From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jul 27 2003 - 20:20:36 MDT
At 11:22 AM 7/27/03 +0200, Frederick H. Cheeseman wrote:
>There is a linguistic theory--known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis--that
the structure of a human language sets limits on the thinking of those who
speak it; hence a language could even place constraints on the development
of the cultures that use it.
>Is this true ?
No.
Well, except that of course and self-evidently it is, since if your
language by some bizarre circumstance lacks implicit causality you'll have
a lot of trouble inventing science and learning not to chew your own
fingers off more than once. But...
=============
Umberto Eco has more than once quoted chapter 26, Book II, of Aulus
Gellius' Noctes Atticae, a second century encyclopaedia, which seems to
show that Gellius did not discriminate colours according to our (or the
spectrum's) ordering. How did Gellius see the world, or at any rate
`elaborat[e] upon literary texts coming from different centuries' (p. 157)?
"Diachronically speaking, Aulus Gellius was trying to put together the
codes of at least two centuries of Latin literature and, synchronically
speaking, the codes of different non-Latin cultures. Gellius must have been
considering diverse and possibly contrasting segmentations of the chromatic
field. ... Determined by his cultural information, Gellius cannot trust to
his personal perceptions, if any, and appears eager to see gold as red as
fire, and saffron as yellow as the greenish shade of a blue horse." (p. 171)
This power of verbal categories over our illusory sense of direct,
unimpeachable perception of the world is known in linguistics as the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; it fell from favour in the 1970s, but is making a
qualified comeback.
...A Scientific American review by Philip E. Ross (February, 1992) finds
that its subsequent debunking might not have been exhaustive. True, `Whorf
had asserted that Eskimos use many distinct words in place of the one
English word "snow".... But Laura E. Martin, an anthropologist at Cleveland
State University, traced the story to its sources and found that Whorf had
exaggerated the number of Eskimo snow roots while understating the number
in English: slush, powder, blizzard and so forth.' Nevertheless, some
Australian languages suggest that `spatial conceptualization is not
universal', although such distinctions `are mastered very early in life'
(pp. 11-2).
...What then of Aulus Gellius and his saffron yellow as the greenish shade
of a blue horse? Has the eye been primed by nature, or are hues secondary?
The New Guinea Dani have only two colour words: `mola', for warm, vivid
hues, and `mili' for cold, gloomy tones. Nearly 20 years ago Eleanor Rosch
tested Dani response to carefully selected coloured chips, and undid her
Whorfian beliefs in a single stroke. Individual Dani had difficulty coming
to agreement on which intermediate hues were mola or mili, but (in a
subsequent test) had virtually none in identifying which of 40 chips each
had been shown.
"The Dani turned out to recognize colors in a manner very similar to the
Americans - making the same confusions, for example - though their overall
scores were not as high. Thus, differences in naming structure were not
paralleled by differences in the way in which colors were stored in memory
or accessed by recall.... The ways in which individuals from different
cultures remember colors seemed to reflect the organization of the nervous
system, not the structure of particular lexicons." (p. 344-5)
More notable still was cross-cultural work done about the same time by
Berlin and Kay, who `studied the color-naming practices of individuals
drawn from twenty genetically diverse languages, ranging from Arabic to Ibo
(Nigeria) to Thai' (p. 348). The number of basic colours per culture ranged
from two (the Dani, say) to eleven (English). What shook many cultural
relativists, though, was the discovery of certain invariant factors:
"[W]hen confronted with chips spanning the full spectrum of hues, their
informants selected the same focal areas for colors, irrespective of
whether they had names for them; that is, [they] agreed about what was a
`good blue' or a `poor green', even if their culture lacked names for these
colors." (p. 348)
Perhaps the least predictable finding was a regular ordering, across 98
different cultures, such that if only two terms exist these translate or
code to bright/dark, white/black; if there is a third, it is always red.
Fourth and fifth are yellow or green, in either order; then blue and brown
compete for sixth and seventh place; purple, pink, orange and grey complete
the spectrum (p. 349). In this case at least, there is very little scope
for philology to interfere with ontology, except to mutilate it.
Eleanor Rosch has summarized the intellectual reverse which these
discoveries forced upon her and her colleagues, which to my mind resembles
the blow that empirical research, such as that collated by Farrell, strikes
at the heart of Freud's doctrines. To their considerable surprise (for they
had started with a sense that the Whorfian hypothesis was virtually
self-evidently true), they
"discovered that colors appeared to be a domain suited to demonstrate just
the opposite of linguistic relativity, namely, the effect of the human
perceptual system in determining linguistic categories. Very similar
evidence exists in the domains of geometric form and emotion categories.
Furthermore, psychological principles of categorization may apply to the
formation of all categories, even in culturally relative domains.
"At present, the Whorfian hypothesis not only does not appear to be
empirically true in any major respect, but it no longer even seems
profoundly and ineffably true."
Why, Rosch asks, `has it been so difficult to demonstrate effects of
language on thought?' (Ibid). Because, she concludes, it could only be true
if major lexical distinctions and the categories of `nature' which they fix
within language(s) were `almost accidentally formed' (Ibid) - in effect,
the Saussurean postulate. By contrast, her research suggests forcefully
that, for the categories she has investigated, the links are strongly
motivated; language categories are shaped by neuro-empirical givens.
[THE ARCHITECTURE OF BABEL]
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Damien Broderick
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