I am underway with chapter two of Pinker’s Language Instinct and he’s working at debunking the idea that words determine thoughts. The idea that words determine how we think is fairly widespread. There is even a movement that started in 1933 called General Semantics (and an institute: Institute of General Semantics) that, as Pinker describes it, goes so far as laying “the blame for human folly on insidious ‘semantic damage’ to thought perpetrated by the structure of language.”

The scientific basis of General Semantics is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which states that “people’s thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language,” which means that “differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers.” But language and thought are not the same thing, insists Pinker, and it is dangerous and just plain wrong to conflate the two.

We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn’t exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a “what we meant to say” that is different from what we said. Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words. And if thoughts depended on words, how could a new word ever be coined? How could children learn a word to begin with? How could translation from one language to another be possible?

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis also can’t stand on its own two feet. Edward Sapir made some interesting observations while studying some Native American languages. He noticed that speakers of different languages had to pay attention to different things in order to make grammatical sentences. For instance in English we have to pay attention to time in order to get the correct verb tense in relation to when we are speaking and when what we are speaking about happened. People who speak Wintu don’t have to bother with tense but they do have to pay attention to whether what they are saying is learned directly or secondhand and then use the appropriate verb suffix. Fine and interesting observations.

Sapir’s observations were taken up by Benjamin Lee Whorf who was and inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company and had taken a class from Sapir at Yale. Whorf had the idea that language determines thinking from his work as a fire inspector. He came to believe that accidents happened because language led people to not understand the real danger of a situation. For instance, a worker had tossed “a cigarette into an ‘empty’ drum that in fact was full of gasoline vapor” and obviously the drum wasn’t empty after all. Whorf, who was also an amateur scholar of Native American languages, began writing articles using word-for-word translations of Native American languages to prove that Native Americans think differently that white Europeans because of the way their language is constructed.

Whorf based quite a lot of his theory on the Apache language. One of the biggest problems with Whorf is that he never studied the Apaches nor had he ever met one. He based his hypothesis solely on Apache grammar and the idea that since they speak differently they must think differently too. Whorf also used literal meanings in his translations, purposely producing sentences that were as odd sounding as possible in order to prove his point. As Pinker writes,

The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.

All that and I am only halfway through the chapter! Pinker does not say that language cannot influence the way we think and see the world. We can be convinced of lots of things by clever use of language. What Pinker is saying is that the language we speak does not determine our thoughts–the things we think about or the way we think about them.

Interesting stuff, yes?