Language, Thought, and Reality

One of my favorite courses when I was studied Linguistics in graduate school was a seminar called "Language, Thought, and Reality." In that seminar, we examined the so-called "Whorf-Sapir Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis." Edward Sapir was one of the best-known linguists of the 20th century and published several major studies of Native American languages. Benjamin Whorf was an interesting character. He had a degree in engineering and studied linguistics as an avocation under Sapir at Yale. Like Sapir, Whorf was interested in Native American languages and studied Hopi, Nahuatl, and Mayan hieroglyphics. In the 1930s, Sapir and Whorf advanced their hypothesis on linguistic relativity, suggesting that our thoughts and perception of reality are influenced, or even determined, by our native language.

At first blush, this hypothesis sounds reasonable to most people, until you start thinking about its implications for thought, perception, and reality. Whorf wrote that "reality is a kaleidoscopic flux that is organized by one's language." Pretty strong statement. I would like to think that reality has a substance that is independent of our perception of it. To illustrate the hypothesis, Whorf said things such as an Eskimo does not see the same thing when he watches snow falling as an English speaker does because the Eskimo language has fifty different words for snow, and English only has one. It is pretty easy to poke holes in the hypothesis by asking a few basic questions. Do we think in language (words), or thoughts? What is the connection between thinking (cognition) and language? Do we perceive the world around us through our senses or through our language? If our language determines or limits our thoughts, why is it that we often have thoughts that we can't put into words? How is it that a baby is able to think, perceive the world and interact with its parents and others before it has learned its native language?

At the end of the seminar, after posing these kinds of questions and listening to several linguist guest speakers talk about the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, most of the students in the class came to the conclusion that, while interesting, the hypothesis really doesn't hold up to scrutiny because although language, thought and reality certainly interact with each other, they are very different things. Complicating things further, language and reality are pretty well understood by science, but thought and perception appear to lie in that area just beyond the reach of science. Even though Sapir and Whorf might not have gotten it quite right, these are still interesting things to think about.