#boroditsky

[ravenclawinspo]

bits and bobs about language, culture and thought

[magicademical]

It's like I have no clue how to critique this Boroditsky paper.

Or type anything coherent at all.

Or drink my water without choking on it.

[linguafile-blog]

News: Debate Concerning Language and Thought

Last week, I posted work done by Boroditsky that was published in Scientific America in 2011. This piece, from The Economist, debates how much language shapes our thoughts, if at all. The 'debate' is set up with one moderator (Robert Lane Green), the two sides (Lera Boroditsky vs. Mark Liberman) and a known linguist's position. In this case, the guest linguist is Derek Bickerton. Here is the opening statement by the moderator Green:

The idea that language influences thought is a profound, exciting and possibly disturbing one. It has often been used to exoticise other languages: in the 1930s, Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote that Hopi had no words for time (like days and months), and therefore perceived time far differently than European-language speakers do. The belief that language shapes thought also has political implications: in "Nineteen Eighty-Four", George Orwell imagined a dystopia in which government banned subversive words, making the associated thoughts unthinkable. Even in this decade, a group of French activists have proposed making French the sole language of European law, because of its purported great "rigour" and "precision". Using such a precise language, we are expected to believe, will lead to better law.

In the dominant school of post-war linguistics, such "Whorfian" thinking has traditionally had a bad reputation. (This is not least because Whorf's knowledge of Hopi proved to be hopelessly incomplete.) Mark Liberman, opening our debate against the motion, notes, however, that such thinking is still extremely common in the wider world, turning up examples from respected newspapers and commentators. Most common is the "no word for X" trope, the idea that if a language does not have a single word for a symbolic English word, that people's thinking must differ significantly. No less a figure than Ronald Reagan once said that Russian has no word for "freedom", when of course it does: svoboda. Such myth-believing in high places can be worse than embarrassing.

Lera Boroditsky, who is among those researchers rehabilitating the language-shapes-thought idea, begins her support of the motion on somewhat different ground, looking far beyond "no word for X". Speakers of languages with gendered nouns tend to think even of abstract nouns as feminine or masculine. Speakers of languages that have no word for "left" or "right" but only cardinal directions stay constantly oriented; Arabic speakers are less prejudiced towards Jews when being tested in Hebrew; and so on: the many examples she cites give a strong hint that there may indeed be something there.

I strongly enjoin readers to commit Mr Liberman's submission to memory, so that they will be prepared for the next "no word for" trope they read in the popular press. But I would now enjoin our debaters, empiricists to the bone, to look at the research Ms Boroditsky cites, and delve deeper into the question of whether this is really language influencing thought or something else—"culture", however defined, is a frequently cited alternative culprit, with language being culture's mirror. Another question to answer is whether the effects Ms Boroditsky describes are significant enough, rather than being mere nudges in areas such as colour-perception, to warrant support of the carefully worded motion: "The language we speak shapes how we think."

You may or may not find the numbers surprising on who the public considers the winner.