February 10, 2010

• On the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

  [My apologies for the utter lack of
  blog posts recently. This is due to the incredible stress and
  time-commitment of college life. I will endeavor to improve in the
  future—though I make no guarantees.]

  Clearly, concepts of space and time are
  relative to culture and language. Here, I'll show you.

  There is an island of people in the
  Western hemisphere in which people commonly use not the traditional
  left/right front/back dichotomies of relative space, but a geocentric
  system of coordinates with only three terms, one consisting of the
  north of the island, one the south, and the other referring to any
  lateral East-West motion. They also commonly refer to their island by
  a name which refers to fruit, emphasizing their history as people and
  as living organisms that subsist upon fruit.

  The island is Manhattan (“The Big
  Apple”), and the three direction words are “uptown”,
  “downtown”, and “crosstown”.

  There is a tribe of a few thousand
  members, inherently nomadic, never in the same place for very long.
  These people have an even more complex conception of space; though
  they use relative terms for spatial motion and orientation, they also
  have several terms we Westerners do not, words referencing vertical
  motions and multi-axis rotations. They also distinguish at least
  three different kinds of motion, not to be confused.

  These people are fighter pilots, and
  their direction words are “altitude”, “climb”, “dive”,
  “yaw”, “pitch”, “roll”, “airspeed”, “groundspeed”,
  and “intercept speed”.

  There are people who work underground
  in a vast edifice, engaging in complex rituals with enormous
  constructions in order to interact with tiny invisible entities. They
  use words that have only existed for a few decades, words most people
  do not understand, to describe concepts that most people cannot even
  begin to articulate. They have a concept of time and space which is
  fundamentally different from that the rest of us know, one that can
  only be articulated in complicated and arcane symbols.

  These people are particle physicists.
  Their edifices are particle accelerators, and their words include
  “lepton”, “quark”, “antimatter”, “wavefunction”,
  “Compton wavelength”, “collision cross-section”, and many
  more. Their concept of spacetime is general relativity, and the
  arcane symbols are tensor equations.

  There is a clan of people, unified less
  by geographic location or physical appearance than by common belief
  and practice, who commonly use words that even they do not
  understand, copying the same meaningless formulas with minor
  modifications and then rewarding each other for these efforts. They
  create vast tomes of text which contain no actual meaning, and never
  manage to do any more than flirt with reference to the actual world.
  These people are very proud of themselves for understanding things
  that ordinary people do not, and they are convinced that they have a
  deep kind of knowledge about the universe.

  They are cultural anthropologists. (The
  description also fits theologians.)

  Erudite nonsense is still nonsense.
  Culturally-sensitive falsehood is still falsehood. The list of human
  universals is incredibly enormous, and there is no evidence that
  language has any more than a passing influence upon the way people
  think.

  A biological anthropologist is someone
  who spends his career trying to prove that humans are the same, and
  succeeding.

  A cultural anthropologist is someone
  who spends his career trying to prove that humans are different, and
  failing.

  • 1:28 pm
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