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> > > Not to spiral too quickly off-topic, but I wanted to point out
that
> > > Sapir-Whorf has been thoroughly discredited,
> >
> > By no means. Certain strong forms have been discredited, but no SW
> examples -- there are some contemporary cogitive researchers,
> including one at MIT, who are presently reinvigorating debate about
Chomsky was MIT as well. As long as there are people who wish to
identify their race, culture, or political bias as being "superior" in
order to justify neo-eugenics or genocide, you'll have interest in this
brand of pseudo-science. The existence of contemporary interest does
not make a bad idea better.
The researcher you point to should illustrate the general pattern of
these arguments. The example in "mandarin speakers vs. English speakers
(2001)" is truly pathetic. As far as I can tell, the research simply
proves that you are more effective in communicating when you communicate
in the listener's preferred representational system (or context as Simon
puts it). It's easy to think of people who speak mandarin, but conceive
of time as horizontal, and there are certainly people who speak English
and conceive of time as vertical -- if the experimenter had separated
people into groups that way, the correlation would obviously have been
even stronger. The researcher completely ignores the fact that
representational systems vary across individuals, and to make a
statement that "English think of time as horizontal" is even more absurd
than saying "when a person looks up and to the left, she is accessing
visual memories, unless she is left-handed". These are very easy to
disprove experimentally, or even anecdotally. Time for me is a thread
extending off and up into the haze, and when I use time-comparison
words, my brain is smart enough to situate things on the thread. As
another example, Mandarin Chinese uses numerical names for some things
that English speakers use symbolic names for (example month names). It
is patently obvious that someone asked "quick, which comes first,
three-month or five-month" would respond more quickly than someone asked
"which is higher, march or may?" I really challenge people to read the
research and make up their own minds before getting hoodwinked too
quickly by these things. Most of the so-called research is putrid.
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