Worldview and language influence each other

Question: Does language influence worldview?
Position‹2 of 3›: Yes, but worldview also influences language
Argument1 of 2›: Worldview and language influence each other

To distinguish which influenced the other first is a chicken and egg question. Worldview helped shape languages and languages influence our perceptions. Therefore, worldview and language are reciprocally influencing each other.

The argument

It is clear that language and worldview are interrelated to some degree. The more interesting question then becomes does language influence worldview or did a people’s worldview influence their language? This becomes a chicken and egg question. A prominent current contributor to the theory of linguistic relativity is Professor Lera Boroditsky. She believes that the next step is to determine if “it is culture that shapes thought which language only conveys, or if it is language itself that does the shaping”. Professor Betty Birner thinks it seems likely that both language and worldview reciprocally influence each other. One of the examples that linguist Benjamin Whorf cited to support his argument that language impacts perception was how the Hopi people think about time differently because they don’t have terms about breaking time into chunks (days, hours, minutes…). To them time is continuous. However, this correlation doesn’t mean that our language shapes our view of time. It could also mean that our view of time shaped each language or that each culture shapes both the way people think and the way they talk.

Premises

[P1]Language and worldview are clearly interrelated, but the direction of causation is not obvious. [P2] Examples like the Hopi conception of time can be explained equally well by language shaping thought or by worldview shaping language. [P3] Leading linguists such as Boroditsky and Birner suggest that culture and language plausibly shape each other reciprocally. [C] Therefore, language influences worldview, but worldview also influences language.

Counter-arguments

If worldview influenced language then all languages would not share a universal grammar. However, renowned linguist Noam Chomsky has identified the organizing principles that make up a universal grammar that is shared by all languages. If language influenced worldview then learning a new language or translating languages would be extremely difficult, yet people do this every day. Additionally, people that share a language would share a worldview. The 1.5 billion people that speak English around the world do not all share a worldview.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That the two are interrelated is inferred from correlation between how people speak and how they think. The structural regularities common to all languages point the other way — towards organising principles that are not set by any culture's outlook. [Rejecting P2] If the Hopi case is genuinely underdetermined, it supports neither direction of causation, and that includes the reciprocal thesis. A case that is compatible with everything is evidence for nothing. [Rejecting P3] Two linguists finding reciprocal influence plausible is a hypothesis, not a finding. The reciprocal claim is also the hardest of the three to test, since it predicts no distinctive pattern that the one-way accounts do not also predict. [Rejecting C] The conclusion sits badly with two everyday facts: languages are routinely learned and translated between, which strong influence in either direction should make far harder, and the many hundreds of millions of English speakers plainly do not share a worldview.