Mad Scientists, Aliens, and the Nazi Party: What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and Why Should You Care? Part I
Amanda McHugh
Part I: How Did We Get Here?
Time after time, ideas get thrown into the ring and misinterpreted by academics and laypeople alike. This is not something to be taken lightly: the clear explanation of ideas is vital to the way we understand the impact of research on the world. When I first drafted this article, this was going to be a minor aside in a story exploring the impact of one of Linguistics’ more famous theories on popular culture and on politics. But as I was refreshing my memory on the topic, I discovered hurdle after hurdle, as well as a story of academic discussion mired in incredibly poor process, lazy explanations, and ultimately, remarkably dangerous consequences once the discussion escaped the academic sphere.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; words that, when brought up in conversation, are guaranteed to make any linguist in the vicinity sigh quietly to themselves. But why? The concept itself is appealing: that language has a fundamental impact on the way we perceive and process the world. Arguments within the sphere of linguistics range from the strictest “linguistic determinism”, where there are hard limits placed on your experience of the world, all the way to what is sometimes termed “linguistic influence,” which is the more modern idea that certain linguistic phenomena change the way you group the things you observe in the world (categorical perception). For example, your vocabulary for different colours shapes your thinking on which collections of wavelengths constitute a single colour or not, and psychological experiments have shown that the way you describe how you are situated in space affects the way you see that space. Technically speaking, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (often termed “linguistic relativity”) falls somewhere in the middle of determinism and influence. However, it doesn’t always get interpreted as such. This article will explore how ideas long before Sapir and Whorf were misnamed and wildly misinterpreted within academic circles, and a second article next week will look at how these ideas have seeped into culture and politics. Ultimately, it is a cautionary tale about what happens when we don’t pay enough attention to how we discuss academic matters.
To fully understand Sapir-Whorf’s origins, we need to take a trip through time. We begin in Ancient Greece with the philosophical notion of Essentialism, where every entity is composed of a series of attributes that define it. Several millennia later, we get the German notion of Volksgeist or ‘Spirit of a Nation’, beginning in the 18th century with thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, who applied Essentialism to whole populations or countries. Note that this is not a uniquely German philosophy: Voltaire, for example, writes about an esprit des nations. However, it is specifically Humboldtian ideas being brought to the U.S. that is most relevant to our story. After World War I, American anthropologist William Dwight Whitney imports the idea, renames it (nobody wanted to be associated with the Germans), and promptly uses it to advocate erasing Native American languages by claiming that learning English would give them a better life.
These ideas are rescued from the grasp of race science by Franz Boas, who emphasised that cultural and linguistic differences did not make groups superior or inferior, just different from one another. Although this hardly sounds controversial now, anthropology in the early 20th century was dominated by jingoism, so Boas’ statement was particularly revolutionary. He also brought in the important idea that differences between the way languages divide up concepts may cause Western researchers to systematically fail to perceive distinctions in other languages, and vice versa. Edward Sapir, who worked with Boas, took a largely similar stance, and it was his own student Benjamin Lee Whorf who took those ideas to another level. This is the point where, academically speaking, things go off the rails.
Whorf, Sapir’s student, most famously elevated these ideas with an assertion about the Native American Hopi people. The most commonly quoted form of his claim comes from a posthumously-published version of an article written in 1936, where he says the Hopi people have “no notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future and into a past.” Sounds farfetched? It is. Neo-Whorfians argue that he is not, in fact, claiming that the Hopi have absolutely no conception of time. However, the fantastical notion of a whole culture living without time, something so fundamental to our existence, captured the popular imagination. Extreme linguistic relativism is catchy, as evidenced by your smugly bilingual friends who tell you that “the world just feels different” when they’re speaking Spanish. The simplest way of explaining why the strongest version of the hypothesis is very unlikely is to consider translation and bilingualism: if learning a new language means learning how to fundamentally alter your perceptions of the world, it would require you to constantly switch between perceptual states and allow two cognitive states to coexist, which arguably very few (if any) people could achieve. Equally, although direct translation is not always possible, the strong hypothesis would prevent any meaningful translation, as the gap between the two languages would be irreconcilable.
Look for papers co-authored by Sapir and Whorf, and you won’t find any; they don’t exist. The misnomer of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was created by another of Sapir’s students, Harry Hoijer, who seemingly lumped their work together into a joint hypothesis. It is also worth noting this philosophy around language and thought existed long before Sapir-Whorf. The strongest version, linguistic determinism, is plainly laid out by Wittgenstein in 1921, where he states (famously) that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” This came over a decade before the publication of the version of Whorf’s thoughts normally taken to be definitive (the 1939 paper written as a memorial to Sapir). But, as I’ve mentioned, thinkers as early as Humboldt were expressing these ideas in fairly outright terms long before they hit the U.S.
Whorf died in 1941, and following this, even academic circles took his ideas and ran with them, unfortunately passing their questionable interpretations to the general public. Stuart Chase, in 1958, published his book Some Things Worth Knowing, where he claims Hopi people were better at understanding time as a fourth dimension. Other scientists seriously thought Einstein’s spatio-temporal unity was something Hopi people could instantly understand by virtue of their grammar (a concept that took Einstein himself seven years to curate). To this day there is no empirical evidence to give linguistic determinism a leg to stand on.
So, what are we left with? A poorly-named non-hypothesis which, whilst generating legitimate debate in the small circle of diligent linguists and anthropologists, has been bashed out of shape and thrown to the general public who, by and large, don’t query the academics. And so the goose chase continues…
Part II will be published next week.