Philosophy of Language » Lecture 11
It is often claimed that Inuit languages have many words for snow, many more than English.
We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow — whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow. (Whorf 1940: 216)
All the available evidence about Inuit languages, however, suggests that those languages have ‘about a dozen words (even a couple of dozen if you are fairly liberal about what you count) for referring to snow and to related natural phenomena, events, or behavior’ (Pullum 1991: 171).
Moreover this collection is
not remarkably different in size from the list in English (which, remember, boasts not just snow, slush, and sleet and their derivatives, but also count nouns like avalanche and blizzard, technical terms like hardpack and powder, expressive meteorological descriptive phrases like flurry and dusting, compounds with idiosyncratic meanings like snow cornice, and so on…). (Pullum 1991: 170)
when you come to think of it, Eskimos aren’t really that likely to be interested in snow. Snow in the traditional Eskimo hunter’s life must be a kind of constantly assumed background, like sand on the beach. And even beach bums have only one word for sand. But there you are: the more you think about the Eskimo vocabulary hoax, the more stupid it gets. (Pullum 1991: 166)
So if the idea is both false and antecedently implausible, why does it persist?
Many people appear to think it illustrates a fundamental thesis about the relationship of language and thought:
So the idea is, Inuit languages allow Inuit people to distinguish many kinds of snow that we cannot, because we cannot think the relevant thoughts.
Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have names for leaf shapes; … printers have many different names for different fonts…, naturally enough. If these obvious truths of specialization are supposed to be interesting facts about language, thought, and culture, then I’m sorry, but include me out.
Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? … Imagine reading: ‘It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers … fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes….’ Utterly boring, even if true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the ice-packs could permit something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation. (Pullum 1991: 165–66)
Take dinosaurs. Once you describe something as a dinosaur, its skin color and sex life are causally independent of your having so described it. But before you describe [something] as a dinosaur, or as anything else, there is no sense to the claim that it is ‘out there’ having properties…
people like Goodman, Putnam and myself … think that there is no description-independent way the world is, no way it is under no description. (Rorty 1998: 87–90)
Constructivism says that what the world is really like – not just how we describe it – depends on the language we speak.
Once we adopt a particular scheme for describing the world, there then come to be facts about the world. (Boghossian 2006: 28)
Some things are socially constructed – nothing could be money unless some people collectively decided to treat it as a means of exchange. (Even so, is this linguistically constructed?)
But that everything is linguistically constructed? Why believe this?
Sense data are relatively unpopular as theories of perception; and other representationalist theories of perception tend to shy away from the idea that language is directly involved in the formation of perceptual representations.
Can we reformulate the S-W hypothesis without talk of sense data?
Given experimental support for the existence of categorical perception, ‘the phenomenon by which the categories possessed by an observer influences the observers’ perception’ (Goldstone and Hendrickson 2009: 69) the viability of this thesis depends on the second conjunct, that our language furnishes our stock of concepts.
Why should we think that the concepts we can acquire are constrained by language?
Simple introspection can often tell people that they do have concepts of things they do not have words for. The American psychologist Greg Murphy relates that he regularly asks students in his courses which of them have a name for those clumps of dust that accumulate under beds on wooden floors. He typically finds that about half the class does (with dust bunnies and dust monsters being popular choices) while half the class does not. But the ones who do not have names for these things do recognise what Murphy is talking about, and so they presumably have dust bunny concepts without corresponding words. (Elbourne 2011: 143)
Compare: lintel, riparian, tactile paving, subitising….
The above examples indicate that the strong claim that the limits of our thought are the limits of our language looks overblown.
But a weaker claim looks more plausible:
There is considerable evidence that some aspects of language influence what we think.
Elbourne (2011: 148–53) reviews some of very interesting recent work by the psychologist Lera Boroditsky on spatial thought, grammatical gender, and gender stereotyped thought.
Dramatic cross-linguistic differences have also been noted in the way languages describe spatial locations…. Whereas most languages (e.g. English, Dutch) rely heavily on relative spatial terms to describe the relative locations of objects (e.g., left/right, front/back), Tzeltal (a Mayan language) relies primarily on absolute reference (a system similar to the English north/south direction system). [boroditsky-2003a, p. 918]
To test whether this difference between the two languages has cognitive consequences, Levinson … tested … a number of spatial tasks. In one study, participants were seated at a table and an arrow lay in front of them pointing either to the right (north) or to the left (south). They were then rotated 180 degrees to a second table which had two arrows (one pointing to the left (north) and one to the right (south)), and were asked to identify the arrow ‘like the one they saw before’. Dutch speakers overwhelmingly chose the ‘relative’ solution. If the stimulus arrow pointed to the right (and north), Dutch speakers chose the arrow that still pointed to the right (though it now pointed south instead of the original north). Tzeltal speakers did exactly the opposite, overwhelmingly choosing the ‘absolute’ solution. If the stimulus arrow pointed to the right (and north), Tzeltal speakers chose the arrow that still pointed north (though it now pointed left instead of right). [boroditsky-2003a, p. 918]
In Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013), the main character speaks a language in which personal pronouns are not marked for gender – like English singular they, or some novel non-gendered pronouns like ze/per.
English lost gender marking of nouns in the 14th century, but other languages retain it – and there are interactions between preople’s preconceptions about gender, on the one hand, and how people are prone to describe things falling under a certain common noun on the other:
The word for ‘key’ is masculine in German (der Schlüssel) and feminine in Spanish (la llave). German speakers used adjectives like hard, heavy, jagged, metal… Spanish speakers used adjectives like golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. (Elbourne 2011: 151)
If your language requires you to keep track of absolute direction, is it really that surprising that you are better at it?
Moreover
although the results from Boroditsky’s experiments are fascinating and impressive as far as they go, … we are in general talking about exceedingly small difference that would not be noticed if they were not probed experimentally.…
the language we speak influences the way we think only with respect to scarcely perceptible cognitive biases that can be measured only in milliseconds and subtle stereotypes that vanish instantly upon reflection. (Elbourne 2011: 154–55)
We’ve seen not much evidence for a strongly constructivist Sapir-Whorf effect.
But intuitively it seems right that sometimes we acquire a concept from acquiring a word – because sometimes finding out the extension of an expression can be a way of learning that there is a viable category in the vicinity.
This is especially important for abstract concepts, about which it is difficult to give an account of how they might be acquired perceptually:
Different justice situations are far more heterogeneous than different cups, and using a common label helps us assemble them in a category. Furthermore, explanations of the conceptual meaning can be more crucial to form the concept of ‘justice’, for instance, than that of ‘cup’. In order to learn [abstract concepts] we might also need to actively ask for definitions/contributions from competent community members … or to resort to recognized information sources (e.g. Wikipedia). (Borghi, Barca, et al. 2018: §2)
As Wood told the story, the eminent man would jiggle his crotch when he stood near her desk and looked at his mail, or he’d deliberately brush against her breasts while reaching for some papers. One night as the lab workers were leaving their annual Christmas party, he cornered her in the elevator and planted some unwanted kisses on her mouth. … She requested a transfer to another department, and when it didn’t come through, she quit. … When the claims investigator asked why she had left her job after eight years, Wood was at a loss to describe the hateful episodes. … Under prodding—the blank on the form needed to be filled in—she answered that her reasons had been personal. Her claim for unemployment benefits was denied. …
‘Lin’s students had been talking … about the unwanted sexual advances they’d encountered on their summer jobs,’ Sauvigne relates. ‘And then Carmita Wood comes in and tells Lin her story. We realized that to a person, every one of us—the women on staff, Carmita, the students—had had an experience like this at some point, you know? … we decided that we also had to hold a speak-out in order to break the silence about this. … We were referring to it as “sexual intimidation,” “sexual coercion,” “sexual exploitation on the job.” None of those names seemed quite right. We wanted something that embraced a whole range of subtle and unsubtle persistent behaviors. Somebody came up with “harassment.” Sexual harassment! Instantly we agreed. That’s what it was.’ (Brownmiller 1990: 280–81; quoted in Fricker 2007: 149–50)
The story is supposed to be one where the invention of a term, sexual harassment, enables women to describe their experience, communicate with others who share that experience, and facilitate resistance and access to recompense.
In this case, the lack of linguistic resource – the convenient term unifying a wide range of problematic behaviours – hampered the organisation of an effective collective response.
Fricker argues that this is not a mere accident: that this lack of resource comprises hermenutical injustice:
the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource. (Fricker 2007: 155)
Fricker emphasises the conceptual dimension rather than the linguistic; but we should expect this sort of injustice if (i) the acquisition of abstract concepts is linguistically mediated (as noted above), and (ii) ‘structural identity prejudice’ is active in who gets to contribute to the lexicon.
To be be excluded from having the way one speaks about ‘some significant area(s) of social experience’ (Fricker 2007: 153) be influential in the form and content of one’s language we might call linguistic marginalisation.
The hermeneutical injustice faced by Carmita Wood and the others Brownmiller discusses is the product, it seems, of linguistic marginalisation (no one talks about it, there is no standard term, no easy expression of this common experience). So here too, language influences thought: not by constructing the world, but through the way that power guides the construction of language itself.