UPDATE ON THE LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY WARS.

UPDATE ON THE LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY WARS. I posted here at the beginning of this year about the “fierce debate” in linguistics between “those, such as Noam Chomsky, who think that all languages function roughly the same way in the brain and those… such as Benjamin Lee Whorf…[who think] that different languages condition or constrain the mind’s habits of thought.” I said then that “I have the impression that the universalist school has the majority view.”—a cautious conclusion because I had linked to this wikipedia article on linguistic relativity, which said, in discussing the “universalist Period”, “[Chomsky’s] theory became the dominant paradigm in American linguistics from the 1960s through the 1980s and the notion of linguistic relativity fell out of favor and became even the object of ridicule.” Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford, in an article in the weekend Wall Street Journal (July 24-25) indicates that the debate is still unsettled, saying: “after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny….” Professor Boroditsky acknowledges that “The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong.”. but now, she says, “a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.” I remember graduate students telling me about Chomsky’s theory back in the sixties, and, some fifty years later, it is still debated. There is an excellent blog about linguistics, Language Log, which is a good place to follow this and other issues in linguistics.