The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

analogical reasoning in a contentious era

Ideas flitter in and out of our minds. The important thing is to make time for them. I am a big fan of conversations about thinking better, bigger, and more clearly. How to communicate effectively. Language shapes how we think. We can put weird images into minds simply by speaking.

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky demonstrates this by describing a jellyfish waltzing while also thinking about quantum mechanics. A complete impossibility but everyone went along with the thought experiment. The TED talk is at the end of this post.

The fact that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis reminds me linguistically (at least in my mind) of Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street actually serves to clarify the meaning.

“The Sapir-Wharf hypothesis states that the grammatical and more verbal structure of a person’s language influences how they perceive the world.”

No way to know how my world view or cognition has been influenced by hours and hours of watching Sesame Street as a child but it is fair to admit—it has.

What might it say about a culture that lacks a word to describe emotional eating. Let me introduce one of my favorite German words, kummerspeck. It translates to “grief bacon” and refers to weight gained because of sadness and emotional eating. If a language has multiple words to describe something, a speaker of that language is provided with more granularity. A specific word is selected that best conveys the intended nuance.

Hoping to diffuse the Sesame Street into something slightly more erudite, I will share a quote shared again by Lera Boroditsky, from Charlemagne, Holy Roman Empire, “To have a second language is to have a second soul”. She also points out the contrast to Shakespeare and a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Seemingly dismissing the role of power and persuasion in language.

Perhaps it isn’t simply the words or language but how we frame them. Think of an entire world of linguistic context within a cultural perspective or reference.

Sometimes I think we focus a lot of attention in the tech space on fact-checking when in fact what I think we really need is frame checking. And I can imagine how, when you select some text on your computer and you can hit a command and you bring up a dictionary, we need that, but for a frame, so like a frame-thaurus. So you bring it up and you see all the different frames, which groups use those frames. Instead of just knowing, check your source, you want to check your word source, like where did that language originally come from.—Aza Raskin,Your Undivided Attention

I think it is worthwhile to revisit working definitions of “framing” and tracing it back to a report,Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1986).

Here are a few of the assumptions and an example demonstrating how framing can influence choices you make. Choices you believe to be voluntary.

Assumptions of rational choice (often violated):

Cancellation the choice between options should only depend on states in which they yield different outcomes.

Transitivity is satisfied if it is possible to assign to each option a value that does not depend on the other available options.

Dominance if one option is better than another in one state and at least as good in all other states, the dominant option should be chosen.

Invariance preference between options should be independent of their description or different representations of the same choice problem should yield the same preference

To demonstrate responses to different frames, respondents given statistical information about the outcomes of two treatments of lung cancer were then asked to select their preferred treatment. The same statistics were presented to some respondents in terms of mortality rates and to others in terms of survival rates.

The respondents then indicated their preferred treatment.

Framing influences how the problem is described and therefore the signals of beliefs and preferences or habits of respondent.

In media we tend to think of framing as a series of cultural filters we use to decide how we view the world. The choices we make are then influenced or informed by the frame we create. Language is the currency of how we shape our perception—either in negative or positive frames.

So to me, that really pushes on this idea, again, of how much we believe we are perceiving reality the way that it is and how much of what we're making judgments on we think is based in a rational, clear perception of physical reality, as opposed to how much of it is constructed by all of the ideas that we have surrounding whatever it is that we see. And those ideas of course come, not just from our own minds, but from the minds of other people, through language, through cultural practices and so on.—Lera Boroditsky

Johns Hopkins neuroscience professor David J. Linden says the following:

The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation.

Understanding the limits of objectivity and how we introduce bias into everything we do is simultaneously liberating and frightening. Life is experiential. Go participate!

How language shapes the way we think