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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   4103 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

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I just saw this video by Tom Scott on linguistic determinism, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

"Does the language you speak change how you think?" This is the title of the video. And my answer is: Yes! Of course! Obviously! It's a concept I was aware of before, but always took it as a given. I didn't even think that it's a controversial position. But Tom calls it 'not serious' and "easily disprovable."

Usually I will find some snarky blog post or a racist Substack defending a widely rejected theory, but I have not been able to find anything using my usual search terms, eg. "In defense of..." etc.

What are the best essays, papers, and books in defense of linguistic determinism?

Quoth Betteridge…

Anyway, this article links to some defenses from as late as 2002. I’m left with the impression that it’s a hit piece, but I can’t be sure that it’s targeting the universalists.

It looks as if, by the time one starts publishing serious academic work on relativism, one must have crawled quite far up one’s own ass. If true, this could have dire consequences for the availability of actual experiments.

Thanks!

Going through my old bookmarks and posts on various forums, I noticed that the term "linguistic determinism" is rarely used, though it is still sometimes implied or at the very least can be shoe-horned in. Linguistic relativism is easily defensible. Anyone who disagrees is dumb and wrong. For example, I found this post on Language Log, which I often reference. It's about Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria in 1930s Uzbekistan and Kirghizia and their relevance to our current discussion about language, IQ, and cognitive differences.

This is what Luria writes in the first chapter of Cognitive Development:

The way in which the historically established forms of human mental life correlate with reality has come to depend more and more on complex social practices. The tools that human beings in society use to manipulate that environment, as well as the products of previous generations which help shape the mind of the growing child, also affect these mental forms. In his development, the child's first social relations and his first exposure to a linguistic system (of special significance) determine the forms of his mental activity. All these environmental factors are decisive for the sociohistorical development of consciousness. New motives for action appear under extremely complex patterns of social practice. Thus are created new problems, new modes of behavior, new methods of taking in information, and new systems of reflecting reality.

Here, in line with the Soviet school of psychology, emphasis is put on the importance of material and historical-cultural environmental conditions in shaping language and conscious existence.

It has become a basic principle of materialistic psychology that mental processes depend on active life forms in an appropriate environment. Such a psychology also assumes that human action changes the environment so that human mental life is a product of continually new activities manifest in social practice

In 1930s Luria traveled to Uzbekistan and Kirghizia. There he found that "illiterate (oral) subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the names of objects, never abstractly as circles, squares, etc. A circle would be called a plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon; a square would be called a mirror, door, house, apricot, drying-board." They didn't perceive these figures as abstract shapes but rather as representations of tangible things they knew. While, on the other hand "teachers' school students... identified geometrical figures by categorical geometric names: circles, squares, triangles, and so on."

This is obvious. They didn't yet find a need for abstract geometrical categories and definitions, and it still could be said that the illiterate Uzbeks understood and were able to express the concept of roundness, but unlike us, they understood and expressed it concretely.

However, the following finding is much more interesting. If linguistic determinism is false, then a person's illiteracy should not affect their ability to categorize things into groups based on set criteria. But, it seems like thought that requires abstract categorization is unexpressible in the illiterate and oral language of the studied subjects:

Subjects were presented with drawings of four objects, three belonging to one category and the fourth to another, and were asked to group together those that were similar or could be placed in one group or designated by one word. One series consisted of drawings of the objects hammer, saw, log, hatchet. Illiterate subjects consistently thought of the group not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations — 'situational thinking' — without adverting at all to the classification 'tool' as applying to all but the log. If you are a workman with tools and see a log, you think of applying the tool to it, not of keeping the tool away from what it was made for — in some weird intellectual game. A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: 'They're all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces, If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as a god a job as a saw'

So, in a culture and language that is stagnant due to a lack of material pressure to develop abstract language, there can not possibly be a way to "correctly" categorize a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet. It's a thought that is unexpressible under those conditions. While those peoples' potential can be assumed to be the same as ours, they are limited by their language.

Is this linguistic determinism? Yes? It satisfies the cop-out definition widely given online: "Linguistic determinism is the theory that a language determines the way you think of the world." But for linguistic determinism to be controversial and more than something everyone should take as a given, I could have expected it to claim that language determines not only "the way you think of the world" but also the world itself, its material conditions. But as it stands now, it's boring. Back to the dialectic we go.

And in general, is this not the point of Flynn? That it is the twentieth century’s cognitive revolution, "in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories," that made the IQs go up? That this doesn't strictly measure smartness, but reflects the increasing cognitive demand of the times? And, finally, that the undemanding life of 1930's illiterate Uzbeks didn't yet have a place for abstract similarities, used as measures of literacy and "intelligence," and that their thought was determined by this limitation?

Tom Scott is a cuck.

Also I did manage to find in my bookmarks a racist blog post, but I still have yet to read it.

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