Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought.
DeterminismDeterminism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. With numerous historical debates, many varieties and philosophical positions on the subject of determinism exist from...
itself refers to the viewpoint that all events are caused by previous events, and linguistic determinism can be used broadly to refer to a number of specific views.
For example, those who follow
analytic philosophyAnalytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
from
Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language....
onward accept the proposition that, as Wittgenstein said in the
Tractatus Logico-PhilosophicusTractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his lifetime. It is an ambitious project to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science.He wrote it as a soldier...
, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." (proposition 5.6), "The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world." (proposition 5.632) and "About what one can not speak, one must remain silent." (proposition 7).
Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought.
DeterminismDeterminism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. With numerous historical debates, many varieties and philosophical positions on the subject of determinism exist from...
itself refers to the viewpoint that all events are caused by previous events, and linguistic determinism can be used broadly to refer to a number of specific views.
For example, those who follow
analytic philosophyAnalytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
from
Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language....
onward accept the proposition that, as Wittgenstein said in the
Tractatus Logico-PhilosophicusTractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his lifetime. It is an ambitious project to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science.He wrote it as a soldier...
, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." (proposition 5.6), "The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world." (proposition 5.632) and "About what one can not speak, one must remain silent." (proposition 7). That is, the words we possess determine the things that we can know. If we have an experience, we are confined not just in our communication of it, but also in our
knowledge of it, by the words we possess.
From an entirely different starting point, the
Sapir–Whorf hypothesisThe linguistic relativity principle is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.The idea that...
argues that individuals experience the world based on the grammatical structures they habitually use. For example, speakers of different languages may see different numbers of bands in a
rainbowA rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere...
. Since rainbows are actually a continuum of color, there are no empirical stripes or bands, and yet people see as many bands as their language possesses primary color words. Although neither Edward Sapir nor his student Benjamin Lee Whorf ever wrote an "hypothesis" of this nature, writings such as Whorf's
The Relation of Thought and Behavior to Language (1956) make arguments based on a version of linguistic determinism.
A separate angle on linguistic determinism maintains that language is the only thing that is ever known. The objective world is entirely removed by the presence of language. It is perceived, but human life is determined by having language and by the language's own internal demands. Like
semioticsSemiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes , or signification and communication, signs and symbols, into three branches:...
, which argues that a single grammar exists prior to all human activity (although the grammar of semiotics is not strictly linguistic), these linguistic determinists say that the structures, hierarchies, and hidden associations of our individual human languages determine the conclusions that we reach in our logic, the aspirations of our lived lives, and all our emotional content.
Role in literary theory
Linguistic determinism is a partial assumption behind a number of recent developments in
rhetoricRhetoric is one of the arts of using language as a means to persuade. Along with grammar and logic or dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. From ancient Greece to the late 19th Century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public...
and
literary theoryLiterary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
. For example,
Jacques DerridaJacques Derrida was a French philosopher born in Algeria, who is known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy...
's project of deconstruction aims to break apart the terms of "paradigmatic" hierarchies. (In language structures, some terms exist only with antonyms, such as light/dark, and others exist only with subordination, such as father/son and mother/daughter. Derrida's targets are the latter.) If one breaks apart the hidden hierarchies in language terms, one can open up a "lacuna" in understanding, an "aporia," and free the mind of the reader/critic. Similarly,
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, sociologist and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley.Foucault is best known for his critical studies of...
's New Historicism posits that there is a quasi-linguistic structure present in any age, a metaphor around which all things that can be understood are organized. This "epistem" determines the questions that people can ask and the answers they can receive. The epistem changes historically: as material conditions change, so the mental tropes change, and vice versa. When ages move into new epistems, the science, religion, and art of the past age look absurd. Some neo-Marxist historians have similarly looked at culture as always encoded in a language that changes with the material conditions. As the dialectic struggle of economic forces clash and synthesize, so too do the language constructs.
Fictional allusion
In
George OrwellEric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist...
's novel
Nineteen Eighty-FourNineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel, by George Orwell, published in 1949 about the totalitarian régime of the Party, an oligarchical collectivist society where life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control,...
, it is noted that the true purpose of Oceania's official language, Newspeak, is to reshape the English language so it is impossible to commit thoughtcrime. Many words are made obsolete to grant the Party a universally narrow way of thinking.
Criticism
Linguistic determinism is far from universally accepted. In
August 2004August 2004 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December
See also: August 2004 in sports-Events:...
, however, Peter Gordon, a
psychologistPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
, published
a study that provides support to the hypothesis of linguistic determinism. The study investigated abilities held by native speakers of the language of a
tribeA tribe, viewed historically or developmentally, consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states.Many anthropologists use the term to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups .Some theorists hold that...
of
hunter-gathererA hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, foraging and hunting without significant recourse to the domestication of either...
s in
BrazilBrazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is a country in South America. It is the fifth largest country by geographical area, occupying nearly half of South America, the fifth most populous country, and the fourth most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean...
,
PirahãThe Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. They currently number about 360, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades, and the culture is in danger of extinction...
, which is a "one, two, many" language (that is, a language which contains words only for the numbers
one{| class="infobox" style="width: 20em;"|-! colspan="2" align="center" style="font: 10em times; background:#ccc;" | 1|-| colspan="2" | |-| Cardinal| 1
one|-| Ordinal| 1st
first|-| Numeral system| unary|-| Factorization| |-...
and
twoclass="infobox" style="width: 20em;"|-! colspan="2" align="center" style="font: 10em times; background:#ccc;" | 2|-| colspan="2" | |-| Ordinal number| 2nd
second|-| Numeral system| binary|-| Factorisation| prime|-| Gaussian integer factorisation...
, all other numbers being simply represented by a single word meaning "many"). It was demonstrated that these native speakers had an impaired ability to compare quantities of objects higher than three, and that their ability to conceive of numbers was comparable to that of an infant. Opponents of linguistic determinism, though, have suggested that Gordon's findings might be explained by non-linguistic factors, and that the issue remains far from settled.
IdealismIdealism is the philosophical theory that maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is based on mind or ideas. It holds that the so-called external or "real world" is inseparable from mind, consciousness, or perception...
and
empiricismIn philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge"...
both reject the idea that language is prior to knowledge (idealism) or sense (empiricism).