Does Our Language Make us Financially (Ir)Responsible?
No, it does not.
Despite this.
Your bullshit detector needs to peg at about 11 when you read something like this. I would be willing to bet money right now that this is not true. It's not that it's impossible. Rather, it's that this kind of lame, kindergarten-level linguistic hypothesis--Whorfianism, actually--is just way, way too tempting, and it's the kind of thing that it's way, way too easy to (unconsciously) Gerrymander evidence for. This is just too simplistic to be true. It has the ring of bullshit about it, and not just a little bit.
I'm not digging in my heels and refusing to look at evidence here; I'm just telling you that I am comfortable predicting right now that this is going to turn out to be bogus.
No, it does not.
Despite this.
Your bullshit detector needs to peg at about 11 when you read something like this. I would be willing to bet money right now that this is not true. It's not that it's impossible. Rather, it's that this kind of lame, kindergarten-level linguistic hypothesis--Whorfianism, actually--is just way, way too tempting, and it's the kind of thing that it's way, way too easy to (unconsciously) Gerrymander evidence for. This is just too simplistic to be true. It has the ring of bullshit about it, and not just a little bit.
I'm not digging in my heels and refusing to look at evidence here; I'm just telling you that I am comfortable predicting right now that this is going to turn out to be bogus.
posted by Winston Smith at
7:25 PM
1 Comments:
Language Log has a piece up reacting to the publicly available versions of this guy's paper: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3756
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