Jacqueline Engel's List: Does Language Determine How we Think

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

However, others—most notably MIT linguist Noam Chomsky—later argued that all languages share the same deep structure of thought and that thought has a universal quality separate from language. (Babies think before they learn to speak, so thought is not dependent on language.) Those scientists believe that languages express thinking and perception in different ways but do not shape the thinking and perception. In the case of the teacup, that school would argue that surely a speaker of any language absorbs the same information at the scene regardless of the conventions of verb form used and, if pressed, can convey exactly what happened by adding more specific descriptions.
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But an emotional and intense response from psychologists who previously rejected the idea that language affects thinking is not surprising, she says.




"This work is at the center of some of the biggest debates in the study of the mind—nature versus nurture; is the mind divided into modular regions; is there a special encapsulated language 'organ' in the brain. It's pretty bothersome for someone to come along and say that perhaps many of the phenomena that we in psychology have been studying could differ from language to language. It would be much easier if we could just study American college sophomores and assume our observations would be the same everywhere."
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Gleitman says there is no debate that specific word choice and use of language can influence other people's thinking—after all, that partly is what language is for, she notes. Boroditsky counters that there is nothing in human endeavor to which language is not connected. Thus, she argues, why not the very mechanisms of how we perceive, remember and process?

The biggest problem is one of confirmation bias: finding an answer you already believe. If someone has a question about a belief or opinion—say, that vaccines are dangerous—then when they look it up online they'll tend to be biased toward sites that have information they already agree with! This is a well-known effect, and is one reason some things, like anti-vaccination beliefs, are strong even in well-educated communities. The people are smart enough to look up and understand what they read, but perhaps not experienced enough in critical thinking to evaluate what they're reading without bias.
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We invented the scientific method because we are naturally terrible at explaining our own experiences. Without the scientific method, there is no way to know what causes simple, everyday things like thunder. Every explanation is as good as another, and if an explanation becomes culturally bound and passed down, that becomes the official explanation for millennia. Our natural tendency is to confirm our assumptions, but science tries to disconfirm our assumptions one by one until the outline of the truth begins to form. Once we realized that approach generates results, we went from horses and tobacco enemas to mapping DNA and walking on the moon in a few generations.

My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism"