure out for themselves whether the sapir - whorf hypothesis smokescreen makes any sense .
