reviving whorf: the return of linguistic relativity

Reviving Whorf: The Return of Linguistic Relativity

Maria Francisca ReinesUniversity of North Carolina

Jesse Prinz*City University of New York

Abstract

The idea that natural languages shape the way we think in different ways was popularized by Ben-jamin Whorf, but then fell out of favor for lack of empirical support. But now, a new wave ofresearch has been shifting the tide back toward linguistic relativity. The recent research can beinterpreted in different ways, some trivial, some implausibly radical, and some both plausible andinteresting. We introduce two theses that would have important implications if true: HabitualWhorfianism and Ontological Whorfianism. We argue that these offer the most promising inter-pretations of the emerging evidence.

It is a standard position in philosophy that language is nothing more than a means for theexpression of thoughts (Locke 1690; Fodor 1975). This is also a popular position in psy-chology, where many hold that language learners map words onto antecedently existingconcepts. The concepts come first, and only later the language to express them (Pinker1984; Piaget and Inhelder, 1967 ⁄1948). Recent empirical research, however, suggests thatlanguage is more than a means for expression and communication. There is now compel-ling evidence that language affects the way people think, and that each language has a dis-tinctive influence on its speakers’ mental abilities; speaking Maya rather than Spanish, orKorean rather than English has an effect on the thought or experience of speakers.

This idea, known as ‘linguistic relativity,’ has modern roots in the work of the linguist,Edward Sapir, who claims,

[T]he ‘‘real world’’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of thegroup…We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the languagehabits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (1929: 209)

Sapir’s remark is off-hand, but the idea was developed by his student, Benjamin LeeWhorf. Whorf’s most quoted passage reads:

Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is partof a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. Wedissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that weisolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer inthe face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impression whichhas to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in ourminds. (Whorf 1940 ⁄ 1956: 212)

These passages suggest two theses that are gaining support in current empirical research.The Sapir’s quote indicates something about the means by which language influencesthought; we will call it Habitual Whorfianism. And both Sapir and Whorf speculateabout the effects of that influence – what we will call Ontoglogical Whorfianism. In this

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paper, we define and defend these two theses and contrast them with two less plausibleviews, Radical Whorfianism and Trivial Whorfianism, which represent the polar extremesin the debate over linguistic relativity. First, we review some representative empiricalresults.

1. Empirical Results

Sapir and Whorf did not adequately support relativity, because they used unreliable infor-mants in documenting linguistic diversity and then failed to test the hypothesis that thealleged differences correlate with, much less cause, cognitive differences. Their examplesalso failed to rule out the possibility that some third factor, such as culture, was influenc-ing both language and thought. Now we have better evidence. Recent research hasshown that some features differ across languages and correlate with differences in thepsychologies of speakers. The features in question are unrelated to any known culturalvariables, so it looks like the psychological differences derive from language, not fromsome other source. Here, we review empirical results in four domains: grammaticalgender, frames of reference, spatial categories, and noun types.

1.1. GRAMMATICAL GENDER

Many languages, but not English, have grammatical gender. When a language has gram-matical gender, all of its nouns are categorized as belonging to a gender category. Thisincludes nouns that refer to things that have biological gender like ‘boy’ and ‘bull’, butalso all the rest of the nouns like ‘lettuce’, ‘locomotive’, and ‘love’.

Languages differ in the number of gender categories they contain. Spanish andHebrew have two: feminine and masculine. German has three: feminine, masculine andneuter. Some languages contain many more, including very unusual genders.1 Interest-ingly, which nouns go into which category can vary across languages even when twolanguages have the same gender categories. For example, French and Spanish both havejust feminine and masculine gender categories. However, the categories differ in mem-bership. The word for bed is feminine in Spanish, ‘cama’ and masculine in French,‘lit.’2

In a series of experiments, Boroditsky et al. (2003) tested whether grammatical gendercan influence people’s mental representations of objects. The researchers made a list of 24English nouns. Of these, 12 were feminine in Spanish and masculine in German, and theother 12 were the reverse (masculine in Spanish and feminine in German). Spanish andGerman native speakers were presented with the English nouns and were asked to offerthe first three adjectives that came to mind in response. Would the genders of the nounsin the subject’s native language affect the adjectives produced in English? An effect in theadjectives would suggest that grammatical gender affects how speakers think about the ref-erent of the noun. In other words, an effect in the descriptions would suggest that gram-matical gender affects sense. The resulting descriptions turned out to be quite ‘‘gendered,’’

[T]he word for ‘‘key’’ is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakersdescribed keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, while Spanish speakers said theywere golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. The word for ‘‘bridge’’, on the other hand, isfeminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers described bridges as beautiful,elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous,long, strong, sturdy, and towering. (Boroditsky et al. 2003: 70)

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You would expect this kind of gendered description if the subjects were explicitly relyingon the noun’s gender in German or Spanish to determine the kinds of adjectives thatcould be used to describe the referent of the noun; that is, if they were using ‘llave’, theSpanish word for ‘key’ to evoke stereotypically feminine adjectives. But this study wasconducted entirely in English. This fact suggests that for these bilinguals, being speakersof German or Spanish made a difference in their thinking and it made a difference evenwhen they were not speaking German or Spanish. This is striking because it suggests thatthe effect is not the result of mere priming from the gendered article, but a more endur-ing effect on the speakers’ prototypes for the categories.

1.2. FRAMES OF REFERENCE

In a cross-linguistic study of 13 languages, Pederson et al. (1998) found that linguisticcommunities use one or more of three distinct frames of reference (Brown and Levinson2000). A frame of reference is a coordinate system that speakers use to describe objects’location in space. Relative frames of reference locate objects according to viewer-centeredcoordinates based on body axes. In ‘The cat is to the left of the car’, the word ‘left’ is rel-ative to the speaker’s location. Intrinsic frames of reference locate objects in terms ofobject-centered coordinates or landmark objects. For example, ‘The cat is at the car’srear’, locates the cat in relation to the car. Absolute frames of reference describe locationin terms of fixed bearings, cardinal directions, or other stable geographic landmarks. Forexample, ‘The cat is south of the car’ makes reference to a cardinal point.

English uses all three frames of reference, but some languages use only two or one. Forexample, Tzeltal, a Mayan language from the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, mainlyuses absolute frames of reference.3 Speakers of Tzeltal use a cardinal system that translatesroughly to ‘uphill’, ‘downhill’, and ‘across’ (Brown and Levinson 1993). Languages thatuse only relative frames of reference include Dutch and Japanese. Tamil and Yucatec areamong the mixed cases.

In their study, Pederson et al. gave Tzeltal and Dutch speakers a task aimed at reveal-ing differences in non-linguistic cognition that correlate with differences in the type offrames of reference used in their respective languages. Subjects stood at a table in front ofa line of toy animals (a cow, a sheep, and a horse). In the training phase, the animalswere presented in a line and then taken away. Subjects were then allowed to rearrangethe toy animals on the table, lining them up just as they had been originally presented.The direction and order of the animals was corrected until subjects were proficient atrecreating the arrays as originally presented. In the testing phase, subjects were again pre-sented with the line of animals. After the initial presentation subjects were moved to adifferent table, in effect rotating them 180�. They were presented with the animals anddirected to ‘make it again just the same’. Pederson et al. predicted that speakers of Dutchwould recreate the line relative to themselves, because Dutch uses relative spatial terms.For example, if in the original line, the sheep was rightmost, followed by the cow andthe horse, Dutch speakers would keep the sheep on their right, after rotating 180�. Insharp contrast, speakers of Tzeltal should reverse the relative order so as to preserve theanimals’ relation to fixed geographical points. If the sheep was on the right in the initialline, it should be on the left after turning around, because that way it could remain, say,downhill.

Their hypothesis was well supported.4 Over five trials, 16 of the 27 Tzeltal speakers gaveabsolute responses every time. Of the 38 speakers of Dutch, 32 gave relative responsesevery time. There is a very strong correlation between this non-linguistic cognitive task

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and features of the subjects’ language. This correlation suggests that the frame of referenceused in the language has an impact on how people remember spatial arrays.5

1.3. SPATIAL CATEGORIES

On the received view about language acquisition, children acquire (or innately possess)concepts first and only later map them onto the corresponding words in their language.For instance, children first understand the notion of spatial containment and only latermap onto it the word ‘in’. This view dovetails well with the assumption that spatial con-cepts are universal. Concepts of spatial location and motion are the same no matter whatlanguage you speak because they derive from a species-typical capacity for observationallearning, or a shared evolutionary heritage.

Research by Bowerman and Choi (2000) suggests otherwise. Spatial categories varydramatically across languages. Here are two examples. English speakers say ‘in’ to describeputting an apple in a bowl and a videocassette in its sleeve. We say ‘on’ to describe putt-ing a cup on the table and a lid on a container. ‘In’ is associated with containment and‘on’ with support. In Korean, these same four actions are described using three distinctmorphemes. To describe putting an apple in a bowl, Korean uses ‘nehta’. For putting thevideocassette in its sleeve, the verb is ‘kkita’. ‘kkita’ is also used for putting a tight-fittinglid on a container. For the cup on the table, Korean uses ‘nohta’. In Korean, the spatialsemantic categories are not containment and support but fit, tight or loose. If two objectsfit together closely, like the cassette and its sleeve or the container and its lid, then theact of joining them is described by ‘kkita’. ‘Nehta’ denotes the act of putting objects intoa loose-fitting container, and thus applies to putting apples in bowls, but not cassettes incases. ‘Nohtah’ is for putting something loosely on a surface. Thus, the Korean categoriesare orthogonal to the English ones.

For a more exotic example, we can look at Mixtec, a language of Mexico. Mixtecdoes not have any prepositions or other morphemes for spatial categories. Speakers ofMixtec locate things by analogizing the objects on which they are situated to anatomicalparts of humans or other animals. For describing a cat lying on a mat, for instance, Mix-tec speakers say something like ‘the cat is-located the mat’s face’. A man on a tree limb issomething like ‘the man is-located the tree’s arm’ (Bowerman 1996).

Bowerman and Choi have studied the Korean case, and shown that the semantic dif-ferences show up very early in development, with little evidence for an initial period inwhich universal spatial categories are used. Between 16 and 20 months, children begin touse spatial morphemes productively. Even at this early age, Bowerman and Choiobserved dramatic differences in learners of Korean and English. First, Korean childrennever failed to mark the distinction between caused and spontaneous motion, which ismandatory in that language but optional in English (‘The baby went in the tub’ does notspecify whether the baby went on his own or was put there by Peter). Second, by 18–20 months, the English-speaking children were using the in ⁄out distinction and theon ⁄off distinction, which does not exist in Korean. The earliest spatial words of Koreanchildren were ‘kkita’ and ‘ppayta’ (fit ⁄ unfit), crosscutting the English categories. By 18–20 months, Korean children had learned an extensive repertoire of words for actions sen-sitive to tightness of fit. Third, between 16 and 20 months, English-speaking childrenused ‘up’ and ‘down’ for a wide range of vertical motions. Korean-speaking childrenbegan using general terms for vertical motion significantly later, and instead showed earlymastery of words for more specific postural changes on the vertical axis, which have nocounterparts in English.



These differences in the acquisition of spatial language show that children who speakdifferent languages are noticing different spatial relations and co-classifying different thingsfrom a very early age. There is no evidence that these children systematically over-extendtheir spatial terms toward some universally salient set of spatial features. Importantly, theselinguistic differences also correlate with non-linguistic performance later in life. McDon-ough et al. (2003) showed Korean- and English speakers a series of spatial actions andasked them to select the odd one out. Eighty per cent of Koreans selected items that dif-fered in tightness of fit, whereas only 37% of English speakers did. English speakerstended to pick things like shape and texture in picking oddballs, even though the taskdrew attention to spatial relations. This suggests that the relations of tightness and loose-ness are much more salient to Korean speakers and that difference can be attributed to afeature of their language.

1.4. NOUN TYPE

English has both count nouns, such as ‘cat’ and ‘desk’, and mass nouns, such as ‘milk’and ‘mud’. The difference is that count nouns semantically ‘unitize’ their referents whilemass nouns require something additional to bundle them into countable units. Massnouns are bundled or unitized by number classifiers. For example, when you want to sayhow much water you drink you cannot say, ‘I drink two waters a day’. To count the ref-erents of mass nouns, to say that you drink two waters, you have to add a number classi-fier, such as ‘glasses’ or ‘ounces’ or ‘gallons’. Count nouns do not require a classifier. Ifwe want to say how many cats are on the desk we can say, ‘There are two cats on thedesk’. It is part of the semantic content of ‘cat’ that its referents are discrete entities. Theyare already in units and are therefore countable. In some languages, all nouns require clas-sifiers. These languages are called classifier languages. They include Chinese, Japanese, andYucatec Maya, a Mayan language spoken by some Native Americans of the YucatanPeninsula (Lucy and Gaskins 2001, 2003).

For English speakers, it is hard to imagine how classifier languages work. In our lan-guage, some nouns have a unit already built in as part of their meaning, like ‘comb’,‘book’, or ‘desk’, and some do not, like ‘water’ and ‘mud’. In Yucatec Maya, all nounsare like the English ‘water’ or ‘mud’. There is nothing about Yucatec Maya nouns thatbreak up their referent into units or items. Even terms for ‘book’, ‘cat’, and ‘table’require a classifier that specifies the unit. This suggests that Yucatec Maya nouns are likestuff names. The classifiers specify how different kinds of stuff get put into units. Forinstance, to say ‘two candles’ in Yucatec Maya you have to say something like ‘two longthin wax’ where ‘long thin’ is the classifier.

In one of his early studies, Lucy (1992) showed that these linguistic differences affectmemory. When presented with pictures of scenes that differ in either the amount of somestuff (say a pile of grain) or the number of objects (say the number of pigs), Englishspeakers find changes of the latter sort easier to detect and recall. If a picture with fourpigs is replaced by a picture with three, English speakers notice that, but might fail tonotice changes in piles of grain. Yucatec Maya speakers do not show this pattern and areless likely than English speakers to notice when the number of pigs changes. Countnouns seem to encourage counting, and counting influences what we notice and recall.

In more recent work, Lucy and Gaskins (2001, 2003) have tried to show that massnouns draw attention to material substances, whereas count nouns draw attention toshape. They presented English and Yucatec Maya speakers with three objects and askedthem to judge which two of the three items were more similar. The triads were made up



of a ‘pivot’ item, a material alternate, and a shape alternate. For example, one triadincluded a plastic comb with a handle as pivot, a plastic comb without a handle as mate-rial alternate, and a wooden comb with a handle as shape alternate. Another triadincluded a square piece of paper as pivot, a paper book as material alternate, and a squarepiece of burlap as shape alternate. Consistent with their prediction, English-speaking sub-jects chose the material alternate as the more similar only 23% of the time, whereas theYucatec Maya speakers chose the material alternate 61% of the time.

These results suggest that dominant noun type makes a difference in what you notice,co-classify, and recall. The nouns of a classifier language function more like stuff names,drawing attention to composition, whereas count nouns, when available, draw attentionto shape and number. The nouns we use seem to make a difference in thinking.

2. Explaining the Results

When Whorf first defended Linguistic Relativity, there was little evidence for thehypothesis: linguists had identified various examples of lexical and grammatical variation,but none had been linked to cognitive differences, and some attempts to find variationhad met with apparent failure (Heider 1972). The situation remained largely unchangedfor some time, and this invited dismissive critiques of Whorfianism (Pinker 1994). Butthere has now been a neo-Whorfian renaissance with numerous cognitive differencesbeing correlated with differences in language. Our survey is only a small sample of a rap-idly growing literature. The question is how to explain these results. In this section, wewant to consider four explanations: one radical, one trivial, and two that we find bothplausible and interesting.

To begin, consider the following:

Radical Whorfianism: languages influence psychological processes because thinking depends onnatural language.

This hypothesis is radical because it is highly controversial to suppose that thinkingdepends on language. One might try to defend this supposition by arguing that publiclanguages are the vehicles of thought. This is, perhaps, defensible in certain domains. Forexample, it has been argued that thinking about large exact quantities depends on havingnumber words to label them (Lemer et al. 2003). Strikingly, people who speak languageswithout words for exact numbers do very poorly at keeping track of even relatively smallquantities (Gordon 2004). More controversially, language has been implicated in sensorybinding (Carruthers 2002; Hermer-Vazquez et al. 1999), and theory of mind (De Villiers2000).6

However, these cases may be exceptions. The idea that all thought depends on lan-guage strikes us as completely implausible. We know from research on mental imagery(Kosslyn et al. 2006), language-deprived adults (Schaller 1991), transient aphasia (Lecoursand Joanette 1980), and animal cognition (Hauser 2000), that sophisticated decision-mak-ing can be achieved without language. There is also a principled argument against Radi-cal Whorfianism form language learning (Fodor 1975). To learn a natural language, wemust map its words onto concepts that we already possess, and, doing that presupposesthat thought does not depend on natural language.

Moreover, Radical Whorfianism is difficult to square with results form neo-Whorfianresearch. For example, recall that Boroditsky et al. (2003) found effects of grammaticalgender using a test conducted on bilingual speakers in English, which has no grammaticalgender. Given their level of fluency, it is unlikely that subjects reverted to their original



languages when filling out Boroditsky et al.’s English questionnaire (although see Koustaet al. 2008; for a study in which test language seems to matter). It must also be noted thatWhorfian effects are often reversible. For example, Li and Gleitman (2002) show someflexibility in Levinson’s spatial copying task by introducing spatial cues, and Casasanto(2005) was able to erase the effects of native language on time perception by using a sim-ple training task.

The ephemeral character of Whorfian effects might lead one from brash radicalismisminto boring modesty. One might be tempted to settle for:

Trivial Whorfianism: languages influence psychological processes because, when we use words,we draw attention to things that we might happen to neglect without it.

This is trivial because no one doubts that language can direct attention. If I say, ‘Lookup in the sky!’ you may follow this command and notice something that would haveotherwise gone unseen. It is well known that attention can affect memory, and evensimilarity judgments (we can attend to different dimensions of comparison), so the triv-ial claim that language can influence attention can go pretty far in explaining experi-mental results. English speakers do not pay attention to tightness of fit when selectingspatial prepositions, but this feature of the world is easy to point out, and, when that isdone, English speakers would have no difficulty noticing what Koreans notice – forexample that there is a big difference between the way water fits ‘in’ a bottle and thebottle fits ‘in’ the refrigerator.

The problem with Trivial Whorfianism is that it implies that Whorfian effects ariseonly when language is actually used and that we might easily have the same patterns ofthought if we were not language users. But both these claims can be called into question.Whorfian effects may be especially pronounced in linguistic contexts (Slobin, 1996), butlinguistic behavior is so frequently rehearsed that it is likely to promote habits of thoughtthat extend beyond language use, and there is no reason to think that our specific habitsof thought would be the same if we did not learn our particular public languages. Thisgives rise to an interesting hypothesis:

Habitual Whorfianism: languages influence psychological processes because they instill habits ofthought that lead us to think in certain ways by default that we would not have thought inwithout language learning.

Majid (2002) embraces a form of Whorfianism like this in explaining the Levinsonresearch on spatial cognition. Speakers of languages with no relative spatial expressionshabitually notice how objects are positioned relative to cardinal points. She compares thiswith research on expertise, noting that we have ample evidence that repeated cognitiveactivities produce skills that alter our capacity to notice things and comprehend theworld. Indeed, given this fact, Trivial Whorfianism is an unstable position, becauserepeated effects on attention will inculcate habits, and Habitual Whorfianism will emerge.Habitual Whorfian also makes sense of Boroditksy’s finding that bilinguals continue toshow the biases of their mother tongues when speaking a second language. And the viewcaptures Whorf’s insight that language can give us the impression that certain inferencesare ‘natural’ because we make them automatically as a result of our linguistically incul-cated habits.

Habitual Whorfianism is interesting because it shows that speakers of different lan-guages could end up habitually thinking in different ways. If psychological laws capturehow people think, including what forms of thought come most easily, then it is possiblethat speakers of different languages will be governed by different psychological laws. If



we want to accurately predict someone’s non-verbal behavior, we need to know whatlanguage they speak.

There is another interesting version of Whorfianism that also strikes us as plausible:

Ontological Whorfianism: languages influence psychological processes because they lead us toorganize the world into categories that differ from those we would discover without language.

Anti-Whorfians might think such a view is incompatible with Fodor’s (1975) argumentfrom language learning. Don’t we need to conceptualize a category before labeling it?We think not. We do need to be able to represent particular objects, but languagecan invite us to group together a set of particulars that we would not otherwise group.This new group can be used to form a prototype, which can then be used for furthercategorization and cognitive elaboration. The role of language is contingent on thisscenario (something non-verbal could make the group salient), but profound. In lead-ing us to habitually group certain particulars together (an effect of Habitual Whorfian-ism), language shapes the categorical boundaries that constitute our subjectiveorganization of world. On this view, language influences our understanding of whatkinds of things exist – our ontologies. And, given that these influences are not obviousfrom introspection, we are prone to mistake category boundaries that are linguisticallyinfluenced for boundaries that are privileged, natural, and inevitable. This would makeWhorf smile.

Ontological Whorfianism explains many of the empirical results. Bowerman’s work onprepositions shows that the spatial relations we see as belonging together can be influ-enced by language. Lucy’s work on mass nouns shows that unitizing may be an optionalactivity and that it is possible to experience a class of individuals and a class of stuff. Boro-ditsky’s work on articles shows that the features we regard as typical for a category arenot simply read off of the statistics of the exemplars we encounter, but can be imposedby the gender of the words used to categorize. In all these cases, language transcendswhat is given in pre-linguistic experience and introduces something: a similarity space,internal structure, associated features.

Strikingly, Ontological Whorfianism can even be defended in rudimentary perceptualdomains. Early research suggested that the organization of color space is not influencedby language (Heider 1972), but we now know this is not true. Color spaces are quantifi-ably similar across languages, suggesting biological constraints, but by no means identical(Kay and Regier 2007; Roberson et al. 2004). For example, Kay and Kempton (1984)showed that speakers of Tarahumara, a native American language that has one word forblue and green, are more accurate than English speakers in estimating distances betweencolor chips. We see a greenish blue chip as more like a blue chip than like a green chipeven if it is closer to the green chip in objective color space. Linguistically imposed dif-ferences in color boundaries sometimes come packed with differences in conceptual asso-ciations as well. In English, we use the word ‘pink’ for light red, and this color categoryis associated with femininity. We would not hesitate to buy a light blue shirt for a manwho claimed blue as his favorite color, but it would be risky to buy a pink shirt for aman who loves red. The opposite pattern in found in Russian, where light blue is singledout with a special name that is also used as slang for homosexuals. There is correspondingevidence that Russians draw a categorical boundary within blue, while English speakersdo not (Winawer et al. 2007).

These examples suggest that language influences categorization, conceptual associations,and perhaps even qualitative experience (experience may depend on attention and atten-tion can be influenced by concepts). Unlike Radical Whorfianism, we are not suggesting



that language is necessary for categorization or even that linguisitic categories are unnatu-ral. Rather, we are saying that language is one of the factors that helps select betweenmany possible boundaries, and the boundaries we draw then influence human reasoning,decision-making, and behavior. English speakers react to pink and prototypical red invery different ways.

Critics might concede the point but insist that the effects in question are both rare andmodest. As we saw earlier, Sapir says the world is ‘to a large extent’ linguistically con-structed, and Whorf says objects are grouped into categories ‘largely’ by language. It isdifficult to support such strong claims using existing research, and comparative psychol-ogy (both cross-cultural and cross-species) suggests that the boundaries we draw are heav-ily influenced by non-linguistic factors. Whorf gives in to exaggeration when hedescribed pre-linguistic experience as a kaleidoscopic flux. But we think this does notrender relativity uninteresting. First, effect size can be quite large, as the data reportedabove attest. Second, some categories, especially social kinds, may be dramatically affectedby labeling (Hacking 1995). Third, effects can be quite pervasive, as is presumably thecase with grammatical gender, which could influence the conceptualization of every nounin gendered languages. Fourth, the ability to code things linguistically can impact atten-tion, recognition, problem-solving, and memory and every other cognitive faculty. Fifth,the fact that language can influence the perceptual primitives may force us to rethinkstandard accounts of modularity, epistemology, and concept acquisition. Sixth, languagemay play a role in promoting important group differences in cognition, including differ-ences the correlate with gender, ethnicity, class, and the collectivism ⁄ individualismdivide.

In conclusion, we think that Whorfian effects are both real and interesting. By labelingthings, language draws our attention to features of the world, and noticing these featuresbecomes habitual. Those habits bias which of the many discernable categories we recog-nize by default, and may even impose category boundaries we would not notice other-wise. Language can also influence how we construe category members (as with genderedarticles or slang use of color terms). In these ways, language informs our sense of wherenature’s joints reside, and what various categories are like – our ontologies. We suspectthat these effects are pretty pervasive. If so, the implications are far reaching. Philosopherswho say that language is merely a vehicle for expressing thoughts must revise their views,and it may turn out that speakers of different languages habitually parse the world in dif-ferent ways. We must recall that the manifest image is not the world given in experience,but reflects instead what we as thinkers bring to it. Language may play a role in con-structing the given.

Short Biography

Maria Francisca Reines is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina, Cha-pel Hill. She has a BA in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. She iscompleting a dissertation on linguistic relativity and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Herresearch interests include philosophy of language and mind, in particular issues in transla-tion, communication, and understanding. Jesse Prinz is a Distinguished Professor of Phi-losophy at the City University of New York. He works primarily in the philosophy ofcognitive science, with an emphasis on the role of perception and emotions in groundinghigher mental capacities. His books include Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Percep-tual Basis, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion, and The Emotional Construction ofMorals.



Notes

* Correspondence address: City University of New York, Graduate Center, 385 Fifth Avenue, New York, 10016NY, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

1 Gender categories are sometimes called noun classes. Some languages, like Thai and Sosetho, contain nearly 20noun classes. There is some debate about whether these should be considered grammatical genders or somethingelse (Sera et al. 2002).2 Languages vary also as to how they mark grammatical gender. Spanish, for example, is said to be ‘gender loaded’because it carries gender marking information in several grammatical categories (Sera et al. 2002). These includenouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners. In contrast, only a few grammatical categories carry gender informa-tion in German. German nouns are rarely marked for gender and adjectives carry gender information only some-times (Sera et al. 2002).3 In some contexts, speakers sometimes use a very limited intrinsic system.4 See Li and Gleitman 2002, for a challenge to these results and Levinson et al. 2002, for a reply.5 Further evidence that language affects spatial cognition comes from recent work involving non-human primates.Haun et al. (2006a,b) found that non-human primates and human infants share a preference for allocentric strategiesfor locating objects. (The preference is allocentric because the experimental task did not distinguish between intrinsicand absolute strategies.) This suggests an innate disposition for allocentric strategies, with preference for egocentricstrategies arising alongside the acquisition of languages, like English and German, that favor relative frames of refer-ence.6 Defenders of these claims do not always emphasize relativity. They sometimes argue that any public languagecould give us the relevant ability.

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reviving whorf: the return of linguistic relativity

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