The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as we know it today can be broken down into two basic principles: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity.

Der mensch lebt mit den Gegenständen hauptsächlich, ja...sogar ausschliesslich so, wie die Sprache sie ihm zuführt."

Humboldt viewed thought as being impossible without language, language as completely determining thought. On closer inspection, we can see that this extreme hypothesis leads to a question: how, if there was no thought before language, did language arise in the first place? Humboldt answers this by adhering to the theory that language is a platonic object, comparable to a living organism which just suddenly evolved one day entirely of its own accord.

This famous passage from the American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884-1936)'s 'The Status Of Linguistics As A Science', written in 1929, demonstrates the dominating thought of what has come to be called by all sorts of names including the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis', the 'Whorfian hypothesis' and more plainly the 'Linguistic Relativity hypothesis'. We can see the reason for the variety of titles for the hypothesis - as well as the influence Sapir must have had on his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) - if we look at the following passage from Whorf himself, which propounds much the same viewpoint:

'We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organised by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organise it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organisation and classification of data which the agreement decrees.'

Surprisingly, though, neither Sapir or Whorf made it very clear whether they were arguing for strong or weak determinism. At times we are "at the mercy of" whatever language we speak, while at others our linguistic habits simply "predispose certain choices of interpretation".

Whorf, originally a 'fire prevention engineer' by trade, spent a lot of his time studying the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona, who make no distinction in their language between past, present and future tenses; where in English it seems natural to distinguish between 'I see the girl', 'I saw the girl' and 'I will see the girl', this is not an option in Hopi. This apparently made quite an impression on Whorf, who imagined that the scientists of the day and the Hopi must see the world very differently...although the philosopher Max Black considers that 'they may be expected to have pretty much the same concept of time that we have' in spite of this. And Whorf himself notices, 'The Hopi language is capable of accounting for and describing correctly all observable phenomena of the universe'. Another characteristic of the Hopi tongue is that there is just a single word - 'masa'ytaka' - for everything that flies, including insects, aeroplanes and pilots.

This quotation from Freud's book 'The Ego and the Id' helps us make what I consider to be a helpful distinction when talking about the influence of language on thought: whether we are talking about conscious or unconscious thought. I have suspected for a long time that language actually gives rise to consciousness, to thought that is available to conscious introspection; thought of an unconscious nature takes place, I believe, from the day we are born, as the cognitive faculties exercise themselves upon the world of the child. But it is only when the child learns the meaning of words, learns to associate them with concepts, that he or she becomes 'conscious', in the sense of becoming aware of his/her existence as the object of other's thoughts and judgements, and exercising upon him/herself the internalised critic Freud calls the Superego. The child learns the words 'good' and 'bad'; thought processes become their own objects for the first time.
I think perhaps the answer might be that conscious thought is thought that has been given a verbal symbol to coexist alongside it. Thus thought that occurs below a conscious level, both the 'simple' thought of cognitive processes and the complex thought of say, repressed ideas and affects, remains unconscious until verbal correspondences are found. More importantly, conscious thought may be thought of as unconscious thought that has been given access to consciousness through the use of verbal symbolia; thus words bring concepts from the conscious mind into the unconscious. But there is a price to be paid: what I believe to be an unlimited variety of concepts that could be brought to consciousness have but a limited number of words in which to clothe themselves.
This, of course, relates to the question of whether language determines thought. I think it fair to say in the light of Freud's theory, which seems to me to be undoubtedly correct, that yes, language does determine conscious thought, for conscious thought is by Freud's definition thought that has been made conscious through language; but since the majority of thought is unquestionably unconscious, we cannot say that language determines thought wholly.