Language dictates worldview

The argument

Both the grammar and the vocabulary of a language determine how a person views the world. Because language is so prevalent — present in nearly every act of thinking, remembering and explaining — it becomes the main governing factor in how each person thinks, and may even dictate how the culture around each language is organized. The mechanism proposed is one of availability. A language does not merely label thoughts that were going to occur anyway; it supplies the categories in which thinking is done. Distinctions a language marks are easy to notice and easy to hold in mind, while distinctions it does not mark require effort to construct at all. Over a lifetime that difference compounds into a habitual way of seeing. There are many examples of differences between languages corresponding to differences in their speakers' cognition, and the clearest involve number. Pirahã, an indigenous language spoken in northwest Brazil, has no numbers. In place of a counting system it has only three words for quantifying objects, which translate roughly as "a small number", "some", and "many" — terms that describe a rough magnitude rather than an exact quantity, and which therefore cannot be used to establish that two groups contain the same amount. The consequences are not confined to speech. Research on Pirahã has shown that because the language has no counting system, its speakers have trouble learning to count in other languages, trouble learning basic mathematics, and trouble remembering the quantity of items when it exceeds three. The difficulty appears in memory as well as in arithmetic, which is what makes the case relevant: the absence of numbers in the language corresponds to a limit on what its speakers can readily keep in mind, not merely on what they can say.

Context

This view is widely known as the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, posited by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 20th century. "Strong" here refers to the high level of influence that language has over cognition as argued by these researchers.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The weakness of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it is simply too strong. There is a host of evidence beginning in the mid-late 20th century demonstrating that at most, the language a person speaks merely influences how they view the world. Linguistic determinism also presumes that language is the only factor governing a person's cognition and perception, and this is false, too. Finally, if each language has its own distinct worldview, as the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states, then it should be extremely difficult to translate, or at least convey, concepts from one language to another or to learn a second language--but this isn't the case at all. In short, there is a reason that the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is no longer prevalent in linguistic inquiry. Its claims are too strong and lack nuance, and as a result, it has been largely disproved by subsequent research.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] "Determine" and "influence" are different claims, and the premise asserts the strong one when the position it supports needs only the weaker. [Rejecting P2] Pirahã is a single case, and a language lacking number words is as consistent with a culture having little use for counting as with the language constraining thought. The premise assumes the direction of causation it needs to establish. [Rejecting P3] The reported difficulty with counting shows a relationship between a language's resources and a practised skill, not a limit on cognition. As the counter-argument notes, strong linguistic determinism predicts that translation and second-language learning should be close to impossible, and they are not.