The influence of language in conceptualization: three views

Different languages carve the world in different categories. They also encode events in different ways, conventionalize different metaphorical mappings, and differ in their rule-based metonymies and patterns of meaning extensions. A long-standing, and controversial, question is whether this variability in the languages generates a corresponding variability in the conceptual structure of the speakers of those languages. Here we will present and discuss three interesting general proposals by focusing on representative authors of such proposals. The proposals are the following: first, that the effect of language in conceptualization is general and deep; second, that the effect is local, transient, shallow and easily revisable; and third, that there is no proper effect of language on conceptualization, although there is surely some cognitive impact of language: many conceptual tasks engage language one way or another. Introduction Many authors have held that language is necessary for thought: without language, there are no concepts. This language-first thesis is typically associated with German romantics, but it is by no means exclusive of them. Many philosophers of the analytic tradition have endorsed it, and it has even been claimed that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was inspired less by the romantics than by early analytic philosophers (Joseph 1996). However, the hypothesis that language somehow shapes thought, or our conceptual structure, does not require a thesis as strong as the language-first thesis. Many contemporary psychologists believe that non-linguistic babies have concepts, but some argue that the acquisition of language effects a kind of re-calibration of conceptual categories, and some hold that language is a source of concepts. There are many issues that are usually run together in this debate. We want to steer clear from some of them. First of all, we want to avoid the issue of whether language is or is not either a vehicle of thought 1 . If language is a vehicle of thought, then presumably language does have an impact on conceptual structure. However, language can have an impact on conceptual structure without being a vehicle of thought. Secondly, some authors have distinguished between two general ways in which language can have an effect on cognition: language-as-a-lens and language-as-a-tool-kit (see Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003; Gomila 2012). We will not be concerned with the issue of language-as-a-tool-kit, which has to do more with whether there are certain things that minds cannot do without using language. For instance, it has been claimed that language is involved in intermodular thinking (Spelke 2003), or that it is indispensable for conscious thought (Jackendoff 2012). These are not the kinds of issues we will be concerned with here. Our focus is rather on the issue of language-as-a-lens. In a first pass, this is the issue of whether or not languages affect the way we conceptualize the world. But this is too broad. We want to focus on the issue of whether languages have some effect in conceptualization in those domains where it seems that there can be categorization without language. At least, it is required that there is a domain “out there” that can be categorized in different ways by different languages. This means, in particular, that we will leave aside the much-debated case of numbers and of arithmetic cognition. This case is one where, apparently, there cannot be number concepts –that is, a whole domain of concepts– without language because number concepts seem to go hand-inhand with the linguistic symbols we use for them, instead of drawing on perceptual or core-conceptual information (see Carey 2009; Gordon 2004, 2010). If your language has incorporated natural numbers, you can have number concepts and count; otherwise, there seems to be no way to have any properly arithmetic ability at all. Cases like this do not sit well with the spirit of the “lens” metaphor, which is best exemplified by the color case. According to many, different languages carve the color spectrum in different ways, probably transforming a pre-existent way of categorization. In fact, the numbers case seems to exemplify better the “tool-kit” metaphor, since we seem to engage the linguistic system in counting. 2. Deep, transient, or no effects? Enthusiasts, moderates and skeptics 1 For this issue, we refer the reader to Vicente and Martinez-Manrique (2005, 2008). Some authors claim that language does not affect conceptualization at all, many others accept that it may affect conceptualization to some extent, and others want to hold that the effect of language on conceptualization is vast and deep. One initial problem is that it is not entirely clear what it takes for an effect to be deep. On the one hand, one could expect that if language had a profound impact, it would be roughly along the lines of the resilient changes that language's phonetics brings about in the perception of phonemes – as pointed out by Gleitman and Papafragou (2005) or Hespos and Spelke (2004). Yet the evidence shows that grammar and semantics seem to bring about changes in the conceptual structure that are quite unlike the changes that phonetics imposes. On the other hand, perhaps such a demand is too strong for the conceptual sphere, where – unlike the phonetics case– there are other factors that intervene in its organization. Here we will present and discuss three interesting general proposals: the enthusiasts, who hold that the effect of language in conceptualization is general and deep; the moderates, for whom the effect is local, transient, shallow and easily revisable; and the skeptics, who see no proper effect of language on conceptualization, although they admit some cognitive impact of language in the sense that many conceptual tasks engage language one way or another. These three seem to be the relevant contenders in the contemporary discussion, and for each of them we will select one the most recent representative lines of research: work from Casasanto et al. for the enthusiasts, from Landau et al. for the moderates, and from Li et al. for the skeptics. Of course, there are other areas of research, and we will mention briefly some of them, but they have been previously covered in other papers (e.g., Bloom and Keil 2001; Gleitman and Papafragou 2005). In addition, we will devote relatively more space to the enthusiasts’ camp, given that it is here where most of the polemic points arise. 2.1. The enthusiasts The initial revival of Linguistic Relativity (LR, from now on) purported to show that language affects adult categorization. For instance, Lucy (1992) tried to show that speakers of classifier languages (vs. speakers of languages with the count noun/ mass noun distinction) 2 categorized more in terms of substance than in terms of shape, while Levinson and his colleagues picked out the domain of spatial coordinates and compared 2 Classifier languages count objects relying on classifier particles that vary according to the kind of object it is –animate/inanimate, substance it is made of, shape, etc– as in ‘one [animal] pig’. Languages with count nouns can apply numerals directly to them (‘one pigs, two pigs’). the categorization of speakers of languages with dominant egocentric relative coordinates vs. that of speakers of languages with only absolute coordinates (Levinson 1997, 2003). 3 It was held that these purported relativistic effects become manifest some time after children acquire language, a prediction implied by the thesis that language makes the difference (Lucy and Gaskins 2001). A new wave of studies by developmental psychologists suggests that children categorize the world in identical and universal ways until they master their language (Hespos and Spelke 2004). There are plenty of domains of categorization that are under the scrutiny of experimental work now: from the classical domain of colors to the projection of grammatical gender on attributes of real-world things (Sera et al. 2002; Boroditsky et al. 2003; Kousta et al. 2008). So it seems that the evidence in favor of some degree of LR is growing. Yet, relativists still have to clear up two lingering worries about their research: 1) Do the data actually reveal that language affects non-linguistic conceptualization? 2) Can they really show that the correlation between linguistic differences and the alleged conceptual differences is due to linguistic differences causing conceptual differences? Let us develop these two issues. Linguistic Relativity is a thesis about the impact of language on cognition. Most participants in the current debate take it that the issue is whether or not language shapes our conceptual structure. Experiments should be designed in such a way that the tasks subjects have to solve cannot be solved by linguistic means. They have to engage cognition, not language. We would not test LR if subjects were classifying objects or events in some domain by thinking “how does my language call these things/these events”? This is the worry related to whether data reveal that language affects nonlinguistic cognition. We will see below that some authors doubt that classical experiments deal with this worry successfully. The second worry is the following: many experiments show that there is a correlation between language and cognition. However, they do not show that this correlation is due to language’s influencing thought. For instance, there are correlations between speaking a language with absolute coordinates and re-arranging, after turning 180o, an array of objects with respect not to the subject’s own body but with respect to those coordinates 3 Egocentric relative spatial coordinates are those that rely on the orientation of an object with respect to the bodily position of the speaker, as in ‘take the road to your left’. Absolute coordinates rely on a stable frame of reference, such as a landmark (‘take the road uphill’) or cardinal points (‘t