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Brown's formulations became widely known and were retrospectively attributed to Whorf and Sapir although the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them. |
Since Brown and Lenneberg believed that the objective reality denoted by language was the same for speakers of all languages, they decided to test how different languages codified the same message differently and whether differences in codification could be proven to affect behavior. |
Universalist scholars ushered in a period of dissent from ideas about linguistic relativity. Lenneberg was one of the first cognitive scientists to begin development of the Universalist theory of language that was formulated by Chomsky as Universal Grammar, effectively arguing that all languages share the same underlyi... |
Today many followers of the universalist school of thought still oppose linguistic relativity. For example, Pinker argues in "The Language Instinct" that thought is independent of language, that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural" ... |
Pinker and other universalists have been accused by relativists of misrepresenting Whorf's views and arguing against strawmen. |
Joshua Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind". |
Joshua Fishman argued that Whorf's true position was largely overlooked. In 1978, he suggested that Whorf was a "neo-Herderian champion" and in 1982, he proposed "Whorfianism of the third kind" in an attempt to refocus linguists' attention on what he claimed was Whorf's real interest, namely the intrinsic value of "lit... |
Where Brown's weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that language "influences" thought and the strong version that language "determines" thought, Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind" proposes that language "is a key to culture". |
In his book "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind", Lakoff reappraised linguistic relativity and especially Whorf's views about how linguistic categorization reflects and/or influences mental categories. He concluded that the debate had been confused. He described four parameters on w... |
Lakoff concluded that many of Whorf's critics had criticized him using novel definitions of linguistic relativity, rendering their criticisms moot. |
The publication of the 1996 anthology "Rethinking Linguistic Relativity" edited by Gumperz and Levinson began a new period of linguistic relativity studies that focused on cognitive and social aspects. The book included studies on the linguistic relativity and universalist traditions. Levinson documented significant li... |
Lucy defines this approach as “domain-centered,” because researchers select a semantic domain and compare it across linguistic and cultural groups. Space is another semantic domain that has proven fruitful for linguistic relativity studies. Spatial categories vary greatly across languages. Speakers rely on the linguist... |
Separate studies by Bowerman and Slobin treated the role of language in cognitive processes. Bowerman showed that certain cognitive processes did not use language to any significant extent and therefore could not be subject to linguistic relativity. Slobin described another kind of cognitive process that he named "thin... |
Researchers such as Boroditsky, Majid, Lucy and Levinson believe that language influences thought in more limited ways than the broadest early claims. Researchers examine the interface between thought (or cognition), language and culture and describe the relevant influences. They use experimental data to back up their ... |
Recent studies have also taken the "behavior centered" approach, which starts by comparing behavior across linguistic groups and then searches for causes for that behavior in the linguistic system. In an early example of this approach, Whorf attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers' use of ... |
More recently, Bloom noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counter-factual questions posed to them in a questionnaire. He concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in Chinese. Other researchers attributed this result to Bloom's flawed... |
Everett's work on the Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon found several peculiarities that he interpreted as corresponding to linguistically rare features, such as a lack of numbers and color terms in the way those are otherwise defined and the absence of certain types of clauses. Everett's conclusions were met wit... |
Recent research with non-linguistic experiments in languages with different grammatical properties (e.g., languages with and without numeral classifiers or with different gender grammar systems) showed that language differences in human categorization are due to such differences. Experimental research suggests that thi... |
Kashima & Kashima showed that people living in countries where spoken languages often drop pronouns (such as Japanese) tend to have more collectivistic values than those who use non–pronoun drop languages such as English. They argued that the explicit reference to “you” and “I” reminds speakers the distinction between ... |
Psycholinguistic studies explored motion perception, emotion perception, object representation and memory. The gold standard of psycholinguistic studies on linguistic relativity is now finding non-linguistic cognitive differences in speakers of different languages (thus rendering inapplicable Pinker's criticism that li... |
Recent work with bilingual speakers attempts to distinguish the effects of language from those of culture on bilingual cognition including perceptions of time, space, motion, colors and emotion. Researchers described differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in perception of color, representations of time and oth... |
Linguistic relativity inspired others to consider whether thought could be influenced by manipulating language. |
The question bears on philosophical, psychological, linguistic and anthropological questions. |
A major question is whether human psychological faculties are mostly innate or whether they are mostly a result of learning, and hence subject to cultural and social processes such as language. The innate view holds that humans share the same set of basic faculties, and that variability due to cultural differences is l... |
Multiple alternatives have advocates. The contrary constructivist position holds that human faculties and concepts are largely influenced by socially constructed and learned categories, without many biological restrictions. Another variant is idealist, which holds that human mental capacities are generally unrestricted... |
Another debate considers whether thought is a form of internal speech or is independent of and prior to language. |
In the philosophy of language the question addresses the relations between language, knowledge and the external world, and the concept of truth. Philosophers such as Putnam, Fodor, Davidson, and Dennett see language as representing directly entities from the objective world and that categorization reflect that world. O... |
Another question is whether language is a tool for representing and referring to objects in the world, or whether it is a system used to construct mental representations that can be communicated. |
Sapir/Whorf contemporary Alfred Korzybski was independently developing his theory of general semantics, which was aimed at using language's influence on thinking to maximize human cognitive abilities. Korzybski's thinking was influenced by logical philosophy such as Russell and Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica" and W... |
Korzybski independently described a "strong" version of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. |
In their fiction, authors such as Ayn Rand and George Orwell explored how linguistic relativity might be exploited for political purposes. In Rand's "Anthem", a fictive communist society removed the possibility of individualism by removing the word "I" from the language. In Orwell's "1984" the authoritarian state creat... |
APL programming language originator Kenneth E. Iverson believed that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages (without actually mentioning it by name). His Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought", was devoted to this theme, arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about computer... |
The essays of Paul Graham explore similar themes, such as a conceptual hierarchy of computer languages, with more expressive and succinct languages at the top. Thus, the so-called "blub" paradox (after a hypothetical programming language of average complexity called "Blub") says that anyone preferentially using some pa... |
In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel "Babel-17", based on the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. |
Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life" developed the concept of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis as applied to an alien species which visits Earth. The aliens' biology contributes to their spoken and written languages, which are distinct. In the 2016 American film "Arrival", based on Chiang's short story, the Sapir–Wh... |
In his science fiction novel "The Languages of Pao" the author Jack Vance describes how specialized languages are a major part of a strategy to create specific classes in a society, to enable the population to withstand occupation and develop itself. |
In the Samuel R. Delany science fiction novel, "Babel-17," the author describes a highly advanced, information-dense language that can be used as a weapon. Learning it turns one into an unwilling traitor as it alters perception and thought. |
The Totalitarian regime depicted in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four" in effect acts on the basis of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, seeking to replace English with "Newspeak", a language constructed specifically with the intention that thoughts subversive of the regime cannot be expressed in it, and therefore people ... |
Intentionality is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it has been regarded as the characteristic "mark of the mental" by many philosopher... |
The earliest theory of intentionality is associated with Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument for the existence of God, and with his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exist in reality. The idea fell out of discussion with the end of the medieval scholastic per... |
The concept of intentionality was reintroduced in 19th-century contemporary philosophy by Franz Brentano (a German philosopher and psychologist who is generally regarded as the founder of act psychology, also called intentionalism) in his work "Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint" (1874). Brentano described intenti... |
Brentano coined the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the peculiar ontological status of the contents of mental phenomena. According to some interpreters the "in-" of "in-existence" is to be read as locative, i.e. as indicating that "an intended object ... exists in or has "in-existence", existing not ex... |
A major problem within discourse on intentionality is that participants often fail to make explicit whether or not they use the term to imply concepts such as agency or desire, i.e. whether it involves teleology. Dennett (see below) explicitly invokes teleological concepts in the "intentional stance". However, most phi... |
To bear out further the diversity of sentiment evoked from the notion of intentionality, Husserl followed on Brentano, and gave the concept of intentionality more widespread attention, both in continental and analytic philosophy. In contrast to Brentano's view, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre ("Being and Nothingnes... |
Other 20th-century philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer were critical of Husserl's concept of intentionality and his many layers of consciousness. Ryle insisted that perceiving is not a process, and Ayer that describing one's knowledge is not to describe mental processes. The effect of these positions is tha... |
Platonist Roderick Chisholm has revived the Brentano thesis through linguistic analysis, distinguishing two parts to Brentano's concept, the ontological aspect and the psychological aspect. Chisholm's writings have attempted to summarize the suitable and unsuitable criteria of the concept since the Scholastics, arrivin... |
In current artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind, intentionality is sometimes linked with questions of semantic inference, with both skeptical and supportive adherents. John Searle argued for this position with the Chinese room thought experiment, according to which no syntactic operations that occurred in a c... |
A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of intentional inexistence: to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states. This is particularly relevant for cases involving objects that have no existence outside the mind, as in the case of mere fanta... |
For example, assume that Mary is thinking about Superman. On the one hand, it seems that this thought is intentional: Mary is "thinking about something". On the other hand, Superman "doesn't exist". This suggests that Mary is either "not thinking about something" or that Mary is "thinking about something that doesn't e... |
Eliminativists deny that the example above is possible. It might seem to us and to Mary that she is thinking about something but she is not really thinking at all. Such a position could be motivated by a form of semantic externalism, the view that the meaning of a term, or in this example the content of a thought, is d... |
Relationalists hold that having an intentional state involves standing in a relation to the intentional object. This is the most natural position for non-problematic cases. So if Mary perceives a tree, we might say that a perceptual relation holds between Mary, the subject of this relation, and the tree, the object of ... |
Dennett's taxonomy of current theories about intentionality. |
Daniel Dennett offers a taxonomy of the current theories about intentionality in Chapter 10 of his book "The Intentional Stance". Most, if not all, current theories on intentionality accept Brentano's thesis of the irreducibility of intentional idiom. From this thesis the following positions emerge: |
Roderick Chisholm (1956), G.E.M. Anscombe (1957), Peter Geach (1957), and Charles Taylor (1964) all adhere to the former position, namely that intentional idiom is problematic and cannot be integrated with the natural sciences. Members of this category also maintain realism in regard to intentional objects, which may i... |
The latter position, which maintains the unity of intentionality with the natural sciences, is further divided into three standpoints: |
Proponents of the "eliminative materialism", understand intentional idiom, such as "belief", "desire", and the like, to be replaceable either with behavioristic language (e.g. Quine) or with the language of neuroscience (e.g. Churchland). |
Holders of "realism" argue that there is a deeper fact of the matter to both translation and belief attribution. In other words, manuals for translating one language into another cannot be set up in different yet behaviorally identical ways and ontologically there are intentional objects. Famously, Fodor has attempted ... |
They are further divided into two theses: |
Advocates of the former, the Normative Principle, argue that attributions of intentional idioms to physical systems should be the propositional attitudes that the physical system ought to have in those circumstances (Dennett 1987, 342). However, exponents of this view are still further divided into those who make an "A... |
The latter is advocated by Grandy (1973) and Stich (1980, 1981, 1983, 1984), who maintain that attributions of intentional idioms to any physical system (e.g. humans, artifacts, non-human animals, etc.) should be the propositional attitude (e.g. "belief", "desire", etc.) that one would suppose one would have in the sam... |
Basic intentionality types according to Le Morvan. |
Intentionalism is the thesis that all mental states are intentional, i.e. that they are about something: about their intentional object. This thesis has also been referred to as "representationalism". Intentionalism is entailed by Brentano's claim that intentionality is "the mark of the mental": if all and only mental ... |
Discussions of intentionalism often focus on the intentionality of conscious states. One can distinguish in such states their phenomenal features, or what it is like for a subject to have such a state, from their intentional features, or what they are about. These two features seem to be closely related to each other, ... |
Critics of intentionalism, so-called anti-intentionalists, have proposed various apparent counterexamples to intentionalism: states that are considered mental but lack intentionality. |
Some anti-intentionalist theories, such as that of Ned Block, are based on the argument that phenomenal conscious experience or qualia is also a vital component of consciousness, and that it is not intentional. (The latter claim is itself disputed by Michael Tye.) |
Another form of anti-intentionalism associated with John Searle regards phenomenality itself as the "mark of the mental" and sidelines intentionality. |
A further form argues that some unusual states of consciousness are non-intentional, although an individual might live a lifetime without experiencing them. Robert K.C. Forman argues that some of the unusual states of consciousness typical of mystical experience are "pure consciousness events" in which awareness exists... |
Several authors have attempted to construct philosophical models describing how intentionality relates to the human capacity to be self-conscious. Cedric Evans contributed greatly to the discussion with his "The Subject of Self-Consciousness" in 1970. He centered his model on the idea that executive attention need not ... |
The auditory moving-window is a psycholinguistic paradigm developed at Michigan State University by Fernanda Ferreira and colleagues. Ferreira and colleagues built the paradigm in order to address the scarcity of (fluent) spoken-language comprehension literature versus the robustness of that for visual-word processing.... |
The paradigm has been used in the study of syntactic processing in the study of aphasic patients. One such study suggests that many aphasic patients retain their abilities to process syntactic structures on-line. Further, evidence suggests that Expressive aphasics have a degraded ability to process complex syntax on-li... |
The auditory moving-window paradigm, because of its similarity to the eye tracking paradigm, has a broad range of applications. It is at least sensitive enough to detect frequency effects on comprehension: low frequency words had a greater IRT and DT than high frequency words, suggesting a relative difficulty of lexica... |
Because one of the aims of the auditory moving-window is to investigate fluent speech, the paradigm is several steps more complex than simple auditory word-by-word presentation: |
The presentation of a prepared sample depends on what software is being used. What follows is an abstraction of the general strategy. |
The auditory moving-window is roughly analogous to an eye tracking task presented in the auditory modality. The eye tracking variable of interest that is thought to be closest to the DT is that of fixation duration. They are held to be directly related: a greater DT is correspondent to a greater fixation duration. Seve... |
Kenneth Goodman (December 23, 1927 - March 12, 2020) was Professor Emeritus, Language Reading and Culture, at the University of Arizona. He is best known for developing the theory underlying the literacy philosophy of whole language. |
Goodman began teaching at Wayne State University in 1962. His research focused on reading in public schools. While at Wayne State University, Goodman developed miscue analysis, a process of assessing students' reading comprehension based on samples of oral reading. One of his research assistants in miscue analysis was ... |
After publishing an influential book on the subject of whole language, Goodman began to create a psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic model of reading inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky. Goodman decided that the process of reading was similar to the process of learning a language as conceptualized by Chomsky, and tha... |
After developing and researching the Whole Language model, Goodman presented his work to the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference and published an article in the "Journal of the Reading Specialist," in which he famously wrote that reading is a "psycholinguistic guessing game." He retired from the... |
Goodman's concept of written language development views it as parallel to oral language development. Goodman's theory was a basis for the whole language movement, which was further developed by Yetta Goodman, Regie Routman, Frank Smith and others. His concept of reading as an analogue to language development has been s... |
Goodman served in several important capacities, including as President of the International Reading Association, President of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy, and President of the Center for Expansion of Language and Thinking. He also worked extensively with the National Council of Teachers... |
His last book was "Reading- The Grand Illusion: How and Why People Make Sense of Print" with contributions from linguist, Peter H. Fries and neurologist, Steven L. Strauss and was published by Routledge in 2016. |
Goodman was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame in 1989. |
1. "A Communicative Theory of the Reading Curriculum," Elementary English, Vol. 40:3, March 1963, pp. 290–298. |
2. and Yetta M. Goodman, "Spelling Ability of a Self-Taught Reader," The Elementary School Journal, Vol. 64:3, December 1963, pp. 149–154. |
3. "The Linguistics of Reading," The Elementary School Journal, Vol. 64:8, April 1964, pp. 355–361. |
Also in Durr, (ed.), Readings on Reading, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1968. |
Also in Frost, (ed.), Issues and Innovations in the Teaching of Reading, Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1967. |
4. "A Linguistic Study of Cues and Miscues in Reading," Elementary English, Vol. 42:6, October 1965, pp. 639–643. |
Also in Wilson and Geyer, (eds.), Reading for Diagnostic and Remedial Reading, Merrill, 1972, pp. 103– 110. |
Also in Gentile, Kamil, and Blanchard, (eds.), Reading Research Revisited, Columbus: Charles Merrill, 1983, pp. 129–134. |
Also in Singer and Ruddell, (eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, 3rd Edition, Newark: IRA, 1985. |
5. "Dialect barriers to reading comprehension," Elementary English, Vol. 42:8, pp. 852–60, December 1965. Also in Linguistics and Reading, NCTE, 1966. |
Also in Dimensions of Dialect, NCTE, 1967. |
Also in Kosinski, (ed.), Readings on Creativity and Imagination in Literature and Language, NCTE, 1969. |
Also in Teaching Black Children to Read, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, 1969. |
Also in Kise, Binter, and Dalabalto, (eds.), Readings on Reading, Int. Book Co., pp. 241–51. |
Also in Caper, Green, Baker, Listening and Speaking in the English Classroom, Macmillan, 1971. Also in Shores, Contemporary English: Change and Variation, Lippincott, 1972. |
Also in Ruddell, (ed.), Resources in Reading Language Instruction, Prentiss Hall, 1972. |
Also in DeStefano, Editor, Language, Society and Education, Jones Co., Worthington, Ohio, 1973. |
6. and Yetta Goodman, "References on Linguistics and the Teaching of Reading," Reading Teacher, Vol. 21:1, October, 1967, pp. 22–23. |
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