u/revannld

In more layman/pop-science-informed circles the refuted nature of both linguistic relativism and determinism seem to be taken almost as categorical (as if something can truly be that categorical in the theoretical part of an empirical science). However, talking with many linguists in my university, especially in areas such as ethnolinguistics, it seems that some kind of linguistic relativism is not only accepted but entirely indispensable to research (Daniel Everett was actually a professor at my university so that can be a factor).

Researching a bit more, it seems that in academia the hypothesis isn't as universally contested as publicized in science communication. There are many, many very well-cited research as well as whole books collecting evidence in favor of it (showing, for instance, how numeracy is consistently worse in peoples whose languages which do not natively feature complex counting systems).

Anecdotally, not being a native English speaker, my whole life since I started to speak English fluently I dealt with not frequently expressing thoughts I would in my own language as they would take whole sentences in English and, in the converse, inventing neologisms and crazy schemes to be able to bring English and German-style compound-wording to my language in order to express things that English speakers take as basic. A very common phenomenon in my language is also the high import of anglicisms, as our translations truly couldn't convey the original meaning.

Also doing research in logic and computer science (thus in intersections of philosophy and mathematics) for me it was always quite obvious how much the specific aspects of a programming language would influence and sometimes put hard limits and determine someone's programming style and, in the end, the kinds of things they thought possible to do in computers (imagine for instance if we had stuck to von Neumann's advice of programming in machine code...); the same for doing mathematical proofs in different logical systems and mathematical foundations or even in different proof assistants or in a more natural language form (has this "Sapir-Whorf for formal languages" already been studied?). As someone with deep interest in music it also always felt obvious why some languages feature a higher percentage of speakers with perfect pitch than others (seemingly a manifestation of even a strong form of Sapir-Whorf - has this been claimed?).

Through this research it seems that most controversy around Sapir-Whorf come from two interpretations that I see as somewhat flawed of both the original hypotheses and their successors: 1) that an individual could never possibly transcend the limits of their language and 2) that the language could never be modified to be able to express more or less information. I think these interpretations are quite extreme and unjust, as it seems nobody who defends the hypothesis is truly talking about that.

The main point seems to be that the effort to express something naturally seems to be different for each language. If what you want to express is too hard to do naturally, it may be often the case that most people will hardly express or even give too much importance to it, thus effectively killing the possibility of this kind of thought becoming widespread. If you add new words to your language, bring many imports or deeply alter its structure and grammar, is it still truly the same language?

You could also do it without new lexical units, but either it will make your thoughts prohibitively verbose and unintelligible (think scientific language without terminology) or make high use of resignification, which at first glance will be confusing to many of your peers and will take a lot of time for speakers of your language to get used to the resignified terminology. The limitations (and expansions) on thought seem to consider time and effort and especially not on individual levels (because with enough time and effort individuals can learn anything, even if badly) and not considering extreme changes to the ordinary pragmatical language use. Opponents of Sapir-Whorf seem to have a warped view of "the common man" as almost a schizoid antisocial Western intellectual: 100% intellectually independent, individualistic and willing to change one's own language and expression to unrecognizable extents regardless of how this could affect their relation with their peers; that's almost never the case in society, people will more than often prefer to learn English to study sciences and philosophy than to learn it in their native tongue.

This is central to my studies in philosophy because, sadly, opposition to Sapir-Whorf and many strong forms of support for Universal Grammar-like ideas are rampant in analytical philosophical discourse. Philosophers of language, pragmaticians and metaphysicians constantly derive their arguments from examples of "ordinary men's English", conclude that it reflects some transcendental truth using indispensability arguments "that's the way we speak and it works" and when people argue that this is too contingent to the English practice of some few specific universities (such as Oxford) criticism is dismissed as "this is linguistic relativism and is proven wrong. Thus this argument generalizes to all languages". It may not be published like that, but that's the kind of discourse one can generally hear in more informal seminars and in the coffee time. In turn, this seems to generate a culture where every argument arguing that we should not generalize "Oxford's or Cambridge's view of what ordinary men's English practice is like" to transcendental arguments about universals is taken as controversial or speculative: the "default" in analytical philosophy seems to consider the pragmatics of English fully generalizable to talk about universals in all languages; opposition to this idea seems to be minority position, thus speculative. I would expect anyone to see this as obviously dumb and even dangerous.

Some opponents of Sapir-Whorf will even focus on very specific examples of names of more concrete objects (such as colors, sensations, objects, time), show how research for relativity in these concrete objects failed and generalize the argument motte-and-bailey to any abstracta and metaphysics; when I think this generalization clearly shouldn't be done. Some languages (like Pirahã, for instance) seem to base most of their declarative assertions on evidentiality markers, and I wouldn't be surprised the discovery of a language where no form of existential/metaphysical assertion (that something "exists, is/are, have, is true...") is possible. Is this generalization truly sound? Has this already been pointed out in philosophy of language? What is the relationship of linguistic relativity with 1) evidentiality assertions vs metaphysical assertions in philosophy in non-indo-european languages, 2) formal languages and 3) sociolinguistics?

I apologize for the size of the post (but I wanted to make myself 100% clear - English is also not my native neither my second language, so my verbosity may be an evidence of linguistic relativity itself xD) and appreciate everyone's time and attention.

I find it really weird that working on research on areas intersecting philosophy for many years (analytical, that is, mainly logic and formal philosophy), despite constantly trying and putting a decent amount of effort into it, I have never actually managed to understand what exactly is the hype or the issues mostly explored in "continental philosophy", especially existentialism, nihilism, critical theory etc. I ask the community's pardon in advance for the long, personal and subjective monologue that will follow but I feel it is essential to understand from where I'm coming from and thus what are exactly my troubles in understanding these themes.

I have somewhat of a basic bibliographical mapping of arguments presented by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Horkheimer, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard, I have been a regular at a local highly regarded Lacan study group and lectures on psychoanalysis, however the issues raised in these settings always felt almost meaningless to me: I understand the reasoning behind these arguments at a surface level, but it seems I can't internalize them; they seem mostly useless to my life and the society that I envision and only useful up to helping me understand the reasoning process behind other people and developing alterity/otherness. This led me to inevitably conclude that my lack of deeper understanding of these discussions may stem not from the nature of arguments or my intellectual abilities or effort but maybe because of my inherent background and privileges.

For some context, I would say I have been in quite a privileged position since day one of my life, as I come from an upper class normative background and excelled both academically and socially; lack of purpose has never been a thing in my mind for any single moment. I would say many colleagues in mathematics, logic and analytic-inclined philosophy departments share a lot of this sentiment; my hypothesis is that this would maybe be the reason for their antipathy towards human and social sciences and continental philosophy. Is that the case? Is there a classification for this kind of mentality or personality? Does someone know a single brief paper or work focusing on this analysis? (as I've always failed to get "the big picture" in critical theory, as the objective scientific language used seems to presume something obvious and easily captured by the reader, I don't feel that is the case for everyone).

My main trouble with these questions though is that, myself leaning on more radical and skeptic stances in philosophy (anti-realism, constructive empiricism, nominalism, instrumentalism, non-cognitivism in metaethics etc), these questions always felt meaningless to me. My first intuition of reading Wittgenstein at a younger age of language games and some philosophical problems not being real problems has never really went way.

Yes, I internalize the lack of "objective anything" in almost all areas of human inquiry into my thought, but that for me is more liberating and motivating than anything else: I embrace arbitrariness and dynamic/change in foundations/first-beliefs, and objectivity and guarantees/confidence for me mainly come in the form of structural stability/reinforcing either through formal and linguistic rigor and rules (thus logic) or emerging from optimization in complex systems (such as human society, science as a social human undertaking), and the belief that predictability and reliability can arise in these systems comes mostly from a naive subjective commonsense induction perception ("it works/helps me reach visible results, has been working, there is no reason to belief it does not even slightly work").

Thus, first-principles and transcendental static truths for me seem unimportant as my only guarantee are continuous and social revision/rectification complex processes. These seem to be enough for me to have confidence that, no matter what arbitrary first-principles I choose, through either formality/rigor/rule-following or "peer-review"/dialectic (not restricted to academia) in society my course of action and beliefs will be gradually rectified to some good ending, to self-fulfillment, purpose, success, happiness, sense of belonging.

This clearly seems to be correlated with a kind of optimism in the future of society and the world I have, and a belief in society and in "the system" (that no matter how bad things may appear, they could been much worse - and have been much worse in the past), and I usually mentally associate (and I have much anecdotal evidence for that) some people's attraction to nihilistic thought as product of their general pessimistic tendencies (or "pessimistic-first" tendencies - to consider any positive suggestion, proposal, idea or good news highly questionable a priori). Has these associations been formally studied in the literature?

Thus, how to solve this conflict between "optimistic privileged thought" and "pessimistic nihilistic thought" either in the interaction between people but also inside philosophy? It seems it is purely a matter of aesthetics/perception: it seems that you either see the glass half-empty or half-full and that may be a primitive defining feature of your whole philosophical framework, and something that you almost never will be convinced of the contrary. My final question, though: how could a person with beliefs similar to mine (optimistic, privileged, instrumentalist and skeptic of many philosophical problems - especially existential ones) effectively "*really understand"/*internalize existential and nihilistic questions and stances as meaningful and how could I feel these issues are actually "useful" for me or for society? (epistemic justification and usefulness is usually a very widespread issue of some analytic philosophers and logicians towards these kinds of inquiries).

This thread has been very personal, but I really believe most researchers I know working in STEM, mathematics and analytic philosophy can relate to this feeling, and anyone that knows people in these areas will probably agree. This is a genuine troubling question for me.

I appreciate all responses and your time and effort.