Language and Thought: Exploring Philosophical Perspectives
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If one thinks of minds as stocked with ideas and concepts prior to or independently of language, then it might seem that the only function language could have is to make those ideas and concepts public. This was the view of Aristotle, who wrote that “spoken words are signs of concepts.” It was also the view of the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704).
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According to this conception, words are simply vehicles for ideas, which have an independent, self-sustaining existence. To use another metaphor, although words may be the midwives of ideas, their true parents are experience and reason. Leibniz suggested the same model, writing that “languages are the best mirrors of the human mind.”
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It was typical of Locke to see words as devices more for veiling truth than for revealing it. In his view, words have little or no cognitive function; indeed, they interfere with the direct contact possible between the mind and the light of truth. Understanding and knowledge are private possessions, the fruit of an individual's labour in conforming his ideas to reason and experience. Hence, listening to the words of others yields not knowledge but only opinion.
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Locke's picture of the independent existence of ideas did not imply any particular answer to the question of whether language is shaped by the mind or the mind shaped by language. However, the intellectual climate of 18th-century Europe, shaped by increasing exposure to the histories and cultures of peoples outside the continent, tended to favour the second alternative over the first. Thus, the considerable differences between European and non-European languages and the difficulty initially involved in translating between them cast doubt on the existence of any universal stock of ideas, or any universal way of categorizing experience in terms of such ideas. They suggested instead that linguistic habits determine not only how people describe the world but also how they experience it and think about it.
The first linguistic theorist to affirm this priority explicitly was Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), whose approach eventually culminated in the celebrated “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” formulated by the American linguists Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) on the basis of their work on the diverse (and disappearing) indigenous languages of North America.
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According to a weak interpretation of this hypothesis, language influences thought in such a way that translation and shared understanding are difficult but not impossible. Different languages are at varying “distances” from each other, and the difficulty of saying in one what can be said easily in another is the measure of the distance between them. According to its strongest interpretation, the hypothesis implies linguistic conceptual relativism, or “linguistic relativity,” the idea that language so completely determines the thoughts of its users that there can be no common conceptual scheme between people speaking different languages. It also implies linguistic idealism, the idea that people cannot know anything that does not conform to the particular conceptual scheme their language determines.
