Tuesday, June 30, 2009

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...

7 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I don't see the big deal--anyone who has studied math (or organic chemistry or physics...) knows that language influences thought, and vice versa. So what?

12:55 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I don't think that anyone who has studied math will agree.

You may be thinking:

(1) Our thinking is to some extent constrained by the concepts that are easily available to us.

But that's different than:

(2) Language exerts a strong influence on our thoughts.

8:37 AM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

One of the greatest benefits I reaped from my program in Religious Studies is that I now know Chinese fairly well. I can now call bullshit on all the people in the humanities who use Chinese (since it's so different from our language) as a way to support their loony hypotheses. I will now call bullshit all over her Mandarin Chinese example.

In Chinese, the word you use to indicate the next something is 下, pronounced "xia" (shee-ya, said quickly) with a falling tone. The word you use to indicate the previous something is 上, pronounced "shang" (shang, said quickly) with a falling tone.

These words are somewhat pictographic in nature and yet, like most Chinese words, they don't strictly mean that which they picture (if they are pictographic, that is - not all Chinese words are). One of the interesting things about Chinese is that it's a very poorly engineered language. Drawing images for words is simply not very efficient, and this leads to condensing meanings wherever possible so as to reduce the number of pictures one must remember in order to communicate. This, alone, is very interesting to me, as it leads to tons of word combinations with which we can somewhat easily agree (such as using the same character for the term "to flee" and the term "to leave", leaving it to context for the reader to use in order to determine which meaning is most appropriate) and many combinations with which we find it hard to agree (such as using the same character for the term “to flee” and the term “to lose”, as in losing an object – kinda weird, but kinda related by a sense of something not being where it used to be, or some sort of sense of loss, etc.). It gives insight into how the ancient Chinese thought about the world and evidence that, while there are what we would consider to be loosely related terms grouped together, it is most important that more often than not, the terms grouped with one another are ones which make sense to us, giving at least some evidence that people in cultures with languages that develop in entirely different manners and independently from one another still come to the same conclusions about which objects and actions are similar and relate to one another. It is interesting that there are many instances in Chinese where terms which are grouped together don’t seem to us to relate, but it is also interesting and important that we understand why they grouped together the meanings they did in the comfortable majority of instances.

ANYWAY, back to the point:

While 下 can be used to indicate that something is below something else, as the picture sort of indicates, it can also be used to indicate that something is next in an order, since Chinese manuscripts are written from top to bottom.

Her translation of the Chinese term for "last month" being the "up month" is flat out wrong and misleading, and she uses this inept translation to back her idea that the Chinese somehow think differently of time than we do. They don’t in any meaningful way so far as this topic is concerned. They don't think that time is somehow a spectrum of events moving vertically through space whereas we think of it horizontally. In fact, I don't know anyone who even bothers assigning some sort of x-y axis to time in his or her brain. They still make the same observations about time that we do – it moves in one direction and there is a past and a future. Using a term which CAN mean “above” does not make last month the “above month” any more than using the term “left month” to indicate last month would make sense in English. It makes it last month.

9:26 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

10:03 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Very interesting, Mystic. Looks like it pays to know actual, ya know, facts...

There's a long history of this sort of thing associated with attempts to prove the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis and similar claims.

Whorf himself tried to make claims about the Hopi and their language, claiming, inter alia, that they don't experience time as we do, since their language contains no tenses. (Note the presupposition of the truth of his own hypothesis...) Turned out that his translations of Hopi were utter shit, as pretty much every sensible person, even those with no knowledge of Hopi, concluded.

Recently there were breathless claims that Chinese speakers thought about counterfactuals differently than English speakers...again, mistranslations were the real cause.

10:40 AM  
Anonymous The Dark Avenger said...

FWIW, a friend of mine who has a Math PhD had a Chinese friend who claimed that because of the way Chinese was structured that Newton's discovery in physics couldn't have been made, which is interesting, because up until the time of the late Ming, early Manchu dynasty, China was on the 'leading edge' of technology of the time(they invented printing, not Gutenberg, gunpowder, etc.)

OTOH, in my wife's native language(Ilocano), the same word is used for steam and smoke. I only learned this today.

You can't translate the title of Chekovs' Three Sisters literally in her language, because they only have three words to describe siblings:

Manong(Older brother)

Manang(Older sister)

and Ading(younger sibling)

It would have to go something like "Manang Millie, and ading Maritess and ading Venaflor".

They also have no gendered third-person pronouns, so it's common for them to get him/her or she/he his/her confused when speaking English because the concept doesn't exist in their language.

I once joked with her that since they use the obviously-Spanish derived "trabaho" for the word work, that the Ilocano didn't work until the Spanish 'discovered' the Philippines, and responded that there was a word for work in Ilocano but that the Spanish word was commonly used for that concept.

Hope these real-life examples help.

12:21 PM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

Oh, a professor IN MY PROGRAM told me once, as proof for his thesis that reality is socially constructed (seriously, a professor and the entire rest of my class was arguing for this thesis against me, the lone rebel), that the Chinese don't have any tenses in their language, and therefore time doesn't exist for them.

I not only laughed in his face, but literally yelled "NO WAY, YOU DO NOT THINK THAT". As his smile grew into a more grim countenance, I explained to him that, yes, while the Chinese do not conjugate any verbs, they do in fact acknowledge that time exists.

In Chinese, you cannot say "I went to the store". Instead, you must say "Yesterday, I go to the store." That is how it's handled. You put the time phrase first, then the rest of the sentence without verb conjugation. That is how time is handled. They still know it's there.

Unbelievable. There was a girl from Taiwan in my class who didn't ever argue with the thesis, but laughed the whole time I was reaming him and the rest of the class for thinking that Chinese people don't know that time exists.

Just completely unbelievable.

2:40 PM  

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