Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts? Language and Culture Final Report

Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts?

Language and Culture

Final Report

Group members

Leader : 葉曇樺 93210111 Members: 黃哲政 91110611 黃振郎 89110159 鍾文中 87210351 林正平 87210351 吳佳宜 93110215

Job distribution References collectors: 黃哲政 , 吳佳宜 , 黃振郎 , 鍾文中 , 林正平 , 葉曇樺 Context editors: 林正平 , 鍾文中 , 黃振郎 , 黃

哲政吳佳宜 , 葉曇樺 Summary editor: 葉曇樺 Power-point maker: 葉曇樺

About Whorf-Sapir hypothesisWhorf-Sapir hypothesis: The language we learn in the community where we

are born and shapes and structures our thoughts, world-view, and our social behaviour.

Reference webside:http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html

Nowadays, this hypothesis is a controversial issue, as the result, we discuss this issue “Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts?”

The issue: Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts?

Part I. Record of discussing progress This is a controversial issue, for this reason, there are many

kinds of voice in our team. However, the whole discuss progress had proceeded very smoothly. Described as below.

(The first vote) 1. the opposition: 黃哲政 People often feel that their thoughts aren’t being expressed

properly by words; the mind has a language of its own, independent of the language that the mouth uses.

Summary (1)

Summary (2) 2. the undecided: 吳佳宜 This is really a debated issue. I am not sure whether the lan

guage is so powerful to our thought, it seems to effect our thoughts lightly.

3. the affirmative: 黃振郎 ,林正平 , 鍾文中 , 葉曇樺 Maybe the language has tiny influence to our thought, but

we cannot deny that the language has power to shape our thought. It exists in our lingual system, we are effected by it insensibly.

Summary (3)

(Each party tried to convince the other party by their expression.)

(The second vote) 1. The opposition: 黃哲政 , one vote. 2. The affirmative: 黃振郎 ,鍾文中 ,林正平 ,葉曇樺 ,吳佳宜 , five votes.

(This discussion ended)

Summary (4) Part II. The interflow by Email and Telephone

in our team: (6/5-6/29) 1. 葉曇樺 : Tried to provide some references to all of

team members. 2. 黃哲政 : Had some question to our conclusion, and

decided to write down different idea to complete the whole viewpoint of our final report.

3. 林正平 : Tried to get information about our rate of final report progress and gave some suggestions.

Summary (5)

4. 吳佳宜 :Mentioned that she had some questions about our conclusion and difficult in writing our report.

5. 黃振郎 :Mentioned that the whole direction of his report and provide some new opinions.

6. 鍾文中 : Updated some points of his report and give some suggestions in power-point making.

Summary (6) Part III. The conclusion of our team: This vote outcome just meant that, most of our team

members cannot deny the language has some influence to our thought. It does not mean the vote represents a right answer. In fact, all of us agreed that the language seems to have tiny power to effect our thought. It is like a chicken and egg question. Which comes first? We are not very sure that, however, we must admit that our lingual system is very complicated, everything has its own possibility to happen. That is why we choose this and prepare more space to handle the coming studies in the future.

Individual response- 葉曇樺 (1)

In the first, we must mention the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf had a research about Hopi, a native American language spoken in Northeastern Arizona. The research was that speakers of Hopi and speakers of English see the world differently because of differences in their language, and there were some important points about the events of the two certain speakers see the world differently-focusing events, syntax, their view of time and so on, were reflected in their language. That is the question- Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts?


In this hypothesis, the author claimed that language had a strong effect on thought. Our culture, the traditions, lifestyle, habits, and so on that we pick up from people we live and interact with, shapes the way we think, and also shapes the way we talk, in general, most likely, the culture, thought habits and the language have all grown up together. We learn to classify things that are similar and give them the same label, but what counts as being similar enough to fall under single label may vary from language to language. For example, we try to find that “What is dog?”, in my thoughts, ‘dog’ is a noun, and belongs to our language. How to definite “dog”? When we think about the word, a clear image appears in my brain immediately- a dog, with four legs, two ears, gets barks and so on, we gather all items and label it “dog”.


However, some linguists don’t agree all of above statements, they bring up some questions. Such as the question “Do people think in language?” The answer is, much of the times, but not always. None of these thoughts require language, therefore, it is possible to think about something if we don’t have a word for it. The other question “Learning a different language will change the way we think?” The new language does not really change the way we think, unless the new language is totally different from our own, but we might get some insight of another culture and another way of life.

Individual response- 葉曇樺(4)

Moreover, I must emphasize that language is growing. Because our world is a global village, international culture interflow, information exchange and so on, all influence our language deeply. Because of time passing, the meaning of some words become different from the past. For instance, the distinction of “young person” and “middle-aged person” is so different from the past. Nowadays, advancement of health-tech makes people live older than the past, the definition of the two words is growing

different as well.


At last, my conclusion that it is true the language I speak shapes my thoughts. The reason is that, although we might not say our thought is only effected by language, but must admit that we cannot deny language has some influence to our thought indeed. Culture, language and thought, are very hard to get judgement which comes first, that is like a chicken and egg question. We cannot use dichotomy to judge them completely.


ReferencePART I. 1. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring_2002/ling001/thought.html 2. http://www.lsadc.org/faq/index.php?aaa=faqthink.htm 3. http://orvillejenkins.com/worldview/worldvthink.html 4. http://lachaim.blogspot.com/2005/01/words-shape-thoughts.html 5. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6303 6. http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?ProgrammingLanguagesShapeThoughts 7. http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html 8. http://curtrosengren.typepad.com/occupationaladventure/2004/09/does_our

_langua.html 9. http://www.ai-forum.org/topic.asp?forum_id=3&topic_id=13698 10. http://cognitivedaily.com/?p=53 11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4414277,00.html


12. http://www.usingenglish.com/speaking-out/linguistic-whorfare.html?INFO=ISBN%3A_0072822767_TITLE%3A_Anthropology%2C+2/e

13. http://www.geocities.com/twocentseltcafe/whorf.html 14. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=1

2330 15. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&d

b=PubMed&dopt=Citation&list_uids=11487292 PART II. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 16. http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html 17. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/njp0001.html 18. http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/4110/whorf.html

Individual response- 黃哲政 (1) Before answer this question, let us know what is thought and lan

guage. 1. What is thoughts “Thought” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Thought or thinking is a mental process which allows beings to

model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires. Concepts akin to thought are sentience, consciousness, idea, and imagination.Thinking involves manipulation of information, as when we form concepts, engage in problem solving, reason and make decisions. Thinking is a higher cognitive function and the analysis of thinking processes is part of cognitive psychology.In the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, thinking means you tend to put a higher priority on impersonal factors than personal factors.

Individual response- 黃哲政 (2)

2. What is language According to one look dictionary search---

Quick definitions “Language” is: the mental faculty or power of vocal

communication; a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols; the cognitive processes involved in producing and understanding linguistic communication; a system of words used in a particular discipline; the text of a popular song or musical-comedy number; (language) communication by word of mouth


From the definition of the “Thought”and “Language”, we can say that thought does not equal language. That words and thoughts can't be the same thing. Our thoughts are really totally free, at least as regards any constraints that might be imposed by language -- that whatever modifying influences language has, it doesn't anywhere impose a constraint on what we can think. (from Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove and Professor Steven Pinker’s speechs)

Experts agree that the startling result provides the strongest support yet for the controversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts. So-called “linguistic determinism” was first proposed in 1950 but has been hotly debated ever since. So what somebody’s language does not shape his thought. “It is a very surprising and very important result,” says Lisa Feigenson, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, who has tested babies’ abilities to distinguish between different numerical quantities.

Individual response- 黃哲政 (4) “Whether language actually allows you to have

new thoughts is a very controversial issue.” As we know babies who can not use words to speak, can also expresses their emotion, through cry,laugh, and other body posture. Babies clearly are making sense of the world, and that's before they're saying a word. And dumb persons are shows their feelings by body languages. Animals too -- I think there's a lot of good evidence that many non-human animals engage in some form of thought, even though obviously they don't have the words.

Individual response- 黃哲政 (5) I agree with the “Traditional descriptions of the relation

between thought and language take a fairly static view.”( http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring2002/ling001/thought.html) It is means "There resides in every language a characteri

stic world-view.... Man lives primarily with objects, [but] he actually does so exclusively as language presents them to him." (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1836)

"Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars towards different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world." (Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1940)

Individual response- 黃哲政 (6). Experiments suggest that the relevant issue is not thought (a static notio

n) so much as thinking, i.e. the specific task one is performing (a more dynamic notion). In particular, when you're expressing thoughts in a particular language, you necessarily have to respect the important categories of that language, but if you choose you can include whatever extra information you want (Slobin 1996).

For example, some languages tend to express many aspectual distinctions, i.e. information about the internal temporal structure of an event. English happens to be fairly rich in this domain. (from Ling 001 language, culture, and language)

And language always ambiguous For example, Professor Steven Pinker, a member of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center at MIT. (THINKING ALLOWED Conversations On The Leading Edge Of Knowledge and Discovery With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove) say,

Individual response- 黃哲政 (7) language is a way of communicating thoughts, of

getting them out of one head and into another by making noise. I think that even if you look at language itself, you see that there's got to be something underlying the words themselves, because words can be ambiguous, the ambiguities that exist in language would suggest that they can't possibly constrain our thoughts.

we invent slang, we invent jargon, we invent new figures of speech when we need to shows that we have the idea first, and we think to ourselves..


Language is obviously very important to supplying the actual content of the thoughts. But there is a way that we think without language or words. Recently there have been a number of techniques that scientists have used to try to tap the minds of creatures that don't have language.

So the language we speak don’t shape our thoughts. There's a reason why people often feel that their thoughts aren't being expressed properly by words -- that even tiny differences in the words can convey very subtle differences in meaning, the mind has a language of its own, independent of the language that the mouth uses

Individual response- 黃振郎 (1) I believe that language influences thought but don't believe

that it determines thought, and that it is applicable in certain situations but isn’t in all situations. First, language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains. Second, one's native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought. For example, English and Mandarin talk about time differently--English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical. This difference between the two languages is reflected in the way their speakers think about time. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis believed that thought and language are very closely related.

Individual response- 黃振郎 (2) Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf are credi

ted the relationship between thought and language, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The hypothesis consists of two parts, linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism. The functions of one's mind are determined by the nature of the language which one speaks. In simpler terms, the thoughts that we construct are based upon the language that we speak and the words that we use. In its strongest sense, linguistic determinism can be interpreted as meaning that language determines thought. In its weakest sense, language partially influences thought. Whorf was amazed that the Hopi

Individual response- 黃振郎 (3) language has no words for past, present, and future

(Campbell 3). After further interpretation and analysis he concluded that the Hopi have a sense for the continuum of time despite having no words to specifically describe past, present, and future (Campbell 3). Skoyles made an experiment to deaf children. The experiment results lead Skoyles to believe that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct in its strongest sense.

Individual response- 黃振郎 (4) The language we spoke affected our view of the

world. George Orwell, a literary scholar, realizes that language has the power in politics to mask the truth and mislead the public, and he wishes to increase public awareness of this power. He accomplishes this by placing a great focus on Newspeak and the media in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Demonstrating the repeated abuse of language by the government and by the media in his novel, Orwell shows how language can be

Individual response- 黃振郎 (5) used politically to deceive and manipulate people,

leading to a society in which the people unquestioningly obey their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality. Language becomes a mind-control tool, with the ultimate goal being the destruction of will and imagination. Language can shape people’s sense of reality, how it can be used to conceal truths, and even how it can be used to manipulate history.

Individual response- 鍾文中 (1) 'He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

Which is the measure of the universe' - Prometheus Unbound, Shelley

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as we know it today can be broken down into two basic principles: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity.

Linguistic Determinism: A Definition Linguistic Determinism refers to the idea that the language we use to some exten

t determines the way in which we view and think about the world around us. The concept has generally been divided into two separate groups - 'strong' determinism and 'weak' determinism. Strong determinism is the extreme version of the theory, stating that language actually determines thought, that language and thought are identical. Although this version of the theory would attract few followers today - since it has strong evidence against it, including the possibility of translation between languages - we will see that in the past this has not always been the case. Weak determinism, however, holds that thought is merely affected by or influenced by our language, whatever that language may be. This version of determinism is widely accepted today.

Individual response- 鍾文中 (2)

Wilhelm von Humboldt: The 'Weltanschauung' Hypothesis.

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) was the first European to combine a knowledge of various languages with a philosophical background; he equated language and thought exactly in a hypothesis we now call the 'Weltanschauung' (world-view) hypothesis, in fact a version of the extreme form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Humboldt maintained that language actually determined thought:

Der mensch lebt mit den Gegenständen hauptsächlich, ja...sogar ausschliesslich so, wie die Sprache sie ihm zuführt."

Humboldt viewed thought as being impossible without language, language as completely determining thought. On closer inspection, we can see that this extreme hypothesis leads to a question: how, if there was no thought before language, did language arise in the first place? Humboldt answers this by adhering to the theory that language is a platonic object, comparable to a living organism which just suddenly evolved one day entirely of its own accord.


Linguistic Relativity: A Definition

Linguistic relativity states that distinctions encoded in one language are unique to that language alone, and that "there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages". If one imagines the colour spectrum, it is a continuum, each colour gradually blending into the next; there are no sharp boundaries. But we impose boundaries; we talk of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. It takes little thought to realise that these discriminations are arbitrary - and indeed in other languages the boundaries are different. In neither Spanish, Italian nor Russian is there a word that corresponds to the English meaning of 'blue', and likewise in Spanish there are two words 'esquina' and 'rincon', meaning an inside and an outside corner, which necessitate the use of more than one word in English to convey the same concept. These examples show that the language we use, whichever it happens to be, divides not only the colour spectrum, but indeed our whole reality, which is a 'kaleidoscopic flux of impressions', into completely arbitrary compartments.

Individual response- 鍾文中 (4) The Notion of Translatability Closely related to the notion of codability is the notion of translatability. Although different la

nguages may have different ways of dividing up their spectra of experience into verbal forms, we find it is still quite possible to translate from one language into another. Although someone translating from one language into another may find it necessary to use a whole phrase in the target language to communicate the concept expressed in the original language with only a single word, this is achievable. In the Australian aboriginal language Pinupti, the word 'katarta' refers to the hole left by a goanna when it has broken the surface of its burrow after hibernation. It takes seventeen words to translate that concept into English, but the result is fine, lacking perhaps some of the conciseness but none of the subtlety of the Pinupti word.Of course inter-language translatability again offers evidence against the strong version of determinism. The differences between the lexicons of individuals would carry great import. I know the meaning of the word 'saltatoria'; the person sitting next to me word-processing a dissertation on paediatrics would probably not know the meaning of it. This does not, of course, mean that I would be unable to explain to him what it meant. Of course another thing to bear in mind is the fact that words are often borrowed from one language into another, for instance the French borrowing 'le weekend' from English. This sort of borrowing would be impossible if language determined thought completely. And if we look just a little further, it becomes obvious that if it was true that language dictated thought, and that concepts were untranslatable, then children would be incapable of learning language at all; for how would a child learn its first word?

Individual response- 鍾文中(5)

Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf 'Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world

of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication and reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.'

This famous passage from the American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884-1936)'s 'The Status Of Linguistics As A Science', written in 1929, demonstrates the dominating thought of what has come to be called by all sorts of names including the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis', the 'Whorfian hypothesis' and more plainly the 'Linguistic Relativity hypothesis'. We can see the reason for the variety of titles for the hypothesis - as well as the influence Sapir must have had on his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) - if we look at the following passage from Whorf himself, which propounds much the same viewpoint:

Individual response- 鍾文中 (6) 'We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we is

olate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organised by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organise it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organisation and classification of data which the agreement decrees.'

Surprisingly, though, neither Sapir or Whorf made it very clear whether they were arguing for strong or weak determinism. At times we are "at the mercy of" whatever language we speak, while at others our linguistic habits simply "predispose certain choices of interpretation".

Whorf, originally a 'fire prevention engineer' by trade, spent a lot of his time studying the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona, who make no distinction in their language between past, present and future tenses; where in English it seems natural to distinguish between 'I see the girl', 'I saw the girl' and 'I will see the girl', this is not an option in Hopi. This apparently made quite an impression on Whorf, who imagined that the scientists of the day and the Hopi must see the world very differently...although the philosopher Max Black considers that 'they may be expected to have pretty much the same concept of time that we have' in spite of this. And Whorf himself notices, 'The Hopi language is capable of accounting for and describing correctly all observable phenomena of the universe'. Another characteristic of the Hopi tongue is that there is just a single word - 'masa'ytaka' - for everything that flies, including insects, aeroplanes and pilots.

Individual response- 鍾文中 (7) Freud 'The question 'How does a thing become conscious?' could be put more advantageo

usly thus: 'How does a thing become pre-conscious?'. And the answer would be: 'By coming into connexion with the verbal images that correspond to it'.

This quotation from Freud's book 'The Ego and the Id' helps us make what I consider to be a helpful distinction when talking about the influence of language on thought: whether we are talking about conscious or unconscious thought. I have suspected for a long time that language actually gives rise to consciousness, to thought that is available to conscious introspection; thought of an unconscious nature takes place, I believe, from the day we are born, as the cognitive faculties exercise themselves upon the world of the child. But it is only when the child learns the meaning of words, learns to associate them with concepts, that he or she becomes 'conscious', in the sense of becoming aware of his/her existence as the object of other's thoughts and judgements, and exercising upon him/herself the internalised critic Freud calls the Superego. The child learns the words 'good' and 'bad'; thought processes become their own objects for the first time.


I think perhaps the answer might be that conscious thought is thought that has been given a verbal symbol to coexist alongside it. Thus thought that occurs below a conscious level, both the 'simple' thought of cognitive processes and the complex thought of say, repressed ideas and affects, remains unconscious until verbal correspondences are found. More importantly, conscious thought may be thought of as unconscious thought that has been given access to consciousness through the use of verbal symbolia; thus words bring concepts from the conscious mind into the unconscious. But there is a price to be paid: what I believe to be an unlimited variety of concepts that could be brought to consciousness have but a limited number of words in which to clothe themselves.This, of course, relates to the question of whether language determines thought. I think it fair to say in the light of Freud's theory, which seems to me to be undoubtedly correct, that yes, language does determine conscious thought, for conscious thought is by Freud's definition thought that has been made conscious through language; but since the majority of thought is unquestionably unconscious, we cannot say that language determines thought wholly.

Individual response- 鍾文中 (9) Conclusion As regards linguistic determinism, it seems that most contemporary thi

nkers are quite content to accept the weaker version of the theory, that thought is indeed influenced by the linguistic systems available to us, but not much more; certainly not there are not many linguists today who would support Wilhelm von Humboldt's 'Weltanschauung' hypothesis.It can hardly be argued, either, that there is any limit to the structural diversity of languages. There are plenty of languages available for us to study, and each one divides the world up into compartments in different ways from other languages.To me it seems as if it would be profitable if some thought were given to the link between language and consciousness, the conscious coding of thought via verbal symbols and the way in which conscious thought is encoded in them.


Reference Black, M.1962. Models and Metaphors. New York: Cornell University Press.

Brown, R.1958. Words and Things. Illinois: The Free Press.Brown, Roger L.1968. Wilhelm von Humboldt's Conception of Linguistic Relativity. Paris: Mouton.Ellis, A. and Beattie, G.1986. The Psychology of Language and Communication. New York: Guilford Press.Freud, S.1927. The Ego and the Id. London: The Hogarth Press.Lyons, J.1981. Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Penn, J.1972. Linguistic Relativity versus Innate Ideas. Paris: Mouton.Rossi-Landi, F.1973. Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity. Paris: Mouton. Slobin, D.1974. Psycholinguistics. London: Scott, Foresman and Compa

Individual response- 林正平 (1) Steven Pinker: I call language an "instinct," an admittedly quaint term for wh

at other cognitive scientists have called a mental organ, a faculty, or a module. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. (One corollary is that most of the complexity in language comes from the mind of a child, not from the schools or from grammar books.) All this suggests that language is caused by dedicated circuitry that has evolved in the human brain. It then raises the question of what other aspects of the human intellect are instincts coming from specialized neural circuitry.

I'm interested in all aspects of human language. I'm an experimental psychologist who studies language for a living: how children learn language, how people put sentences together in their minds and understand sentences in conversation, where language is situated in the brain, and how it changes over history.

Individual response- 林正平 (2) My work concentrates on what science has discovered about language since 1950. In answering

those questions, other questions repeatedly come up. Why is the hockey team in Toronto called the Maple Leafs instead of the Maple Leaves? Why do we say, "He flied out to center field" in baseball — why has no mere mortal ever "flown out" to center field? Why do immigrants labor with lessons and tapes and homework and English classes, while their four-year-old kids learn the language so quickly that they can make fun of their parents' grammatical errors? What language would a child speak if he was raised by wolves? I also look at what we know about how language works, how children acquire it, how people use it, and how it breaks down after injury or disease of the brain.

I unify this knowledge with three key ideas. One responds to the fact that what people do know about language is often wrong. The view of language that suffuses public discourse — that people assume both in the sciences and in the humanities — is that language is a cultural artifact that was invented at a certain point in history and that gets transmitted to children by the example of role models or by explicit instruction in schools. The corollary is that now that the schools are going to pot and people get their language from rock stars and athletes, language will steadily deteriorate, and if current trends continue we're all going to be grunting like Tarzan. I argue instead that language is a human instinct.

Individual response- 林正平 (3) The second idea comes from the following: If language is a mental organ, wh

ere did it come from? I believe it came from the same source as physical organs. It's an adaptation, a product of natural selection in the evolution of the human species. Depending on how you look at it, this is either an incredibly boring conclusion or a wildly controversial conclusion. On the one hand, most people, after hearing evidence that language is an innate faculty of humans, would not be surprised to learn that it comes from the same source that every other complex innate aspect of the human brain and body comes from — namely, natural selection. But two very prominent people deny this conclusion, and they aren't just any old prominent people, but Stephen Jay Gould, probably the most famous person who has written on evolution, and Noam Chomsky, the most famous person who has written on language. They've suggested that language appeared as a by-product of the laws of growth and form of the human brain, or perhaps as an accidental by-product of selection for something else, and they deny that language is an adaptation. I disagree with both of them.

Individual response- 林正平 (4) The third idea comes from the question, "Why should we be so interest

ed in the details of language in the first place?" Language is interesting because, of course, it's distinctly human, and because we all depend on it. For centuries, language has been the centerpiece of discussions of the human mind and human nature, because it's considered the most accessible part of the human mind. The reason people are likely to get exercised by technical disagreements over the proper syntax of relative clauses in Choctaw, say, is that everyone has an opinion on human nature, and lurking beneath such discussions of language is the belief that language is the aspect of science where human nature is going to be understood first.

Why do I call language an instinct? Why not a manifestation of an ability to acquire culture, or to use symbols? There are four kinds of evidence that have been gathered over the last century.

Individual response- 林正平 (5) One of them is universality. Universality, by itself, doesn't indicate that

the ability in question is innate. For all I know, VCRs and fax machines are now close to universal across human societies. But universality is a first step to establishing innateness, and it was a remarkable and unexpected discovery — early in the century, when anthropologists first started exploring societies in far-flung parts of the globe — that without exception, every human society has complex grammar.

The final bit of evidence is that language seems to have neurological and perhaps even genetic specificity. That is, the brain is not a meatloaf, such that the less brain you have the worse you talk and the stupider you are, but seems to be organized into subsystems. Using brain damage and genetic deficits as tools, we can see how the brain fractionates into subcomponents.

Individual response- 林正平 (6) The argument from Chomsky and Gould is that maybe language was an un

avoidable physical consequence of selection for something else, perhaps analytical processing, hemispheric specialization, or an enlarged brain. No one who was around when language evolved is here to tell us about it, and words don't fossilize, so the arguments have to be indirect. However, there's a standard set of criteria in biology for when to attribute something to natural selection — that is, when it may be called an adaptation — and when to look at it as a by-product, or what Gould and Lewontin call a "spandrel." Ironically, what Gould and Chomsky have not done is apply these standard criteria to the case of language. They've noted the logical possibility that language doesn't have to be an adaptation, but they haven't said, "Let us now pull out the test kit, apply it to language the way we apply it to any other biological system, and see what the answer is."

Individual response- 林正平 (7)

Brain shape is another possibility that we can rule out as the ultimate source of language. Could it be that a generally spherical brain with a certain kind of neuron packing, through complex laws of physics we don't understand, somehow gives rise to language? Again, over the range of normal variation and of pathology, there are reports of grotesquely distorted brains, usually from hydrocephalus, sometimes cases in which the brain lines the inside of the skull like the flesh of a coconut. It's possible for a person to have that condition and nonetheless develop language on schedule. One reported case was an undergraduate student at Oxford.

The impression from anthropology that humanity is a carnival where anything is possible came in part from a tourist mentality: when you come back from a trip, you remember what was different about where you went, otherwise you might as well have stayed at home. That is, many anthropologists exaggerated

Individual response- 林正平 (8) the degree to which the tribes they studied were exotic and strange, both to justif

y their profession and to raise people's consciousness about human potential. But many of their claims have turned out either to be canards, like Margaret Mead's claims about Samoa, or to miss the forest for the trees: the anthropologists spent so much time looking for differences that they didn't notice basic categories of human experience that are found in every culture, like humor, love, jealousy, and a sense of responsibility. Language is simply the most famous example of a human universal. Donald Brown, an anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara, wrote a book called Human Universals, in which he scoured the archives of ethnography for well substantiated human universals. He came up with a list of about a hundred and fifty, covering every sphere of human experience. That's my interpretation of the main lessons of anthropology. The interesting discoveries aren't about this kinship system or that form of shamanry. Underneath it all — just as, in the case of language, there's a universal design Chomsky called universal grammar — there is in the rest of culture what Donald Brown calls the universal people. He characterized the human species much the way a biologist would characterize any other species.

Individual response- 林正平 (9) Reference About the book: Language Instinct (web-site)

語言本能 : Steven Pinker/ 著洪蘭 / 譯語言 , 社會和同一性 (Language, Society and Identity):

約翰 . 愛德華滋 (John Edwards) / 著蘇宜菁 / 譯 The Language Instinct is a book by Steven Pinker, published in 1995, in

which he argues the case for the belief that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. In addition, he deals sympathetically with the still stronger claim of Noam Chomsky that all human language shows evidence of a universal grammar. In the final chapter Pinker dissents from the apparent skepticism shown by Chomsky that evolution by natural selection is equal to the challenge of explaining a human language instinct.


About the author Steven Pinker (born September 18, 1954, in Montreal, Canada) is professor of Psychology at

Harvard University and author of a number of popular books. He was a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT for 21 years before returning to Harvard in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) from McGill University in 1976, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Experimental Psychology) from Harvard University in 1979.

Pinker has written about language and cognitive science for both specialist and popular audiences. He is most famous for his work on how children acquire language and for his skillful popularization of Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, though he and Chomsky differ on other issues. Pinker has suggested an evolutionary mechanism for this faculty, but this idea remains controversial and is rejected by Chomsky. Pinker also argues that many other human mental faculties are evolved, and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes.

His most recent book The Blank Slate was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and The Aventis Prizes for Science Books. In 2004, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People.

In Jan. 2005, Pinker defended Harvard president Lawrence Summers after his comments on the gender gap in math and science sparked outrage among Harvard faculty.


Language may shape human thought. (My reflection) Experts agree that the startling result provides the strongest support for the contr

oversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts. So-called “linguistic determinism” was first proposed in 1950 but has been hotly debated ever since.

“It is a very surprising and very important result,” says Lisa Feigenson, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, who has tested babies’ abilities to distinguish between different numerical quantities. “Whether language actually allows you to have new thoughts is a very controversial issue.”

Peter Gordon, the psychologist at Columbia University in New York City who carried out the experiment, does not claim that his finding holds for all kinds of thought. “There are certainly things that we can think about that we cannot talk about. But for numbers I have shown that a limitation in language affects cognition,” he says.


Babies and animals Gordon says this is the first convincing evidence that a language lacking w

ords for certain concepts could actually prevent speakers of the language from understanding those concepts.

Previous experiments show that while babies and intelligent animals, such as rats, pigeons and monkeys, are capable of precisely counting small quantities, they can only approximately distinguish between clusters consisting of larger numbers. However, in these studies it was unclear whether an inability to articulate numbers was the reason for this.

Above all, language instinct is the ability for the human beings. I truly believe what language you speak shape your though.

Individual response- 吳佳宜 (1) Culture is something with which we identify ourselves in a

society. It gives us a sense of belonging, membership, compatriotism. We could go so far as to say that it give us a way to define ourselves. In other words, it can tell people who we really are, in terms of our culture of course. So most of our ideas, thoughts, opinions, behavior… etc are shaped through our culture. It is true that language is an important component part of culture. So we could say that language is one of the ways we express our culture. “There is no question that he lexicon of specific language mirrors whatever the

Individual response- 吳佳宜 (2) non-verbal culture emphasizes (Whorf)”. In other words,

if we speak a very comprehensive, creative language, then we are able to express our thoughts very creatively and comprehensively. Therefore, if our language locks creative capabilities, then our thoughts will lock creative capabilities. So our thoughts can only be truly expressed by the capability of the language we speak. “…the differences in language reflect the different views of different people (Whorf)”. Therefore, our thoughts are shaped by the language we speak.

Individual response- 吳佳宜 (3)

Reference:1.http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/lan

guage/whorf.html2.http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/c

shtml/introductory/sapirw.html3.http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html4.http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/4110/

whorf.html

Documents

Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts? Language and Culture Final Report