In formal linguistics, Zellig Harris and his co-workers have come full circle to the work on information structures in discourse that opened the whole field of transformational grammar. Harris, Ryckman, Gottfried et al. Changes in this structure correlate transparently with historically well-documented changes and developmental stages of the science during that period, although the structure was determined by clearly defined formal means and without reference to any knowledge of that historical context. No better confirmation of Sapir's intuition of the essential unity of language and thought could be offered by one of his students. This corresponds precisely to the observation above that the discovery and the language for talking about it co-evolved.
Synecdoche is fallacious in both cases.
The claim, then, is of the unity, but not identity of language and thought. To illustrate this point further, I should like to adduce a recent contribution to the enormous literature in the study of kinship categories, always a favorite topic in anthropological linguistics. This work illustrates a Whorfian effect in the sublanguage of a specialization within the science of anthropology. Be it noted that Harris denies there can be a lingua mentalis or any metalanguage external to natural language. For one thing, were there such one would need to account for the grammar and semantics of that metalanguage, and off we go in an infinite regress of grammatical and semantic metalanguages.