Whorf Lives (re: Whorf Hoax, etc.)

[Maureen Therese Anderson]

[sorry -- still archive surfing:]

>2.   Different languages represent reality in
>different ways.
>
>--No. The old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Right up there with the ether theory
>in physics, just more hardy.

Sapir-Whorf inspired research is a flourishing, growth industry in
linguistic anthropology.

And despite key differences between Whorf and Sapir, and between their
approaches and and contemporary ones, all would consider the simple
comment, that different languages represent reality differently, a
no-brainer.

Also I'd clarify (after reading other posts on this thread -- sorry if it
was already been pointed out) that while Sapir and Whorf did stress the
systematic incommensurability of languages -- incommensurable in the sense
that a major shifting in coordinates of experience is required to pass from
one language to another -- both also stressed that such shifting was well
within the abilities of all humans.  That's a basic tenet of their Boasian
anthropology: the psychic unity of humanity.  What's relative is the
interpretation of sensible experience in conceptual terms, not the process
of thinking.

At present, far from going the way of Ether, Whorf's most basic ideas have
had something of a renaissance in recent decades.  Since Chicago is one of
the centers of this growing sub-discipline thre are lots of its
practitioners in my midst.  One especially influential neo-Whorfian
approach was first set out here in the seventies and eighties, by Michael
Silverstein, in a reformulation that draws upon Peirce, Jakobson, Volosinov
and others.

My impression is that what's new about these contemporary Whorfian projects
is a broadening beyond their earlier focus on semantics (propositional
functions of language), to a greater emphasis on pragmatics (indexical
functions in the enaction of discourse contexts).  Though even in this
respect the project takes much of its inspiration from Whorf's earlier
observations.  (btw, this current emphasis on performativity is very
different than the "performative speech acts" stuff associated with Austin,
Searle, etc.)

The contemporary pragmatic broadening also meets up with another old tenet
of the Boasian tradition, the relative inaccessibility of linguistic
categories to conscious awareness.

So what you get is a typology of grammatical categories in terms of their
accessibility to conscious awareness.  The basic idea is that because
semantic (more accessible) and pragmatic (in general, less accessible)
meanings will be parcelled out among grammatical categories in different
ways in different languages, there will be correspondingly different
sources and patterns of cognitive appropriation, and different systems of
conscious ideologizing about the world, "nature," and the construal of
experience.

So part of this project is new, e.g., categorizing linguistic
structure/meaning in terms of likelihood or likely directions of cognitive
appropriation.  But its guiding idea, that lingustic features impact
concepts about how the world works, is very Whorfian.

Note that these main emphases -- levels of conscious awareness, stress on
pragmatics, on linkages between meaning and indexicality -- coincide nicely
with some longstanding Marxist concerns.  Many involved in the foregoing
projects draw heavily upon Marxian reflection on practical consciousness,
its stress on concrete social relations at play all-the-way-down (as
opposed, say, to Saussurean-inspired semiology), and similar stuff that
Marx for one thought it important to think about.

Maureen