HYPOCOGNITION

HYPOCOGNITION. This article by Kaidi Wu, David Dunning at the Scientific American website (August 9, 2018) introduces the term “hyppocognition”, which is defined as “the lack of a linguistic or cognitive representation for an object, category, or idea”. The article says that the term was “introduced to modern behavioral science by anthropologist Robert Levy.”

The concept seems to the same as the Whorfian theory in linguistics that I have posted on many times, for example in this post asking “CAN A PERSON WHO SPEAKS A LANGUAGE WITH NO WORD FOR BLUE DISTINGUISH BLUE FROM GREEN?” Indeed the article by Wu and Dunnung uses the same example of blue versus green and concludes: “English speakers more easily confuse blue shades [as compared to speakers of Russian, Korean, and Japanese], not because we have poorer vision, but because we lack the more granular distinctions in the language we speak.”

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