More Weak Arguments for the Language Determines Thought Hypothesis
Lera Boroditsky Edition

The hypothesis that language determines thought seems irresistible to people...especially people who work largely with words rather than things.

So far as I can tell, the standard view about the relationship between language and thought goes roughly like this:

What language we speak has some influence on thought, but it certainly doesn't determine it. Facts about your language can spin or color certain aspects of your thought, make certain concepts more easily available to you, and so forth. But it doesn't perfectly determine what you will think, it doesn't determine the big things, and it doesn't make any concepts obligatory, nor does it make any perfectly inaccessible to you.

However, the lure of flashy, cool-sounding theories like the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis seems irresistible.

Here's something by Lera Boroditsky, a psychologist at Stanford. Her conclusion is big, big, big!:

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

However, this conclusion is hyperbolic. The evidence professor Boroditsky offers simply doesn't support such claims. And this is the way these discussions usually go: strong claims about powerful and pervasive influence of language on thought, supported only by meager (though often still interesting) evidence showing only rather weak and inclining effects.

Consider the evidence she offers for language affecting how we think about time:

People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month").

This is interesting, but--as usual in these cases--it doesn't come close to being astonishing or terribly important. It takes very little thought to realize that our common convention of representing time as flowing from left to right is mere convention. We have to represent it some way, representing it in that way works fine, there's nothing sacrosanct about it, end of story. It's perfectly reasonable to think that there's some link between this convention and our convention (again: mere convention) of writing from left to right. But this is not the kind of thing that must be shown to prove that there are astonishing effects of language on thought. It's the kind of small, innocuous, inclining effect that one could pretty much predict without even doing empirical research. But nothing here shows the kinds of profound effects that are advertised. We easily slip into representing time differently if necessary--e.g. along the y axis of Cartesian coordinates--if that becomes convenient.

And the other evidence presented here is no more compelling.

For example, she considers a famed example in this context: the fact that people who speak different languages sometimes carve up the color spectrum in different ways. However, again, we know that colors are a notoriously difficult and odd case. It takes little thought to recognize that colors can be divided up in many ways, and e.g. that it can sometimes be handy to lump two varieties of blue together, sometimes to distinguish between them. The color spectrum can be divided equally well in many different ways, and it's no surprise to find that languages have somewhat different (though note: not radically different) ways of categorizing colors. And in cases where there's much arbitrariness involved, one would expect the predictable influences of language on thought to come to the forefront. E.g., if my language contains a prominent way to distinguish color 1 from color 2--e.g. if different names for them are common--I'll probably be more likely to notice differences between color 1 and color 2. Again, this is not a point that is without interest, it simply isn't earth-shattering. (We also know that different humans--e.g. males and females--have different capacities for color discrimination; so to get a complete picture of what's going on here, we'd have to check to make sure that different ethnic groups don't also have different powers of color discrimination.)

One thing it's important to keep in mind here is that the influence of thought on language is certainly more important here than the influence of language on thought. We develop new terminology because we need it to clearly express new thoughts--not the other way around.

It is also worth noting that the world has its say here, too, though folks on the Whorf side of the debate tend to get that backwards. Eskimos have several words for snow and related phenomena (though not the thirty or more distinct terms that is sometimes claimed),* but so do we (snow, slush, powder, sleet, snain, etc.). Eskimos have a couple of different words for snow, ice and similar things for the same reason we do--because they live in an environment in which snow and ice are salient. Skiers also have many words for snow, and for the exact same reasons. Meteorologists have the most different words for snow, ice, etc., again because of the way the world is and because of what they are interested in and need to do. In the most ordinary cases, the world shapes the inquiring mind, then thinkers craft words to express important thoughts. Language is usually at the end of the line, not at the beginning of it.

Professor Boroditsky also claims that if you speak a gendered language, this tends to have some effect on your thinking--in particular, there is some tendency to think of objects which have masculine names as being more masculine. Of course, we need to point out here that the causal arrow may go the other way, and doubtlessly does in many cases--that is, more masculine-seeming things will probably be more likely to get names with masculine gender. Guns and swords will likely (but not necessarily...think of Vera...) be referred to via masculine-gendered words, for example. So we'd have to control for that. But, more importantly: this is another smallish and predictable kind of effect, not a huge and astonishing one. This is, again, a case of language nudging us in a direction in the absence of any facts. Most things don't actually have genders, of course; so there aren't any facts here to push back against such influences. Things are different in cases in which language urges us to think a certain way, but the world pushes back. Language may have some force in such cases, but it can't match the force of the facts.

Finally, let's consider Boroditsky's claim that:

In fact, you don't even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.

Again, were we'd want to know which ways the causal arrows go here, but I'd certainly be inclined to think that they went from language to art in cases like this. But, again, it seems that the important thing to point out is that the effect is not astonishing. Again, we're dealing with wispy, peripheral, conventional and impressionistic things here. How on Earth do you represent death, anyway? And if you personify it, what sex does it have? (Perhaps more interestingly: why any sex at all?) That in cases like this, people should more often than not (though note: not always!) get nudged here or there by their language should come as no surprise...and it cannot support any sweeping, astonishing claims about how language influences thought.

I should note that I have little doubt that language exerts some influence on thought. And I find research like Professor Boroditsky's interesting and important. Although it is likely that language influences thought only in rather subtle and peripheral ways, e.g. when conventions or metaphors are prominent, such effects might still be important in certain ways, and the sum total of such effects could still be significant.

However, it's important that we avoid hyperbole here. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof--but the available evidence for stronger versions of the hypothesis that language influences thought clearly remain unproven.




* We have Benjamin Lee Whorf to thank for the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax, too...