the great whorf hypothesis hoax

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7/23/09 10:he Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax

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The Great

Whorf Hypothesis Hoax*

Sin, Suffering and Redemption in Academe

Dan Moonhawk Alford

In the original Greek story of fire-stealing, Prometheus stole fire from the gods inorder to give to the humans; his punishment was to have his innards eaten byvultures throughout eternity. With Whorf, there was a new twist: linguists hadalready gotten away with the fire-stealing for 300 years when the physicists creptin and stole it, and Whorf was just trying to get it back -- but his punishment fornearly half a century has been having his own verbal innards fought overincessantly, but never truly devoured, by academic vultures, blindly protectingtheir turf.

Since many major understandings have come from people who never quoteWhorf, what I would like to do right now is suggest that you stop reading my

book and go find a copy of Whorf's Language, Thought and Reality. Manylibraries have it, and the paperback edition is fairly cheap. I advise my students toread the last essay first, then the previous three essays, then the ones with"Universe," "Primitive" and "Habitual" in the titles; the rest at will. Reading whathe actually wrote, and in his presumably 1930's Yale accent, is a great antidote tothe Hypothesis Hoax literature many of you are already familiar with, since itscreators seldom quote him.

Who was Benjamin Whorf and why do people say such bad things about him? Iclaim Whorf as a linguist, as I claim for myself even though I never finished mydoctorate; but whereas I teach for a living, Whorf made his daily money as a fire-

prevention engineer for Hartford Insurance Company and actually refused offersto teach linguistics. So at the center of this huge academic controversy we havesomeone who refused to join the old boys' club -- a 'dabbler' or 'dilettante' inlinguistics, some have called him. Why should anyone care about the ideas ofthis outsider who never even claimed linguistics as his profession?

After 40-some years of concerted academic corpse-kicking, with respectedacademics claiming that they've disproved him in countless ways, why haven't
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his ideas just gone away? Perhaps bad publicity is better than no publicity atall. Does that exhaust all that compels this enduring attention? And what, exactly,are we to be telling undergraduate and graduate students about Whorf thesedays, at the dawn of a new millennium?

Why do I care?

As I mentioned earlier, Whorf was just one of innumerable authors on languageissues that I, as a typical undergraduate, was exposed to in my linguisticstraining at UCLA -- in my very first linguistics class, while I was still an Englishmajor -- and then not again during my undergraduate or graduate classes, sincewe were learning Chomsky's view of language. At the time, I didn't think muchabout his absence after that first class. Very insidious -- in advertising, that'scalled "bait and switch," but I think Whorf nonetheless got me into linguistics. Ithink I thought, as other linguists have admitted to me, "if this is what linguisticsis all about, this is for me!"

It was not until I began retracing Whorf's steps -- until I actually worked on anAmerican Indian language myself, and had been reading quantum physicsinsights for a while -- that his importance in the History of Ideas became clear tome. Whenever I discussed Whorf's insights with Native Americans, theyresonated with his insights on Native languages, and therefore those insightsbecame increasingly more important to me. Whorf had come closer than anyother linguist to explicating the worldviews and langscapes of Native America.

Yet on my return from the reservation environment to academe, I found that nolinguist at Berkeley or conferences seemed to be able to say Whorf's namewithout an accompanying sneeron their lips! They regarded Whorf as simply

'wrong', with no redeemable qualities whatever. As far as I could remember, thiswas a new and different environment than had surrounded Whorf when I'd leftUCLA eight years before -- where Whorf was basically ignored instead of activelypreached against.

Figuring out what had happened while I was gone consumed another two yearsof my life, and by that point I was solidly hooked by the issue. I realized there wassomething very simple but powerful that was being covered over by a hoax -- by

all of the trivial determinism, strawman and ad hominem arguments(1)in theliterature -- covering up something so important that academics were fighting likecrazy to win the right to avoid ever having to talk or write about it!

Now this happens all the time within individual disciplines, but it's seldom theyput aside their differences to form a "global coalition against academic terrorism"the way they did. As I tell my graduate students from various disciplines, if youreally want to know what your chosen field is all about, find the fundamentalissues by discovering who the big guys are beating up and why they're doing it.And if you're ever so lucky as me to find someone that four or five differentacademic disciplines are beating up on, you'll know you've hit paydirt.
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The legacy of Benjamin Whorf

What if you had intimations of an idea SO BIG that it took a highly improbableinternational combination of people interested in consciousness and cognitionissues -- quantum physicists, field linguists, Native American philosophers andothers -- to figure out whether it had any validity? And what if the consensus of

that group was that it was important for cross-cultural understanding? As wesaw in Chapter Five, the perhaps most lasting achievement of disciplinarysynthesis that Benjamin Whorf created, which he called the "principle oflinguistic relativity" on taking it back from Einstein, has in the 1990s been defacto validated by just such a historic meeting and dialogue.

This principle, seen now as a century-long dialogue between physics andlinguistics, occurs at the place where they agree, using complementarity orrespect thinking, quantum logic instead of English logic -- and it's at exactlyTHAT principled intersection, which had never happened before, where NativeAmerican philosophers could finally join in dialogue and find Westerners for the

first time in 500 years who would actually listen to their words, their insights, theirlangscapes and worldviews; as a result, all participants then began to exploretogether, after appropriate rituals, the logic and worldview of the nounlessquantum (spirit) realm, and went away with very special new relationships.

Yet it is this very linguistic relativity principle, this pivotal stage on which such

history has happened, arbitrarily renamed a hypothesis(2) by many socialscientists, presumably "so as to be better tested," that has sparked the amazinglyacrimonious debate, name-calling, and strawman argumentation that's gone on,until recently, during the five decades since the publication of Whorf's collectedarticles by M.I.T. Press.

Worse yet, the debate itself, their own Hypothesis Hoax, is all that most socialscientists and their textbooks ever focus on, not the principle that underlies it.Students are urged to learn the intricacies of the debate from all the current andhistorical players -- although a close reading of Whorf himself -- in the original, inEnglish -- is not necessarily specifically encouraged. And that's the educationthat most students get in the social sciences about this topic, unless theyactually dig deeper on their own -- which they may be discouraged from doingbecause, they're told, they'll just be 'wasting their time' on a dead issue. At least, Iwas.

What are these academics so afraid of that they can't face and contemplate andanswer student's questions about Whorf's actual text? Why the smoke andmirrors? I suspect that they fear, and rightly so, that the entire Western worldview-- logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories -- the entire 'civilization'enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake; or at least the superiorattitude that often accompanies it. It may be a fear that what we're culturally heirto is 'just another worldview and its langscapes' rather than exemplifying, as wetend to want to believe, eternal and universal human logic, which we're simply


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'better at' than people who speak other languages outside of the Indo-Europeanlanguage family. As John Lucy says, relativity "challenges assumptions which lieat the heart of much modern social and behavior research -- namely its claim to

be discovering general laws and to be truly scientific."(3)

David Abram eloquently shows in The Spell of the Sensuous that we long agodisqualified ourselves from claiming anything 'universal' as a culture when we

adopted phonetic alphabets, which shifted the locus of 'interaction with the world'from Nature to the printed page -- thereby also transforming air into somethingempty instead of the inescapable medium of all speech interactions and all life.All the more reason then that we must now listen to the indigenous voices ofthose who have resisted our cultural attitudes, and who come as speakers fromlanguages with different cognitive structures than our own, which has become sodivorced and alienated from Nature.

Whorf was the only linguist of his time who understood the advances in modernphysics well enough to understand that physicists had stolen the fire from thephilosophy of language camp; he staked his claim and tried to take it back. He

knew enough about Hopi to know that, in its proclivity of turning our propositionsabout things into propositions about events, its structure is more congenial todescribing quantum eventings than are the structures of Western languages; inhis writings he suggested Hopi as a human language candidate, a real lifeexample, that would demonstrate the quantum logic of nounless realitiesperplexing physicists. Although Hopi itself has not been considered as yet in theScience Dialogues (because we have had as yet no native Hopi speakers asparticipants), the addition of Athapaskan, Siouan and Algonquian languages tothe 'quantum language list' at the Science Dialogues and elsewhere areindependent evidence that Whorf was substantially on the right track.

Relativity in the History of Ideas

Although anthropologists and others prefer for their own reasons to call it'relativism', relativitymay now be seen primarily as a larger science dialogueoutside the realms of social science itself -- except insofar as the lessconservative practitioners of social science are trying to link their results up withcomplex modern concepts rather than simpler Newtonian ones. Dana Zohar, forinstance, has made substantial efforts to link up psychology with the quantumrealm in The Quantum Selfand other works.

In this realm of the history of ideas, just as in linguistics, words have meaningonly insofar as they participate in a system of distinctions with other words.Relativity(or diversity, or pluralism) and its linguistic complementary opposite,universality, have been used together as a set, a system, for hundreds of years inEuro-thought. Some people prefer to explore their own truth by studying thediversity of things, and some people like to explore their own truth by studyingsimilarities between things -- and both are okay, although they lead in differentdirections. If, at some point, the two camps come back together and respectfully


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compare notes, much can be accomplished in dialogue. And nobody has to dojust one kind of research to the exclusion of the other: although social scientistsbranded Whorf as the relativistpar excellence, my reading of Whorf shows thathe makes a large number of universalist statements in his writings while onlymentioning the same relativity principle in different words three or four times.That is, he effectively balanced both, unlike his critics, who apparently weren'tintellectually capable of such a sophisticated task.

Now if, however, instead of learning from each other, one camp arbitrarily beginsdenying the validity of the insights of the other, begins claiming that differences

are only (trivially) superficial while only universals are deeply real(4) , and beginstrying to logically prove the other viewpoint out of existence and rewrite historyso only that only their half of the truth will remain by generational socialization,the delicate balance between the two ideas is lost -- and a bewildering period ofconfusion begins, as happened following Noam Chomsky's 1957 publication ofSyntactic Structures , a small book which set the stage for changing the courseof linguistics away from ideas of relativity and toward a fundamentalist-likeembrace of universals, in a dichotomous (win/lose) rather than the historic

yes/yes complementary manner and its balancing, more suited to a search fortruth.

The Chomsky Factor

Although Whorf had published a few articles in the 1930s and '40s, few peoplesaw his work until after 1956, when they were pulled together, with some

unpublished essays(5) , by John Carroll and printed by MIT Press. A majorconference had just been called by anthropological linguists a couple of yearsearlier to discuss both Whorf's ideas and those of 'Whorfians' such as Dorothy

Lee, Madeline Mathiot and Harry Hoijer (on whose varied interpretations of Whorfmuch of the blame for the Hydra Heads of the Hypothesis Hoax ultimately rest).

The dominant paradigm of American linguistics at the time, called structurallinguistics, had been formed in the crucible of discovery of the morphology-richNative American languages -- where, because a single word could be a full andcomplete sentence, the pieces of words (morphemes) assumed greaterimportance than the order of words making up a sentence (syntax). That is, whena "word" can also be a "sentence," the boundary between the seemingly discretelevels ofMorphology(how pieces make up a word) and Syntax(how words makeup a sentence) become much fuzzier than in Western languages; from the Nativeperspective there is only morphosyntax, with morpho-having much moreemphasis than -syntax.

It can be said that the distinction between anthropology and linguistics was notas sharply defined in America prior to Chomsky, when indigenous languages(real speakers in real communities) tended to be a major focus of linguistics, inthe way it became after Chomsky called for autonomy and unleashed hordes ofsometimes anti-social linguists on academe, who felt empowered to just make up
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their own data rather than painstakingly collecting it in character-building andsometimes foreign social situations. BC (Before Chomsky), it was wellunderstood that cultural context was part of real live language use, just as Imyself had to learn, along with the pronunciation of the word for "thank you" inMkmaq, the context of when its use was okay (as a response to a formal "wouldyou please pass the X" at the dinner table) and when it was not (when someoneunexpectedly says or does something from their heart spontaneously).

One year after the posthumous publication of Whorf's work, however, NoamChomsky began an end run around the then-dominant structuralist paradigm,

and began manufacturing consent (6) for his own paradigm within linguistics.Chomsky's approach was syntactic rather than morphological (which therebybackgrounded American Indian languages and any insights about them),mathematical (context-free) rather than anthropological (context-bound), and inits mathematical bias it favored universals rather than diversity and relativity.

From the relativity stance, the universalist stance in and of itself isn't 'wrong' inany way; however, along with the rise in popularity of the universalist position

there also appeared in some a new attitude about the 'rightness' of universalsand the absolute 'wrongness' of relativity -- a kind of fundamentalist demonizingthat had not been seen before in linguistics. Universals and relativity becamediametrically opposed to each other, in some minds, rather than working togetheras a complementary set of ideas: both right in their own way, depending on whatyou're looking for, just like the yes/yes light experiments in physics. It was in thecontext of this reactionary dualistic attitude that Whorf's fate was sealed in theChomskyan camp, not as a partner but a foe -- a person whose name was mostindissolubly linked with dreaded relativity in this past century.

As a way of outlining the Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax, I'd like to present anoverview of how Whorf has been misrepresented, since before the publication ofhis collected articles to the present. The original embracing of Whorf byanthropological linguists and others provides one period of a pendulum swing;the heyday of Chomskyanism provides a second period, and the current return toa careful reading of Whorf marks a new and hopeful period of responsiblescholarship. Afterwards, we'll look at some fascinating issues that get left out ofdiscussions about Whorf when people waste too much time arguing about theHoax.

The Pendulum Swings

Part I: What Whorf Wrote and How It Was Originally Received

First and most importantly, let's be clear on one simple fact: Whorf did not writenor actively have anything to do with The Whorf Hypothesis ; likewise, needlessto say, Sapir and Whorf also never teamed up to co-author something called theSapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Never happened. A hoax.


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The Hoax was created and developed by perhaps well-meaning but mostlyuniversalist-leaning social scientists long after Whorf's death, during the push forlinguistics to become more of a 'science'. The Hoax consists of a minisculeamount of relativity, a 20th-Century physics idea which Whorf was extremely

interested in, and a liberal amount of Newtonian monocausal determinism(7),which his critics 'weakly' believe in but which Whorf would have disavowedcompletely as the big picture, had he been alive, preferring to use the

complementary logic of both physics and metaphysics as a better method ofscientific thinking.

Examining the volume of Whorf's collected writings, we find in his earliest writingyears, before taking linguistics classes from Professor Edward Sapir at Yale, onlytwo unpublished short pieces, reflecting psychological concerns, neither ofwhich fits into this controversy in any significant way. Whorf was obviouslyinterested in language issues before studying with Sapir, the perhaps mosteminent linguist of his day and still revered today, but Sapir's influence is quiteevident in shaping the issues and terminology which Whorf began to use in hispublished and unpublished essays from then on.

After beginning to study with Sapir, Whorf published three 'straight' linguisticsessays on Hopi in the preeminent professional journals of his day (Language,International Journal of Linguistics, American Anthropologist),one essay onShawnee published in the appendix of a book, one on decipherment of Mayanhieroglyphs published in a Smithsonian Report, and another on more generaltopics of language such as grammatical categories. These articles show hisacquaintance through Sapir with linguistic thought and the structure of AmericanIndian languages, and none of these are remarkably controversial.

While the above articles reveal that his technical grasp of linguistics was ofsufficient quality for professional publications, Whorf's seven more controversialessays reveal his more speculative side, which is fully in line with theHumboldtian influence in his training through Sapir. These include twoprovocative essays never published during his lifetime ("An American IndianModel of the Universe" and "A Linguistic Consideration of Thinking in PrimitiveCommunities") and an equally provocative one that was published in a book oftribute to Edward Sapir after Sapir's death in 1939 ("The Relation of HabitualThought and Behavior to Language").

And near the end of his life, cut short by "a long and lingering illness" (as Carroll

politely labeled cancer) at age 44 in 1941, he embarked on a new mission: hestopped writing to just linguists (and his desk drawer), and began addressing layaudiences as the first major popularizer of a new linguistics. Whorf publishedthree of his last four articles ("Science and Linguistics," "Linguistics as an ExactScience," and "Languages and Logic") in M.I.T.'s Technological Review,appealing to the general educated audience of his day to become linguisticallyaware -- to realize to what extent the language you speak influences what andhow you think. His most oft-cited formulations of the principle of linguistic


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relativity are contained in these popularizing articles not meant specifically forlinguists (though he kind of talks around the principle at the end of "Habitual

Thought(8)"):

Figure 16 illustrates a similar situation: 'I push his head back' and 'Idrop it in water and it floats,' though very dissimilar sentences inEnglish, are similar in Shawnee. The point of view of linguistic

relativity changes Mr. Everyman's dictum: Instead of saying"Sentences are unlike because they tell about unlike facts," he nowreasons: "Facts are unlike to speakers whose language backgroundprovides for unlike formulation of them." (p. 235)

We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds thatall observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the samepicture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar,or can in some way be calibrated. (p 214)

From this fact proceeds what I have called the "linguistic relativity

principle," which means, in informal terms, that users of markedlydifferent grammars(9)are pointed by their grammars toward differenttypes of observations and different evaluations of externally similaracts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers butmust arrive at somewhat different views of the world. (p 221)

Concepts of "time" and "matter" are not given in substantially thesame form by experience to all men but depend upon the nature of thelanguage or languages through the use of which they have beendeveloped. (p 158)

It was his final act of publication, though, "Language, Thought and Reality,"published in Theosophist, a decidedly non-academic publication by theTheosophical Society in India, that in my opinion really got academics scratchingtheir heads the most about him -- although, to be fair, most academics who wouldcare probably didn't even know about this publication until Whorf's articles werecollected 16 years later. Written probably on his deathbed, and writtenspecifically to people whom he knew were open to and excited about 'new ideas,'this final essay shows Whorf at his holistic, mystical and poetic best, reaching atlast an international educated audience with his ideas about the power oflanguage, and especially its background role in creating our daily lived realities.

Dr. Sam I. Hayakawa, leader of the General Semantics movement and later aCalifornia Senator, was perhaps the first linguist to reprint one of Whorf's essaysfor a larger audience in his 1941 Language in Action. This essay, "Science andLinguistics," the first of his three Technological Reviewarticles for non-specialists, was also the leadoff essay when those three and a few others weregathered and published as Collected Papers on Metalinguistics by the ForeignService Institute of the U.S. State Department in 1952. His final essay, "Language,


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Mind & Reality," was also reprinted in 1952 by Etc., a Review of GeneralSemantics . Within a decade of his death, people in semantics (which deals withmeaning) and in the State Department (which deals with translation) weredetermined to get Whorf's ideas out to a wider audience.

Then in the mid-'50s, Whorf's work fairly exploded onto the scene with twodramatic events: a major linguistics conference in 1954 to discuss his ideas, and

the 1956 M.I.T. Press publication of Whorf's Language, Thought, and Reality, thedefinitive collection of his published and unpublished articles, collected andintroduced by John Carroll (now in its 22nd printing). Most American linguistsduring the '50s were anthropological linguists, and many of the best-knownanthropologists and linguists showed up at the Conference on the Interrelationsof Language and Other Aspects of Culture, either attacking or defending Whorf.The eminent Harry Hoijer vigorously objected at the time to what he called the

"vulgarization of Whorf's work(10) " which he saw going on at this gathering alittle more than a decade after Whorf's death. This vulgarization would continuefor decades, impelled and intensified by the universalist followers of NoamChomsky.

Part IIa: Chomsky takes on Whorf

In fact, I say 'the followers' because in my 30 years of reading in linguistics, onlyonce have I ever come across Chomsky actually attacking Whorf head-on -- andthat was in a Preface he wrote for Adam Schaff's 1973 Language and Cognition,translated from Polish and printed by McGraw Hill, which someone sent me byemail a few years ago. And the interesting thing is: although I don't rememberfinding this Preface when I reviewed the literature in the late '70s and wrote about"The Demise of the Whorf Hypothesis", it nonetheless contains the same'determinism' and 'circularity' arguments, cloaked as 'relativity', as in theliterature I did review.

I think it is useful to study this Preface carefully, so I will footnote some places Ihave trouble with, especially the hidden assumptions behind Chomsky's words.Maybe you should read it straight through (without footnotes) the first time, as Idid -- and went: "Oh, no! Chomsky's right and I'm wrong!" Then I thought it over.

Preface

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity as formulated particularly by Whorf, (11)

discussed here at length, is one that has given rise to much interesting thoughtand speculation. Many of the inadequacies in Whorf's formulation aresketched here; there are others that deserve more prominence than they have

received. Whorf argues that the structure of language (12)plays a role in

determining a world-view(13) and supports his argument by contrasting theworld-view characteristic of speakers of Standard Average European (SAE)

with that of speakers of various American Indian languages. As Schaff notes,the hypothesis practically rests on the treatment of categories of time and
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space in Hopi.(14)The category of space is similar in Hopi to SAE, but theHopi, Whorf argues, do not have our intuition of TIME as a smooth flowingcontinuum, with a past, present, and future, in our sense. The basis for this

distinct world-view is provided by the categories of their language, which does

not formally provide the past-present-future analysis of verb forms,(15) as in

SAE.(16) Against this it has been argued that Whorf gives no evidence for adifference in linguistic structure, but, rather, begs the question by postulatingthe difference on the basis of the difference in the formal structure of Hopi

and SAE.(17) Here, then, is a point where further research might be proposed,

perhaps along lines that Schaff suggests, to bridge the gap in the argument.

But there is, after all, a much more fundamental defect in Whorf's argument,

namely, that his description of SAE is incorrect.(18) In English, for example,there is no structural basis for the past-present-future world-view that Whorf

attributes, quite correctly, to SAE speakers.(19) Rather, a formal analysis ofEnglish structure would show a past-present distinction, a set of aspects

(perfect and progressive), and a class of modals, one of which happens to beused to express future tense (among other devices that serve this purpose).

Approaching English from a Whorfian point of view,(20) we would concludethat an English speaker has no concept of time as a doubly infinite line, hehimself occupying the position of a point moving constantly from past tofuture, but rather he conceives of time in terms of a basic dichotomy betweenwhat is past and what is not yet past, in terms of an aspectual system of asubtle sort, and in terms of a superimposed and independent system ofmodalities involving possibility, permission, ability, necessity, obligation,

future (the latter not being distinguished in any special way). The conclusion isabsurd, which simply goes to show that our concept of time is not determined

by the linguistic categories in any detectable way, but is rather quite

independent of them.(21) If this is true of speakers of English, why not of

speakers of Hopi?(22)

From consideration of these matters one is led to several conclusions. First, theinvestigation of linguistic relativity presupposes an exact analysis of linguisticstructure of a sort that is not available for SAE, let alone for American Indian

languages.(23) This is no quibble over tenth-order effects. Even an excellentlinguist like Whorf was able to misconceive the nature of such a basic part ofEnglish structure as the system of verbal auxiliaries. What is more, it might

yet turn out that Whorf's quite naive conclusion about English is actuallycorrect. That is, further research might, in fact, show that at a deeper level ofanalysis than can be realized today, there is a past-present-future systemunderlying the formal structure outlined in the preceding paragraph. I see noindication that this is true, but it would not be a very great surprise. If itturned out that Whorf is correct, this would further substantiate my feeling

that studies of linguistic relativity are entirely premature, since his correctguess would have been based on no evidence of substance and no defensible
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formal analysis of English structure.(24)

Now read it again consulting the footnotes so you can see how he does achievessuch a stunning effect while sounding polite as apple pie and evencomplimenting Whorf as being an excellent linguist, even though in a left-handedway.

But here's what troubles me the most: the smokescreen aspect. When you finishreading Chomsky's Preface, what is it, exactly, that survives of the very realpossibility that the Hopis do not have and do not live by our cultural notion oftime?What happens to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there is somethingprofound that we can learn about the diversity of human thinking and experience,about different systems of spacetime? (Native American systems I've workedwith seem to express integrated spacetime, like modern physics, not separateSpace and Time like us.) What happens to that felt sense of difference that myAmerican Indian bilingual friends describe as they go between differentlanguages and cultures? It just evaporates, becomes a non-issue, because ofthis highly rhetorical style, shared by Chomsky's followers, which reduces,

simplifies, and discounts important human and existential insights.

Would you, as a student of linguistics, think it would be at all useful to you toread Benjamin Whorf's writings after reading what Chomsky, the leading light ofthe profession, had to say about him? This smokescreen aspect is the majorchallenge that I have with all rationalist argumentation, and why I, with Whorf,prefer systems thinking, which I call respect thinking. I'll try to stay respectful inthe next section, about a Chomskyan follower.

Part IIb: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinctand 'Mentalese'

During the past decade, the book I've been most asked about by my linguisticsstudents, possibly because I have notincluded it in the readings, is apopularizing book about linguistics by M.I.T.'s Steven Pinker, called TheLanguage Instinct. The cover even has a testimonial by Chomsky prominentlydisplayed at the bottom: "An extremely valuable book." It is an excellent book inmany respects, and I recommend it to any thoughtful reader -- except, of course,when it comes to his Chapter 3 on "Mentalese," where he takes on BenjaminWhorf and the misnamed Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Here we almost need a scorecard in order to see the old familiar players in action: utter confusion ofdeterminism with relativity, mixed with strawman and ad hominem arguments,

and even a soupon of faulty scholarship.

Pinker starts out Chapter 3 by introducing us to "the famous Sapir-Whorfhypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people's thoughts aredetermined by the categories made available by their language, and its weakerversion, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages causedifferences in the thoughts of their speakers (p57) ." Whorf immediately has twostrikes against him -- first, his principle about relativity reclaimed from physicswhich had been stolen from linguistic thought, is cavalierly demoted to a


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'hypothesis', as usual, but now it'sprimarilyabout 'determinism': even therelativity is mired in monocausal determinism in Pinker's formulation (which wemight call "The Pinker Hypothesis of Linguistic Determinism"). The magictransformation is complete: a principle of relativity, modelled on 20th centuryphysics formulation, becomes -- voila! -- a hypothesis about monocausaldeterminism, the mainstay of 19th-century physics. How retro! And,unfortunately, as usual, there are no citations or footnotes to any writings by

either Sapir or Whorf to back up his claim, even though as an author hespecifically chose to use the word 'stating' -- so it must be stated by themsomewhere, mustn't it?!

Two pages later we find that "The linguistic determinism hypothesis is closelylinked to the names Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf." The construction isclosely linkedis what we might call a "Passive of Convenient Omission," so thatexactly WHO has been doing the linking incessantly for decades is convenientlyomitted. (Pinker's use of this is all the more bizarre because just two pagesbefore he talks about how constructions like Reagan's famous non-confession

"Mistakes were made" license an evasion of responsibility.) So who's the deleted

agent -- who's doing the linking? My research indicates that the agent is thegroup of advocates of universal grammar who created, developed andpromulgated The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax in the first place as a way ofavoiding the more important implications of relativity and quantum theories intheir own work.

So, true to form, Whorf is the one being introduced to readers as a rabiddeterminist, even though anyone who knows about relativity in physics knowsthat relativity and quantum theories are what separates classical Newtoniandeterministic thinking from that of modern physics; relativity, in fact, introduces

structural linguistic insights into the mathematics of physics, and demonstrateshow different starting points lead to different conceptions of the cosmos, orworldviews. Euclidean geometry gives one view of a world of Space and Time,and non-Euclidean geometry gives another view, of a universe of spacetime.Whorf didn't only write about linguistics, he also brought notions from physics,Jungian synchronicity, systems theory and Gestalt psychology (with itsforegrounding and backgrounding) into his writing -- all holistic viewpoints whichgo against the business-as-usual 'Old Science' standards against which he isnormally judged. In fact, he knew that our grammatical structures mitigateagainst such insights:

Monistic, holistic and relativistic views of reality appeal tophilosophers and some scientists, but they are badly handicapped inappealing to the "common sense" of the Western average man -- notbecause nature herself refutes them (if she did, philosophers couldhave discovered this much), but because they must be talked about inwhat amounts to a new language. "Common sense," as its nameshows, and "practicality," as its name does not show, are largelymatters of talking so that one is readily understood. (p 152)


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Pinker's determinism mischaracterization, which is quite effective for building afamiliar strawman opponent, is followed immediately by undisguised scorn foranyone who finds something of intellectual value in the celebration of cognitivediversity instead of smartly jumping on the universalist bandwagon,characterizing it as merely a pre-professional concern ("perhaps accounting forthe perennial appeal of the hypothesis to undergraduates"). And then theinevitable voice of authority thunders out from the ivory halls:

But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing aslanguage is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity.

Again there is no citational backup, nor is any possible, to show that Whorf everstated that thought was the same thing as language (if he thought they were thesame thing, how was he supposed to have then said that one determines theother?), but there it is -- Whorf's all wrong, and he's committed a conventionalabsurdity. On the next page Pinker tells us that "the more you examine Whorf'sarguments, the less sense they make," and then authoritatively and derisivelyintones,

[T]here is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shapetheir speakers' ways of thinking. But I want to do more than review theunintentionally comical history of attempts to prove that they do.

Wrong? Absurdity? Less sense? Unintentionally comic? Does this promoteobjective scientific reading of Whorf? You see how fun it is to take shots at astrawman opponent and call it 'Whorf'? He then takes the next few pages to helpus understand WHY linguistic determinism, often called 'the strong version,' iswrong, yet again without demonstrating that either Sapir or Whorf advocated it --and what's the point of talking about it if nobody advocated it? What is thepurpose of all this muddying of the waters, this setting up of a strawmanopponent easy to tear to shreds?

In addition, Pinker either does not know about or is resolutely disregarding thework of Berkeley cognitive scientist Dan I. Slobin concerning a particular form ofthinking that occurs simultaneously while we are talking to ourselves or others.Slobin calls this "thinking for speaking," during which process our thinking isvery much shaped by the grammar of our language. Interestingly, in order to eventhink productively about this form of thinking, Slobin was forced to move frommonolithic nouns like "Language" and "Thought" -- processes so difficult to think

of clearly as 'things' -- to more verby, participial forms of English in 'thinking' and'speaking'. As we saw in the "God is not a Noun" chapter, one important way to

tap into creativity is to break up our cognitive habits (25) , and one way to do thatis to think of 'things' in a verby way, changing our language.

Nothing displays Pinker's unremitting contempt for Whorf more than histreatment of one of Whorf's American Indian language examples, which explainedhow English "The boat is grounded on the beach" comes out more like "It is on


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the beach pointwise as an event of canoe motion" in the Nootka language spokenby some river peoples of the American Northwest. Pinker, however, following hisusual habit of shoddy scholarship when dealing with Whorf, seemingly neveractually bothered to check Whorf's original writings and mistakenly attributes thesentence as being from Apache -- from desert dwelling peoples, not generallyknown for their canoe prowess. Why be accurate about someone you've cast asyour enemy, even though it leaves you yourself wide open to ridicule?

Pinker's scientistic bias is clear when he says,

The idea that language shapes thinking was plausible when scientistswere in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it.Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking...

With the exception of Slobin, evidently. This argument hearkens back to the mostimportant Newtonian argument going on here: whether language shapes/moldsour thinking or is a mirror/reflection of it. Notice that the question is deliberateframed in a yes/no, monocausal determinism mode of argumentation -- as if it

couldn'tpossiblydo both at once in some proportion. In higher-order systemsthinking, which these critics have yet to bring to bear on the issue, a yes/yesanswer is quite acceptable: language shapes andreflects thinking while thinkingshapes andreflects language in a mutually interdependent chicken-and-eggyhistorical way.

Pinker also attacks Whorf on the tired old "language and perception" argument;again, nobody using this argument has ever shown, by proper citation, that Whorfhypothesized that language shapes perception, yet the bugaboo crops up inalmost every discussion of the Hypothesis. In showing the obvious absurdity oflanguage having anything whatever to do with influencing perception, Pinker

contrasts the way physicists and physiologists look at color: while to the former'color' is a continuous wavelength dimension without our familiar delineations(that is, just frequencies in a certain range), to the latter it's a matter of threekinds of cones in the eye wired to neurons, etc. "No matter how influentiallanguage may be, it would seem preposterous to a physiologist that it couldreach down into the retina and rewire the ganglion cells."

Well, how preposterous of Whorf to have even brought it up! Which he didn't --see how strawman argumentation works? This kind of language is intended tosilence the "true believers", or even casual questioners, so they won't bring uptouchy issues in class or at professional conferences.

What Whorf DID talk about was how the habits of our language impel us to thinkof a fist, or lightning, as a 'thing'; how a slight elevation of land becomes adifferent 'thing' from the ground around it (hill), or slightly higher water content ofthe ground qualifies it to be a different 'thing' (swamp) from the ground around it.More like conception than perception.

Besides, in his overly-physiological explanation above Pinker appears to assume


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that whatever comes into the retina and through it into the ganglia is what we see-- itself an overly simplistic direct view of vision which overlooks the obviousconstructednature of vision. If we saw 'directly', we would always be aware of theblind spot in our vision where the retina attaches to the eyeball; instead, that is allfilled in by the magic of construction, blending the "direct seeing" input withmemory and meaning to produce a seamless visual field. Much less, if we saw'directly', we would see frequencies, not colors -- red, blue, and green do not

exist as colors in the outside world of atoms and molecules, but as frequencies,which are interpreted and projected by the particular parameters of our humansenses. We, as a reaction to receiving certain frequencies, clothe the world withcolors -- and it even looks like the colors are really 'out there' instead of projectedfrom 'in here'.

On Pinker's page 63, in a discussion of the Hopi conception of time (or, better,'timing') drawn from Whorf's "An American Indian Model of the Universe", we findhis most virulent anti-Whorf attack of all, which reduces to little more than aclassic ad hominem attack against the man and not his ideas:

No one is really sure how Whorf came up with his outlandish claims,but his limited, badly analyzed sample of Hopi speech [even thoughChomsky had called Whorf an excellent linguist!] and his long-timeleanings toward mysticism must have contributed.

An excellent ad hominem tactic, especially in academe: brand him as a mystic,brand his claims as outlandish, and no self-respecting academic will come nearhim on pain of their reputation and possibly employment! Luckily, like Whorf, Idon't care.

Of course, Whorf had already pointed out half a century earlier that our own

notions of flowing time and static space are equally mystical to the Hopi, inwhose language "time disappears and space is altered, so that it is no longer thehomogeneous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or ofclassical Newtonian mechanics." And modern physics seems to back him up,telling us for nearly a century that our own particular cultural notion of time is, infact, but a linguistic construct. Relativity was outlandish when Einstein promotedit, but physicists finally saw the deeper sense of it. And when Einstein showedthat spacetime is curved, that also included the notion of time being curved, notlinear. The notion of curved time, of cycles being important, is indigenous andaboriginal at the same time as being consistent with modern physics. Theconstruct of manifested and manifesting as cosmological foundations instead ofspace and time crossed over from linguistics into physics and propelledEinstein's co-worker Bohm into envisioning the implicate and explicate orders ofreality. Outlandish indeed! Pinker needs to brush up on twentieth-century scienceif his quest is to make linguistics more scientific.

And finally, in an effort to be strictly factual about Whorf being wrong about Hopitime, Pinker cites the work of Ekkehart Malotki to thereby assure us that Hopidoes indeed have time terms. While Malotki's linguistic work has seldom been


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read except by a few specialists, a more accessible treatment of his work, usinghis own image and words, is to be found in a video series on The Mindshown onPBS -- especially the last part of a video chapter on "Language".

Part IIc: Malotki 'Disproves' Whorf about Hopi Time

In this video segment, we are introduced to Malotki in the following way: "Whorf

made various claims about Hopi language and thought. Ekkehart Malotki hasspent 15 years finding out whether they're true." So he's an unbiased researcherwithout an agenda? In one of the very rare instances of actual linguistic fieldworkever being shown on TV, a middle-aged Malotki is shown working with a Hopispeaker -- a woman perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties. Now remember:not only did Malotki authorize the depiction of this fieldwork, but others, fromfilmmakers to linguistic consultants and network executives, must have agreed(on some basis!) that this looked like good fieldwork. Here's a transcription ofone part:

Malotki: Okay, let-let-let's interrupt here for a minute. I just heard one

expression...what was that, kui-vun-sut?

Hopi: Mm-hum. [clear throat] kui-vun-sut.

Malotki: kui-vun-sut. In other words, to go and pray to the sun withcorn meal, and that's why kui-vun-sut, that means the TIME when youdo this?

Hopi: Yes, uh-huh. [quietly] The sun's ... barely sunrise.

First off, no lawyer in the land would ever get away with those tactics in a court of

law ("Your Honor, he's leading the witness!"). And notice that, in this unequalwhiteman-expert/native-woman sociological imbalance, "Yes..." probably means"That's the way you would say it," while barely sunrise is the realanswer. Butmore importantly, this documentation of fieldwork then allows narrator GeorgePage to call Whorf "wrong" a few minutes later -- all because of Malotki hearingwhat he want to hear ("Yes") instead of the REAL answer: that the phrasedescribed a particular growing lightening of the morning sky, not our Westernabstract notion of TIME with past, present and future! What can past, present,and future possibly have to do with describing the quality of light at 'barelysunrise'? How does this fieldwork make Whorf 'wrong'? Fifty-some years beforeMalotki tortured this time-confession out of that poor Hopi woman, Whorf wrote

that

In Hopi however all phase terms, like 'summer, morning,' etc., are notnouns but a kind of adverb... It means 'when it is morning' or 'whilemorning-phase is occurring'... Nothing is suggested about time exceptthe perpetual 'getting later' of it. And so there is no basis here for aformless item answering to our 'time'.


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Malotki's Hopi consultant actually gives an even better gloss, having to do with agradual lightening of the sky characteristic of early morning.

Other phrases in the video however make clear an obvious hidden assumption:that a universalist has come to disprove the claims of a relativist. "Deep down,"Malotki says, "we're all the same -- it couldn't be otherwise." Obviously, beingboth the same and different at the same time hasn't occurred to him; it must be

one or the other -- preferably the universalist answer.

How could it be that there are people out there that live, that get through theworld, completely divorced from this phenomenon of time that we all experience?

Again, these are classically universalist statements, uttered in a kind offundamentalist, true believer way, taking as true exactly that which is beingquestioned. Is it just ME? Do these sound to youlike statements of faith, almostfundamentally religious, or like the statements of an unbiased researcher? Thebest is yet to come: Malotki follows quickly with,

They [Hopis] are living with time at every point of their lives, but notnecessarily of course in the way we perceive time today. Before theencounter with the whiteman, there had never been a need for naminghour or minutes or seconds. In the Hopi society, time is probablyexperienced as a more organic or natural phenomenon.

Maybe it's just me again, but do you see any contradiction between thisstatement and the previous one? There's "this phenomenon of time that we allexperience," and then there's the Hopi experience of time as "a more organic ornatural phenomenon" -- which, ostensibly, WE as Westerners don't experience in"this phenomenon of time that we all experience."

More insidiously however Malotki (and later narrator Page, who is readingsomeone else's script) above uses a rhetorical trick that I didn't mention 20 yearsago in my "Demise" article because I didn't see it happening then the way I donow -- and I don't know exactly what the technical term is forrepackaging youropponent's position as your own and then calling your opponent 'wrong'.

Let's take this slowly now: On the one hand, Whorf argues that American Indians,indigenous and less technological than Westerners, traditionally have a curvedrather than linear concept of time, geared to the diurnal and annual cycles ofMother Earth (the same day coming around again rather than different days). On

the other hand, Malotki states that the Hopi experience time as "a more organic ornatural phenomenon" rather than our hours, minutes, and seconds. Is it ME?Aren't they arguing for the same view?

Narrator George Page, uttering an invisible writer's words that accept Malotki'sfieldwork at face value, continues:

Page: So the Hopi grammardoes possess words and grammar for


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time, but the Hopi concept of time naturally springs from theenvironment with its naturally perceptible seasons, slow movement ofthe sun across the sky, rhythms of planting, of a culture that lives fromharvest to harvest. Like all languages, the Hopi language holds amirror to the world its speakers live in.

Gosh, could it be that Whorf was really arguing that American Indians were more

supertechnological and divorced from nature than Westerners are, and so theirview of time was more unnatural than ours and really weirdinstead of being tiedto the rhythms and cycles of Nature the way Malotki and Page agree it is? Whatkind of sleight of words is this? Minutes later, Page intoningly concludes thesegment with:

Page: Benjamin Whorf's notion that language molds our thoughts, our

minds, is seductive. And though he was wrong about the Hopi

language in particular, that doesn't necessarily mean he was wrongabout language and thinking in general. But most people searching forthe link between language and mind think Whorf's question is the

wrong one to ask. Maybe our minds ARE in part molded by language.Maybe language merely reflects the workings of brain and mind. Ormaybe, it's all in how we look at it. For brain and mind, like biology andpsychology, form a continuum, an unbroken line that sometimes maybe almost impossible to tease apart.

Perhaps I should mention that the word 'wrong,' though uttered three times infifteen seconds here, isn't otherwise uttered a single time throughout the hour-long segment. Does the word 'wrong' used in conjunction with Whorf's namethree times in quick succession convey anything to you personally? What would

you naturally think about Whorf after seeing this superbly produced video onlanguage, and hearing that at the end? Does it seem, given this narration, thatthere is any useful reason whatsoever for reading Benjamin Whorf's actualwritings? Seems like it would be an exercise in futility, which might lead youastray from 'real' linguistic thought.

Part IId. Kicking the Corpse

Perhaps you can now fully appreciate why this continual -- and for decadesincreasing -- academic smokescreen around Whorf disturbs me so much. Andthese are only the most recent examples of an essentially vapid yet acrimonious

debate that stretches back for half a century as Whorf's critics havesystematically simplified his elegant and complex thoughts into fodder for theantique Newtonian shredder, making it up for him as they went along -- andstaying anonymous -- when they couldn't pin him down to saying what they hadcharacterized him as saying. And then they trashed their own simplifications,apparently clueless about the larger and staggering implications of what theywere trashing -- or were they?


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These fairly recent examples of out-and-out Whorf-trashing by Pinker andMalotki, regardless of the excellence of the rest of their work, gave anunmistakably loud and clear message to linguistics students and professionalsand non-linguists alike: It's perfectly okay to talk about the ideas of BenjaminWhorf as long as (1) you make sure to muddy the waters by stuffing him insomeone else's 'determinism hypothesis' straightjacket, and (2) when you'redone, you ritually kick his corpse, turn out the lights, and close the door. Only

then will the universalist gods of modern linguistics and the other social sciencesbe properly appeased, it seems.

Underlying this perhaps unintendedly deceptive scholarship and public reportingis a deep fear that the logic of Western European languages doesn't really matchthe logic of reality after all, or that it's only one of many that are equally true -- abitter pill to swallow for those raised on the 'natural' superiority of WesternEuropean thinking over that of less 'civilized' indigenous peoples. I hesitate tocall this 'racist,' since I really can't get behind a term less than a hundred yearsold with this meaning which has done nothing but needlessly further dividehumanity (religion and place of origin have always been enough to pit people

against each other sufficiently), but it can at the very least be called colonializing-- part of the 'superior' colonialistic mindset which has been wreaking havoc onthe Americas for over 500 years: beginning with a sad history of physical slaveryfor this continent's original inhabitants, moving on to 'civilized' economic slaveryin a reservation system, culminating in cognitive imperialism, the last stage ofcultural imperialism, with Indian children being kidnapped by the federalgovernment and sent to 'English-only' boarding schools thousands of miles awayfrom their families in order to destroy Native culture, knowledge and languages.Many or most Native Americans of 'baby-boomer' age and older -- people youmay know! -- were actual victims of this barbaric bureaucratic carrying out of thewill of the descendants of the Invaders which tried to wipe out the 'differences'between Native Americans and Europeans. Native Americans are also presentlyexperiencing spiritual terrorism as disrespectful 'wannabe's, like Mickey in 'TheSorcerer's Apprentice," appropriate millennia-old spiritual rituals and then teachthem to others for profit.

Part III: The Pendulum Swing Back to Respect for Whorf

David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous

Some changes happen only gradually, as thinkers steeped in one way of thinking

gradually give way generationally to those raised with a new way of thinking,perhaps first as an option and then as a preferred way. Such is beginning tohappen now regarding Benjamin Whorf, I believe, as what my friend Ray Westcalls 'pre-atomic' thinkers give way to 'post-atomic' ones. I felt for years that Iwas the only person who was giving Whorf a fair chance -- okay, the only onedefending him -- but these days you can find physicists, mathematicians,philosophers, American Indians, and even other linguists treating Whorf withrespect again.


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The phenomenological methods of Continental philosophers such as Husserl,Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty have for decades been perhaps the only Westernmode of philosophy (besides Whitehead, perhaps) congenial to the insights ofWhorf, and David Abram pulls the best of that tradition together in a masterfulway in The Spell of the Sensuous -- a joy to read, which I just did while I waswriting the early part of this chapter, and was pleased to find him writing thefollowing:

Whorf's fascinating disclosures were often taken simplistically, by researchers inother disciplines, to mean, among other things, that the Hopi people have notemporal awareness whatsoever, or that the Hopi language is utterly static, andhas no way of distinguishing between earlier or later events, or betweenoccurrences more or less distant from the speaker in what we would call time.Such misreadings, doubtless encouraged by Whorf's occasional propensity forvigorous overstatement, have led various linguists in recent years to decryWhorf's findings. Several researchers, working closely with the Hopi language,claim to have refuted Whorf's conclusions entirely. Such refutations, however,

are themselves dependent upon an oversimplified reading of Whorf'sconclusions, upon a crusading refusal to discern that Whorf was not asserting anabsence of temporal awareness among the Hopi, but rather an absence, in theirdiscourse, of any metaphysicalconcept of time that could be isolated from their

dynamic awareness of spatiality.(26)

While I can't agree with the 'vigorous overstatement' phrasing, though I knowmany think so (though how many of them understand thephoneme/quantum/spirit analogy, I can't say), I admire Abram's general stance onthe Whorf issue, and I think his explanation above is correct; today a unitary'spacetime' notion is not as 'outrageous' as it might have seemed in earlier

decades of last century, and more thinkers are recognizing the oversimplicitywith which Whorf has been treated, thereby hiding insights important for us toknow.

John Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought, Vols. 1 & II.

I also admire John Lucy's solidly empirical approach to Whorf (even if he doessuccumb to calling it a hypothesis), because no matter whether the issue isargued on purely empirical grounds or a more balanced systemic way, theempirical evidence is important. Lucy has learned, as Heisenberg states, that theparticular question you're asking is as important as anything else whenquestioning reality (as the matter/energy character of light shows). Lucyunderstands that ways of thinking, such as the Newtonian views of reality, aredeeply entrenched in common, academic and scientific thinking, and thatrelativity "challenges assumptions which lie at the heart of much modern socialand behavior research -- namely its claim to be discovering general laws and tobe truly scientific."

Language Diversity and Thoughtis a massive undertaking, with the first volume


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discussing many of the issues I've discussed here and more, and the secondvolume actually undertaking the empirical research that he calls for in the firstvolume, contrasting grammars of American English and Yucatec Maya, andconcluding with the identification of "distinctive patterns of thinking related to

the differences between the two languages." (27) This has been a goal of somelinguists in this past century, going back to Saussure, who saw linguistics as abranch of semiology or semiotics, a field which he created and described to be

"A study which studies the life of signs in a society." (28)

Lucy rightly brings to our attention, as I also will later in this chapter, many ofWhorf's insights that get overlooked in the brouhaha over the Hoax, such as thedeeper implications of Whorf's writings,

Throughout his later writings, Whorf made ... statements arguing thatto the extent that science, philosophy, logic, and mathematics emergein a culture, they are dependent on (and frequently little more than)

specialized extensions of language patterns." (29)

or that Whorf was most concerned not with the innate possibilities of languageand thinking so much as with the daily habitual thought world we live in (inWhorf's terms, "the microcosm that each man carries about within himself, by

which he measures and understands what he can of the macrocosm"(30) ) andour 'fashions of speaking':

[T]hese specialized forms of thought are really secondary reflexes ofthe more basic phenomenon, namely that languages influence

everyday habitual thought.(31)

Whorf showed that it was the 'simplest' of English, which some people feeladherence to will solve all problems, that is fraught with the most hiddenassumptions. His insurance investigation work showed him that words like'empty,' 'waste water,' 'spun limestone' and others were fraught with carelesspossibilities in the real world when linked with notions of fire safety ('empty'gasoline drums being more dangerous than full ones because of explosivefumes, 'water' burning when the waste in it is flammable, the 'stone' part of'limestone' suggesting that it won't burn).

Thus, speakers unwittingly accept much of the suggestive value of thelinguistic analogies in their language even when, upon reflection, they

might recognize that they are misleading. (32)

As Lucy rightly comprehends, Whorf was concerned with "the everyday ordinaryconfusions resulting from overreliance on a linguistic label in responding to

experience." (33) In the terms I've used in this book, it's an overreliance on thatword-world that is our guide to experiencing reality, assuming it to be a betterguide than it often is, that's the problem.
http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm#N_33_http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm#N_32_http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm#N_31_http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm#N_30_http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm#N_29_http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm#N_28_http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm#N_27_


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According to Lucy, Whorf "emphasized that speakers have the view thatlanguage reflects an independently organized reality and thought rather than

shapes or affects them in a significant way." (34)As we have seen, the reflectingvs. shaping argument is one that has been around in the social sciences for along time, and 'mutual interdependence' or yes/yes solutions have been widelyresisted. As radical as that solution, however, was Whorf's insistence that merelyexamining isolated words or lexical items was only the beginning of the

investigation:

Whorf's principal claim was that speakers can readily reflect on lexicalmeanings but tend to be completely oblivious to the patternedgrammatical meanings which ultimately govern a lexical item.... Inshort, some aspects of language are more susceptible to conscious

awareness than are others. (35)

Penny Lee's The Whorf Theory Complex

If Lucy's book cracked the Whorf Hypothesis dam, Penny Lee triumphantly surfedthe escaping water, due not in small part to her own understanding of thepowerful role which physics -- classical, relativity and quantum -- held in Whorf'smind and writings. It's a simple and obvious point, given his educational andprofessional history, and the key to understanding correctly Whorf's linguisticrelativity principle, yet it's conspicuously absent in the critiques by most of hissocial science Whorf Hypothesis hoaxers.

Why? Call it the lack of hard science education among social scientists. Or theperils of specialization: when I've said understanding Whorf required knowingsomething of post-Newtonian physics, linguists have told me that learning

linguistics well is difficult enough, so why add something like quantum physicsto that? Fair enough, unless you've set your sights on understanding Whorf;unfortunate, perhaps, but nonetheless true, as Penny's book ably shows. Foronce I could yell, "YES -- someone else actually GETS Whorf!!!!"

What Doesn't Get Talked About Because Of The Hoax??

What is it that generally gets left out of all discussion of Whorf's ideas because ofthe discussion time which the Whorf Hypothesis Hoax takes to cover wheneverWhorf's name comes up? It seems like nobody can just simply have studentsread Whorf and come up with their own understandings unfiltered through theHoax. How many insights into the human mind are currently aborted becausetheir thinkers are derisively dismissed as 'Whorfian'? ("Oh, haven't you heard?He's been disproven.") What signposts pointing to different ways of experiencingthe world did Whorf leave behind which get lost in the dust of the academicdebacle?

Multilingual Awareness


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I will never forget one of my grad students, a Chinese-American woman, who toldme a few years ago that she had searched all major forms of Western psychologyfor five years trying to find herself somewhere in its pages -- all in vain. But themoment she read the first assigned Whorf essay in my language class, she foundwhat she was looking for: a respect formultilingual awareness, which hadsomething to do with the different languages, cognitive systems, and culturesthat she went back and forth between daily. She was personally and

professionally elated at this discovery, feeling Whorf had given her new andfruitful directions to go in, and ultimately wound up including Whorf in herdissertation.

Finding Human Language Equivalents for Modern Physics Puzzles

If Whorf were suddenly able to be conscious, 100-some years after his birth, andfully understand what has happened to his reputation since his death, he mightbe quite amazed, since much of what both his fame and infamy rests on is theessays that were unpublished during his lifetime. Who knows, perhaps he evenmeant them to remain unpublished. But this is where we owe a debt of gratitude

to John Carroll for having the genius to include them for history. Arguably themost important and influential of unpublished works is his seminal "An AmericanIndian Model of the Universe," which I contend may have helped inspire DavidBohm to conceive of the implicate and explicate orders, which relate to the terms"explicit" and "implicit" used in Whorf's essay.

Of crucial importance in this article, as Dr. Bohm must have realized, is the firstwritten cosmology of a people that does not revere a dynamic Time separate froma static Space in the way Europeans do. Instead, the major division has more todo with what we might call Sensory and Non-Sensory, Objective and Subjective,Factive and Non-Factive, or Whorf's preferred terms Manifested and Manifesting.

What we think of as 'past' as well as things occurring 'right now' are part of thesensorily Manifested realm, while the rest -- our habits ("I walk around the blockevery morning," called nomic or habitual), our consciousness and thinkingprocesses, what we sometimes call the future -- all are in the still Manifestingrealm which has not yet fully Manifested in the physical realm. This particular firstdivision of reality seems to be much more prevalent in Native Americanlanguages than Whorf knew, according to my Native colleagues,, stretching as amega-areal feature across most language families on the continent.

But Whorf's genius was, after giving us the above as background, to then give usa nice puzzle to work through in the Hopi language -- one which makesabsolutely no sense in English but makes absolute sense in Hopi terms. Theanswer, indeed, relies on a different kind of reasoning than normally allowed byEurothinking -- the yes/yes rather than yes/no kind of reasoning. Here's thepuzzle: there's a word in Hopi that we cannot help but translate as either"starting" or "stopping," depending on the context in which it's used.

How, indeed, could one word mean two opposite actions that are each primal andnecessary -- wouldn't everybody just get confused the way computers would?


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Perhaps you can now see the analogy to the experiments early in this centuryconcerning the contradictory particle/wave aspects of light, when physiciststhought that if you were one, then you couldn't be the other. Here we have thesame problem, only in human language -- which does nothing so much as pointout the problem of using English in trying to understand reality.

The puzzle comes with what Whorf calls the 'inceptive' aspect of Hopi. He

explains that the 'manifesting' or 'subjective' realm could perhaps better becalled, if we wanted to match our own English metaphysical terms more closelywith theirs, the realm of 'hoping'. He continues,

Every language contains terms that come to attain cosmic scope ofreference, that crystallize in themselves the basic postulates of anunformulated philosophy, in which is couched the thought of a people,a culture, a civilization, even of an era. Such are our words 'reality,substance, matter, cause,' and as we have seen, 'space, time, past,present, future.' Such a term in Hopi is the word most often translated'hope' -- tuntya -- 'it is in the action of hoping, it hopes, it is hoped for,

it thinks or is thought of with hope,' etc. Most metaphysical words inHopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages. The verb tuntyacontains in its idea of hope something of our words 'thought,' 'desire,'and 'cause,' which sometimes must be used to translate it. The word isreally a term which crystallizes the Hopi philosophy of the universe inrespect to its grand dualism of objective and subjective; it is the Hopiterm for subjective. It refers to the state of the subjective, unmanifest,vital and causal aspect of the Cosmos, and the fermenting activitytoward fruition and manifestation with which it seethes -- an action ofhoping; i.e., mental-causal activity, which is forever pressing upon andinto the manifested realm. As anyone acquainted with Hopi societyknows, the Hopi see this burgeoning activity in the growing of plants,the forming of clouds and their condensation in the rain, the carefulplanning out of the communal activities of agriculture and architecture,and in all human hoping, wishing, striving, and taking thought; and asmost especially concentrated in prayer, the constant hopeful prayingof the Hopi community, assisted by their esoteric communalceremonies and their secret, esoteric rituals in the underground kivas -- prayer which conducts the pressure of the collective Hopi thoughtand will out of the subjective into the objective.

Only now that he's set the stage does Whorf bring in the answer to the puzzle,namely, how the same word, or particle really, can mean both 'starting' and'stopping.' He explains very carefully how the 'inceptive' form, which meansbeginning something in the objective realm, means something slightly differentwhen it is applied to the subjective realm of hoping:

The inceptive form tuntya, which is tunytyava , does not mean'begins to hope,' but rather 'comes true, being hoped for.' Why it mustlogically have this meaning will be clear from what has already been


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said. The inceptive denotes the first appearance of the objective, butthe basic meaning oftuntya is subjective activity or force; theinceptive is then the terminus of such activity. It might then be saidthat tuntya 'coming true' is the Hopi term for objective, as contrastedwith subjective, the two terms being simply two different inflectionalnuances of the same verbal root, as the two cosmic forms are the two

aspects of one reality. (36)

So Whorf's cosmic puzzle term from Hopi means something like stopping beingsubjective while simultaneously starting being objective, showing a one-directional movement from one realm to another, each realm being just anartificially different aspect of the same reality pointed to by language. It describesa very subtle transformative process in a way that, while quite difficult to do inEnglish, is quite common in Native American languages. As you can see, it isindeed a yes/yes answer, showing a relationship partaking of both realms at oncein a transformative process from one to another. It is the process, not 'things,'that is important in most Native American languages. It reminds me of the Lakotaterm that means 'mixed blood,' 'translator,' and 'medicine person' all at once,

depending on the context -- which points to the same process.

In the above example we see Whorf portraying a synthesizing way of thinking --complementary, interdependent, Gestalt, holistic thinking -- which is the only wayout of the trap he provides, a trap which cannot be solved by just the informationgiven to us in English, since that information is contradictory in English. Hisessay is an example of linguistic relativity -- of the different views of the cosmosthat unrelated languages and cultures can provide for their participants.

Perhaps it is true, as Whorf suggested, that what we fear is that if relativity iscorrect, we have been tricked all of our lives by English, thinking that ALL of

reality was something like our English language conceptions of it told us it was.Whorf brings a sorely needed correction to Western arrogance that may helpbalance us as English goes global, engulfing other worldviews with its own, withits emphasis on static nouns in an inanimate universe. We owe a debt of gratitudeto Whorf for explicating exactly what different forms of thinking are like, and forso expertly showing us a somewhat foreign way of thinking and holding it up as amirror to our own, much as the Cheyennes did to me for four years in the early'70s. I recommend his entire essay to you in its original English as a spacetimejourney through another langscape.

As far as I can figure it, the toughest part of complementarity thinking is that itgoes against public attitudes. Because of English-speaking people's love ofbinary-opposition thinking, complementarity is often simplified to become theequivalent of "sitting on the fence" or "speaking out of both sides of your mouth."Complementarity is often seen by binary thinkers as indecision, a simple lack ofmaking a decision, rather than as a conscious choice to remain in the tension ofthe truth of both sides -- and such is the path of a shaman, steadfastly standingwith a foot in both worlds.


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The Importance of Meaning in Linguistics

In another of his early, unpublished essays, "A Linguistic Consideration ofThinking in Primitive Communities," Whorf attempted to set the record straightregarding how anthropologists think about linguistics:

What needs to be clearly seen by anthropologists, who to a large

extent may have gotten the idea that linguistics is merely a highlyspecialized and tediously technical pigeonhole in a far corner of theanthropological workshop, is that linguistics is essentially the quest ofmeaning. It may seem to the outsider to be inordinately absorbed inrecording hair-splitting distinctions of sound, performing phoneticgymnastics, and writing complex grammars which only grammariansread. But the simple fact is that its real concern is to light up the thickdarkness of the language, and thereby much of the thought, theculture, and the outlook upon life of a given community, with the lightof this "golden something," as I have heard it called, this transmuting

principle of meaning. (37)

So what is meaning? Tough question -- you see how Whorf had to talk around it. Iremember at the beginning of my linguistics training being told, by Chomskyansand structuralists alike, that "Meaning is a can of worms," which serves as quitea contrast to Whorf's characterization; kind of a half-full/half-empty attitude,perhaps.

Meaning comes in at least two flavors: lexical and structural -- the meanings ofwords, as a foreground, and the meanings inherent in background structuralpatterns into which words are placed. That is, we can have individual meaningsfor words like "king," "peasant," and "kneel," but something else, another kind ofmeaning, is added when we put the words together as "The king knelt before thepeasant." (What, exactly, DOES 'the' mean to you? It usually means it's oldinformation, something or someone mentioned before or understood fromcontext.) Simple ordering in English can give us structural meanings of subjectand object, of who's doing what to whom. It is this structural meaning, where themeaning comes from being a point in a system, known this past century asstructuralism, that linguistics has shown the importance of to the other sciences.

I realized recently while reading Heisenberg's 1958 Physics and Philosophythatthe relationship in quantum physics between 'normal' reality and quantum reality

is very similar to linguists' relationship between a sound and a phoneme: it is thedifference between the 'actually occurring' physical manifestation and thepossibilities and potential before manifestation. For instance, when we hear thesounds of the words "tick" and "stick," we physically register two different tsounds (which we call aspirated and unaspirated, aspiration being a puff of airthat follows the sound) as the "meaning of 't'", or the phoneme /t/; we cannotinterchange those "t" sounds without making our English sound un-English.

But if you ask what does the phoneme /t/ sound like, there is no answer to this


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question. Phonemes themselves do not have sounds and cannot be sounded out;they only sound like one thing or another within specific contexts. In fact, we usenot only 't' in certain places, but sometimes a 'flap' (just tapping the 't' spotinstead of holding it closed, as in "butter") or a 'glottal stop' (made way back inthe throat, as in "cotton") instead.

What all these sounds in English have in common is that each sound, orphone,

is part of a set that MEANS 't', called thephoneme /t/-- but each only in its owncontexts. That is, almost nobody in the U.S. pronounces a classic 't'-soundanymore in the words 'button' and 'cotton'. Sound them out for yourself, both theway you normally do and with an actual 't' sound. We mostly use what's called aglottal stop, down in the throat, instead of a classic 't' near the middle of themouth, unless we're giving a formal pronunciation. But now look at words like'bottle' and 'better' -- we use a flap in the middle of these words, not a glottal stop(unless we're Cockney speakers or certain U.S. East Coast dialects). Sound themout the way you usually do, then use the glottal stop you used in 'button' and'cotton'. And if we used a flap instead of a glottal in 'button' and 'cotton', they toowould sound weird. All of these sounds masquerading as 't' -- each in its own

way the physical manifestation of the meaning or 'spirit' of 't' in specific physicalcontexts. This is directly analogous to the structuralism of this past century'sphysics, with its Newtonian realm of sensory actualities and its quantum world ofpossibilities.

Like phonemes, as with the famous Schroedinger's Cat Thought Experimentwhere a cat in a box is said to be both alive and deaduntil you open the lid andlook, quantum eventing does not itself have real-world characteristics, butrequire real-world contexts and observations in order to manifest their potential.It is the difference between possibilities and actualities, as Heisenberg put it, orbetween the manifesting and the manifested, in Whorf's terms.

Another example, perhaps easier to understand, comes from morphology, thelevel of making words: what does the notion 'plural' look or sound like inEnglish? "Just add an -s at the end of the word"? You don't know the plural untilyou know the word it's going to be applied to: man/men, child/children,goose/geese, sheep/sheep, tree/trees. The potential or quantum state of pluralcontains all those possibilities and more, but it's only when you observe theplural on a word, that you know which of the potential possibilities becomesmanifest as actual.

At any rate, meaning -- or 'potentia' in Aristotle's terms for physics -- is whatscience has been forced to allow in the front door during the past century.

Mechanical Mixtures and Chemical Compounds : Plus vs. Times (circumfixes)

In his popular essay "Languages and Logic," Whorf talked about what at firstmay seem a trivial point to non-linguists: processes of word formation, and howdifferent one kind is that's found in Native America but not very often in our ownlanguages. After carefully dissecting and analyzing some Shawnee and Nootka


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sentences, Whorf reflects:

As a hang-over from my education in chemical engineering, I relish anoccasional chemical simile. Perhaps readers will catch what I meanwhen I say that the way constituents are put together in thesesentences of Shawnee and Nootka suggests a chemical compound,whereas their combination in English is more like a mechanical

mixture. A mixture, like the mountaineer's potlicker, can be assembledout of almost anything and does not make any sweepingtransformation of the overt appearance of the material. A chemicalcompound, on the other hand, can be put together only out of mutuallysuited ingredients, and the result may be not merely soup but a crop of

crystals or a cloud of smoke. (38)

Another simile, a mathematical one I brought up earlier, might discuss thisdistinction in terms ofplus vs. times. I believe it fits the sense of what Whorf wastrying to bring out in his simile, and I used earlier the example of two strangersvs. a couple sitting on a bench to convey the same idea -- one plus one equals

two, but one times one equals a new kind of one with an added dimension.

Whorf says that these Native American languages don't use this chemicalcompounding exclusively, but use other methods of forming sentences as well,and that even we use this form occasionally:

Even our own Indo-European tongues are not wholly devoid of the chemicalmethod, but they seldom make sentences by it, afford little inkling of itspossibilities, and give structural priority to another method. It was quite natural,then, that Aristotle should found our traditional logic wholly on this other method.(39)

Finally we see why Whorf brought this up -- it was another way to bring up thefact that different languages engender different ways of thinking, and thatgrammatical preferences in a language have a direct bearing on preferences inlogic and thinking within a culture. A persistent point to which Whorf alwaysreturns is that while certain parts of language, for instance words, are fairlyamenable to conscious reflection, other parts -- such as these deep grammaticalstructures -- are fairly invisible to our consciousness, and thus all the m

the great whorf hypothesis hoax

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