Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

There has never been any proof for it, and the scraps of data that point in the direction of a weak version of Sapir-Whorff all suffer from the usual psychology research flaws (cf. replication crisis).

If there's any way in which word usage influences our thoughts, there's not much evidence of it. E.g., there are ungendered languages, but the societies that use them are absolutely not more feminist than those where a gendered language is spoken. And suppressing slurs usually leads to substitution by other words, showing that the thought very much stays alive, independent of the word.




The two examples you give don't disprove weak Sapir-Whorf, they disprove strong Sapir-Whorf. Almost no one who knows what they're talking about argues that language is the deciding factor in sexism or racism. Linguistic relativity is widely accepted, and that's the idea that language has an influence on your thought patterns.

There can be other influences that lead to misogyny and other biases, and language may adapt to give expression to those thought patterns. But language also can influence thought patterns. For it not to do so it would have to be the lone exception among all of the stimulae we take in, which is extremely unlikely.


Sapir-Whorf almost can't be disproved. There's no point in disproving it. But where's the evidence?

> the idea that language has an influence on your thought patterns.

What does language even mean in that statement? You can weaken it down all you want, but in the context of this topic, language means: word usage, and thoughts mean: racist, sexist, etc. opinions. Do these opinions get influenced by e.g. the food you eat? The sunset? The temperature of your living room? Those are stimuli, or at least external influences. Language is not a stimulus, but more of a skill. It's encoded in your brain, and it allows you to communicate.

To put it bluntly: is there any evidence that people who are forced to use "black" instead of "African-American" become less racist?


What about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language

Does this not support at least the weak hypothesis?


It doesn't disprove it, but that's not sufficient, is it? Is your argument about their (lack of) number system? Before we could speak, we had no knowledge of numbers, according to this theory. How did we ever get beyond that? Aliens?




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: