Sorry - I put "sexy" in there to grab your attention and to make a point about words. If you studied cognitive psychology or good old-fashioned linguistics in college, you learned this famous theory about how language determines thought. If you didn't, it's your loss. Their theory is partly wrong, because humans can think without using words, but it is also partly right, because words do effect and shape our thoughts.
But Sapir-Whorf went beyond that. They theorized that language shapes and structures our perceptions of the world - both our output and our input.
Indeed, words and their concepts seem to do that. Goethe said "Man sees what he knows." A birder sees a Parula Warbler, a non-birder sees just a "bird," or doesn't even notice it at all. The universal metaphor of blindness for ignorance is no accident.
Sapir-Whorf is almost an "In the beginning was the word" theory. However right or wrong their theory was, it has been a useful and productive and intriguing one, which is the only true measure of a theory in science.
I refer to Sapir-Whorf because we had two posts a while ago which were, ultimately, about words and how they are used. One about "values," one about "progress." In both cases, these words and their connotations slipped into regular usage and began shaping our thoughts, sometimes without our awareness. After all, "thinking" happens somewhere in the shadowy darkness between awareness and un-awareness.
Cognitive Daily reviews the history of the hypothesis, and recent research on this dusty but still fascinating topic.
