Page "Linguistic relativity" Paragraph 25

More than any other linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he himself called " the principle of linguistic relativity ".

Instead of merely assuming that language influences the thought and behavior of its speakers ( after Humboldt and Sapir ) he looked at Native American languages and attempted to account for the ways in which differences in grammatical systems and language use affected the way their speakers perceived the world.

There is not a lot of agreement about Whorf's opinions regarding the nature of the relation between language and thought.

One tradition of interpretation exemplified by his critics such as Eric Lenneberg, Max Black and Steven Pinker attributes him a very strong view of linguistic determinism, according to which commensuration between conceptual schemes and translation between languages is impossible.

Another tradition of interpretation exemplified in the work of John A. Lucy, Michael Silverstein and Stephen C. Levinson points to the many places in Whorf's writings in which he explicitly rejects determinism, and in which he clearly notes that translation and commensuration between linguistic conceptual schemes is possible.

This line of interpretation suggests that a more sympathetic reading of Whorf would lead to a greater understanding of the subtleties in Whorf's use of terminology and consequently to resolving some of the apparent self contradication noted by Whorf's critics.