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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?
I always thought hard S-W has been long recognized as bunk, while soft S-W is kinda wishy-washy area depending on definitions of "influencing" and "changing". Sure, framing is a thing. Pretty big thing actually, even if you discount non-reproducible studies. But it's not an ironclad barrier, it's just a hue in the big palette of things.
A while ago I read this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18579574-the-language-hoax which is very anti-SW. I liked it. I'm not sure I am qualified to judge whether the arguments expressed there are the scientific truth (actually I am pretty sure I am not) but it's surely was illuminating for me.
What is the working definition of hard vs. soft here? My sense was that the popular rejection of S-W was almost entirely motivated by aesthetics rather than hard data, and "linguists think" is a weak argument because linguists are (based on my impression from taking some graduate courses in their department during grad school) not very good at entangling their reasoning with reality. As a matter of fact, with the right framing adjacent academic communities are still quite open to S-W.
Hard is that your linguistics fully determines your thought processes, and if in your language "tomorrow" and "yesterday" are the same word, you view time in a fundamentally different way than somebody who grew up with different words. The best book exploring hard S-W that I read is "Babel-17" by Delany. Softer versions are that linguistics may not be the ultimate determinant, but has certain influence - obviously, the strength of influence determines the "softness" of a particular position.
As I said, framing is real (or at least appears so) and confirmed by reproducible studies, and widely used in marketing industry, for example. So that part I think still alive. But something like "people that have same word for wavelengths X and Y actually perceive them differently than those that have different words" is already rather suspect, and even harder claims that go deeper into thought patterns become even more unlikely.
In case you didn't see my own comment, I come from a native language family where this is the case, and we certainly don't think that way.
I did, and that's why I used this example - because there are multiple examples like this which, especially when combined from different languages, kind of make "strong S-W" seem utterly ridiculous.
The word "tomorrow" does not begin at the letter t an does not end at the w. Conceiving it in this arbitrary manner is a strawman.
Specific words give us only a glimpse of what frameworks, processes, non-verbal categories, etc. might exist in a language.
But those words have to be situated in the context of the language as a whole. As you say, your language does distinguish between yesterday and tomorrow, but "words" for those are stretched over the lenght of a sentence and are defined contextually, as opposed to being visibly delineated on a page by a cluster of letters flanked by spaces, and generally existing as definite categories not signified by proper words (which would still be only contextual).
This is why we have to consider the entire linguistic landscape and structure when discussing the depth and limits of a language. Illiterate Uzbeks, lacking abstract language, could not thus correctly employ abstract categorization in a similarity exercise with pictures of a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet. This kind of thought is unexpressible in their language.
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