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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?
The trivial version's pretty easy to steelman: whether people are raised with a language that distinguishes between two colours are able to identify them better/faster, classically with blue/green. This is still controversial, and there's a whole debate in linguistics about whether every language 'really' has the names for the same colours or not. But you can sit people down in front of a testing center and check this pretty quickly. The effect size isn't huge and I'm pretty skeptical about the evidence just because I'm skeptical of every study at this point, but it's not obviously false under its own premises. (Caveat: you'll have to specifically look for cross-cultural studies; there's a lot of attempts to check by brain hemisphere that are testing something more specific and kinda confused.)
While there's less academic efforts on the process, if you work with artists for long at all, you'll often find that they have a staggering array of terms for everything from color to layout to elemental design (cw: some artist nudes in the Greek sense) that isn't present among casual observers, and as you learn it you'll often find yourself noticing parts to art that you wouldn't have seen otherwise or before.
But that's not very interesting. Conversely, neither is Scott's version -- can we separate a language being changed by its culture from a culture being changed by its language -- particularly interesting to Sapir or Whorf. To some extent the strongest version, of whether removing words from common use a la The Giver would change minds is a fun question, but not a practical one. Most people are interested more in ... basically wordcelism, and whether Word Games can do anything.
Which is a lot harder to test.
Well, that's not entirely true. It's really easy to sit down a bunch of native speakers of a few different languages, especially in the MTurk days. And there's a ton of efforts that have done that. But that's also a space where the replication crisis has hit hardest.
Yeah, it's the ultraweak sapir-whorf hypothesis (language influences some things a little bit), you have more practice distinguishing between colors with words for them so you do it faster. But you could, with practice, distinguish colors with words you currently know or non-verbal color classes just as well (and presumably artists or designers would). It doesn't support what people imagine sapir-whorf means, like, there are categories built into your mind that language creates that deeply restrict or guide the way you think. Which is mostly false imo, you can perfectly well learn things you don't have words for, the restriction is more knowledge and experience generally, which is significantly less faux-profound.
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