Whorf-Sapir.keynote.

# How Language Shapes Thought

A keynote address by Valerie Gremillion, Ph.D

> From a keynote address given at the Language and Spirituality Conference, Aug 1-3, 2003, presented by SEED Graduate Institute , under the title: "The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis: Implications for Perception and Science ".

> I’m neither a physicist nor a linguist, but there is a component for me in this process which really has to do with our thinking and our brains, and the very structure of our brains and how our minds are embedded in that context. So it seems useful to me to lay out the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, which is that language shapes, structures or determines our thinking or thought processes, and to concretize that for you by giving you how exactly that can happen, and how I think it does happen, so that you have some cognitive infrastructure with which you can address some of the dialogue that’s going to be happening.

> I first ran into the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis almost exactly 25 years ago, and I was thrilled, because I knew that there had to be something like that in existence. All my life, the things that I had felt and seen and known I had been unable to put into language. So I knew there was this gigantic space behind me, and then there was not only what I was able to put out in language, but what I was allowed to put out in language by English, by my culture, by my family and by what other people around me were willing and able to hear. So there are all these levels of how language both supports our thinking and constrains our thinking.

> Why is it important that we address this particular topic? If language does shape thought -- let’s just assume that for the moment -- then language is the tool that we are using to construct the world and make the decisions about the future that we are taking. It’s helping us to take actions in the world. Well, if you look around the world, we’re not exactly taking the best actions, and we’re not necessarily making the best decisions. So it behooves us to go back and look at every step of the process by which we are making these decisions and taking these actions, to see where our logic, our insight and our understanding are failing us.

> I’ve been reading a lot about Einstein lately. Einstein said, “Language is an implement of reasoning in the tool-use sense of the world.” That’s worth a little pondering. The first thing that pops into my mind is, well, what kind of tool is it? Is it a shovel? A pair of tweezers? Is it a microscope? And, could it be that different cultures really are using language as different kinds of tools of reasoning, and this is why we see different patterns of behavior in cultures across the world?

> If we think deeply about language, we realize that it’s something we are embedded in, as fish are in the ocean. This makes it pretty difficult to look at, unless you have learned many languages and are able to step back from your own language and look at it from another perspective. Unfortunately for Americans, this is a rare occurrence. We are not people of three, four or five different languages. I know that when I first started traveling to different places in the world, it struck me that not only was language a big tool of reasoning that was different for different cultures, but that it connected different peoples and cultures to different realms of being.

> I’m going to take a moment and tell one of my favorite anecdotes about traveling in Egypt. I was traveling there with a friend, and we were walking through the great bazaar in Cairo, the Khan al-Khalili. I had already noticed that people were living in their bodies and in themselves differently. They made lots of eye contact, and they were present in a way that I wasn’t experiencing back in the United States. The bazaar is quite large, and there are restaurants on one side. I look over there and see a woman sitting in the restaurant eating something. The vague thought passed through my mind, What is that? What is that object she's eating? I immediately turned back to my friend who’s asking a question, and we keep walking. A few minutes later, this little boy runs up to me, and he has one of the things the woman was eating. I’m kind of startled, because the thing that I had been thinking of appeared right before me. I look back at the restaurant, and the woman is waving and giving me a big grin. She had seen and recognized, across this crowded bazaar, my intention and my desire and my wanting to know and understand, and had sent me this gift. It was at that point that I was getting the adequate amount of culture shock that I really wanted -- that other people in other cultures, through other languages and ways of being, are experiencing the world differently and are connecting with each other differently. What I want to connect this to later is how science really parses the world for us in a very specific way and then imposes it on the entire world. This is, for me, a fundamental problem.

> Let me begin by talking about the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis itself. In linguistics, there are two primary schools of thought around how language and thought interact. The "cloak", and the "mold" schools of thought. In the cloak school of thought, it’s kind of like we all have human bodies and then we put on clothes, so thought is the body, and the clothes that we put on are language. In other words, the language doesn’t have anything to do, really, with the shape of the body. But in the mold theory, thought is poured into or through a language, which then structures or molds that. So the cloak school of thought is the Chomskyan view -- there’s like a university underpinning, and everyone is thinking the same way and it just might come out in different ways with different languages. The mold school of thought is really where the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis lies. That language is shaping and influencing, and in the “hard” Whorfian perspective, is determining our thought processes.

> So what I’d like to do is lay out for you some very specific ways that language does do this. I guess I’d call myself a modified Whorfian, because while I believe it is possible to translate things from different languages, it can be easier or harder to translate concepts, but if they don’t exist in another language, then I might have to spend 500 words to describe something that in another language has one word. What this means is that how we chunk things -- there’s a psychological term called chunking -- it means how much we can keep in our short-term memory. It’s seven, plus or minus two entities or objects you can keep in this memory store. This is why we have telephone numbers that are seven digits long. What that means, though, is if I say a sentence that’s 500 words long, you’ve lost me after 100 words. You can’t keep all that in your memory store, so you can’t actually manipulate or think with all the words that are following. So there’s a huge advantage in being able to encapsulate concepts into words or phrases. When a word or phrase doesn’t exist and has to be explained, as the Iraqis are asking our soldiers to be trained in the rules of their culture, it will probably take days to lay out why they’re actually wanting certain kinds of behavior, because we don’t have the words and the concepts. So this conceptual base is what’s very different across many different languages.

> I do just want to make the point that intrinsically, we’re claiming language as a human entity, and I’m studying bee communication right now, and there are thousands of things they can say about their environment, about the tasks they have, and about how to divide labor among them. That’s also true for prairie dogs, elephants and rats. Language was necessary for our survival and evolution, and because of that, the languages that evolved are a measure of how fit we are to our environment, and if we can convey what’s necessary about the environment to other people in order to cooperate with them, to engage with them, to trade with them or to teach them. Or sometimes, in order to deceive them, which we’re seeing a lot of these days. So language is a tool of our evolutionary path. I’m hoping to present a few reasons why we should expand our own language base.

> If we think very simply about language, there are levels of language and how it supports or constrains our thinking. So at the bottom [of the illustration] is this sort of amorphous, non-verbal sense information, our context and history, our genetics, gender and all these other things that comprise how we are interacting with the world. That then goes through this filter or construct of language. At the very base of this -- and I’m not a linguist so I don’t know how they would parse this particular thing -- is the structure of the language. By that I mean whether it’s a noun-based language or something that’s looking at processes and flows. So if you’re paying attention primarily to objects and how they can manipulated, or you’re looking at flows and connections between the network components. Those cast your perception of the world into very different lights. So in the movie last night, Dan Moonhawk Alford said something like, If you look at a ball bouncing and you talk to a child in English, you would say, “Look at the ball.” But in a Native American language, you would say, “Look at the bouncing.” Those are completely different ways to construct your view of reality. So that’s kind of this first level here.

> The next level up is syntax. That might not seem to be too much of a constraint, but if you say je t’aime to someone who’s French, as my French teacher said, you’re eagerly awaiting to see if they add something at the end, because if you say je t’aime beaucoup, it means I like you a lot. But if you just say je t’aime, it means I love you. So the structure of the language creates certain expectations or ideas of how you’re actually even listening to a speaker.

> Then it gets a little more interesting. There’s a vocabulary and a set of concepts embedded in that vocabulary that you have access to as a speaker of the language. I used to think that that wasn’t so significant, that different languages all had shared concepts. But then I went to Sweden and I was learning Swedish and trying to speak to the Swedes, and they kept responding to me in English. At first I thought, well, my Swedish is just so terrible. But I was trying to have a conversation with a scientist, and he said, no, we actually have a very small vocabulary. There’s only 50,000 words in our vocabulary. I said, surely you have all the major words. We must be able to discuss everything in this language. And he said, well, we don’t have a word for mind, so that can make it difficult for us to talk about neuroscience.

> In various cultures, there is a lack of overlap for different concepts, and even different, huge conceptual frameworks that we’re unaware of, because this level of our unshared reality is not discussed. So between us and the Middle East, between us and the African nations, between English and even something like Celtic or Welsh, there’s a lack of overlap of the actual conceptual frameworks, so that our meaning isn’t as shared as we would like it to be.

> Now interestingly, at the top of this [diagram] -- and if you just see this as sort of like a set of supports, like a set of platforms which are both supporting your ability to discuss something in a language, but also successively constraining what you’re actually allowed to say -- then we get usage. Right now there’s a lot of hip-hop language entering our idiom, but there’s also political correctness, so you don’t say certain things, you don’t use certain words, because they’re outside the purview of the usage, even though they’re inside the purview of the language.

> This gets to be interesting because if you look at, say, how different cultures with different languages greet each other. In English, we would say “Hello, how are you?” In another language we might say “Namasté,” which an American could learn as a greeting, but it means “the divine within me salutes the divine within you.” That’s an immediate connection to this other realm of being that you don’t get with “hello.” The Mayans say “Imlakesh,” which means, “I am another yourself.” So immediately, there’s this connecting on a deeper level than a little “Hi” would give you. We’re very unaware of the connections that our language has to all these different realms of being and feeling and thinking.

> Now this is a very simple way to see formally how language can constrain our thinking and our vocabulary and our conceptualization. But there are some other more complicated ways of viewing this. So this is a complicated diagram. In the center, we have thought. We’re looking at how thought is constructed, and if you just look at all the pink words on the outside, all of these words represent things that are helping us construct our thinking and our thinking processes. The perceptual input we get, whether it’s visual, auditory or tactile, helps to generate our thought processes. So we can think non-verbally in many cases, and many people are far more visually based, say, than they are language based.

> But then there’s attention that is directing our thought processes. I come into this room, and I didn’t really look at what’s the color of the ceiling, or where things are in the room, or oh, there’s some little cabinets over there. None of these are within my attentional aperture. This is also true for how our thought is getting constructed. Our attention is, in many very specific ways, directing how our thoughts are formulated. So if you’re in what I call goal-directed mode, and you have a lot of errands or things you must do, then things could be flying around you, and you’re not paying any attention. You are zooming through that space, trying to get your things done. That’s a very different state of mind than being in a receptive state, like, well I’ll just sit back and look around the room and I’ll observe what’s happening. Those are two different attentional modes that will determine then where our thinking goes. English, because of its reliance on objects and entities doing things to them, tends to push us more toward goal-directed attentional states. This means we’re not necessarily so receptive to looking around at the larger context. This is a structuring of our thinking.

> Similarly, our expectations -- and by expectations I mean the unconscious perceptual biases that we have, built into our very perceptual systems -- are literal blind spots. In the visual system, there is a blind spot -- if you bring your arm all the way out to the side, you’ll realize you can’t see it at a certain point. But your visual system fills in that spot, so you believe that you can, unless you check that. This is true for every perceptual system. There are gaps within the system that we have evolved to interpolate or conflate other components of our perceptual system to pretend that we have that data. Here’s an example of a perceptual bias -- I’ll give you a reverse one. I went into a little French candy store, and I thought the place was twice as big as it was. It turned out that there was a mirror along one side. So I got my candy -- I love chocolate -- and I turned around and I wasn’t expecting to see myself, so I actually greeted this other person. Similarly, if you looked into what you thought was a mirror, you would probably literally see yourself for a moment before your system said, wait a second, this isn’t literally there. So we’re constantly filling in perceptual biases, and these expectations are all the way through every level of the system. Into our cognitive system, throughout our perceptual system, and into every realm of how we engage with the environment. We go on probabilities, what’s likely to be there. A lot of accidents and disasters happen because we have assumptions about what’s there, rather than our truly looking at what’s there.

> I do want to differentiate between biases and assumptions and expectations. So expectations are unconscious, embedded within our hardware. But biases and assumptions, and then the larger scale of conscious beliefs, are things that also structure our thinking. They determine how much attention we’ll pay to something, for instance. So if I am a fundamentalist, right-wing Christian, then I might not want to listen to a Buddhist, and even if I do listen to a Buddhist, my perception of what they’re likely to say, or where they’re coming from, will determine literally what I hear. So we are filling in things even from the external environment. Beliefs shape our willingness to take in information, and so determine or dictate our thought. This again comes back to our ability to be truly receptive to what’s in the environment.

> Now what’s interesting is that all of these things are impacted by language. Every single one of these. The language I’m using right now is directing your attention. The language I’m using right now is either impacting in a hard way with your beliefs, or fitting right in so it can easily be heard. Language is affecting not just these components, because this isn’t the fullness of how the brain works, by any measure whatsoever, but language is impacting every single one of these. So rather than thinking solely that language itself is dictating thought in this kind of molding way, if we look at our brain system as a network, then we can see that because language is affecting every one of these other components, it has a multiplier effect on how much it truly is affecting our thinking. And it’s not simply the idea that language determines thought -- it’s that language pervades every component of our mental makeup, and has huge numbers of opportunities to either constrict or to expand our perception and thus our thinking processes.

> Poets, for instance, are often working to use language in a way that pops us out of our expectations, or our beliefs or our assumptions. Science tries to use language in a way that’s very formal, straightforward and clear, but often is laying down its specific set of biases, which it never acknowledges.

> I do want to point out that there are other things which are interacting here -- this is just a little list, because I definitely didn’t want to draw all those connecting feedback loops. First of all, there is feedback among all these components, and if anyone wants to tell you that the brain is a hierarchical thing, you can just let that one go, because the brain is a gigantic conundrum of feedback loops, and everything is affecting everything else. But into this picture, we have to also look at genetics, history, context, culture and our personality -- meaning our mood, or our tendencies, or our states of mind and the kinds of consciousness that we have access to. I don’t know if all of you were there at the movie last night, but they were all male speakers. I was really struck by the fact that we are perhaps not so aware that men and women have very differently constructed brains. They are looking at the world through very different perceptual and conceptual apertures. You could think of it as two halves of a pie, and when we’re looking at a fully male perspective, we’re not getting the whole perspective. We’re getting a specific set of conceptual biases. For instance, at every level of the system, women’s brains are different in terms of all of their perceptions and their senses, they’re different in terms of their memory systems, they’re different in terms of their conceptualizing. They’re different in terms of how they integrate information.

> So we can start to see that there are these different holders of perspectives. There are cultures that have different perspectives, or what I like to call attentional or perceptual apertures on the world through their different languages, but also through their cultures, which may either constrain their language apertures or expand them. Then there’s gender, and there’s your familial history and what you’ve been allowed to say or do, and then to think. Then there’s this entire idea of conceptual framework. I think this is where we are not using the power of language in the way we could be. It is where I think science is failing, because concepts that are developed in one area of science are not being generated into other areas of science. In fact, the whole idea of science as a set of disciplines with lines between them is a specific conceptual framework that is an implementation of the reductionist view that is an illusion. The world, reality, is not divided into biochemistry and biology and neuroscience and physics and ecology. These are all things that are completely inter-embedded with each other. For us to divide up the world like that is to perpetuate this illusion which does not allow us to make connections and to see the world as a whole.

> So already we can see that scientific language and practice and conceptualization is, I would say, damaging, because it has not just cut us off from our perceptions of the world in a holistic way, but it has cut off the realms of science from each other so they can’t feed into each other. I believe this is one of the reasons we’re in the predicament that we’re in. In cutting things apart in this way, without a specific supported framework for integration, we end up making choices that are divorced from the consequences. This is where language could really be aiding us. We could be creating new language to facilitate this kind of integration.

> Let’s parse that other diagram, from the non-linear network formulation into a more linear framework. Let’s just start with a simple assertion, that the information that we receive determines the perceptions that we have, and the perceptions that we have determine the actions that we take. Well, that sounds pretty straightforward. But implicit in that is the requirement that the information that we receive be truthful, for instance, and not deceptive. Or that it be accurate, and not inaccurate, or coming from the blind spot.

> If we parse this a little more -- this is just the first part, from information to perception -- we can see some of the things that were in the previous diagram, that information is hitting into these lenses or apertures -- it first runs into a set of expectations and biases and beliefs that either allow the information through in the way in which it came to you, or it can split the information into parts, it can make them have different relationships to each other, or it can skew the data in some way. It then passes through another set of these apertures -- they’re not just filters, because we are constructing reality using these same mechanisms. So it’s not just “I will remove things.” It’s also “I will add things.” Our attention or our arousal or alertness state and our cognitive parsing, or how we chunk the information are all things that will then determine what our literal perceptions are. And again, language is affecting every one of these. So there’s this pathway in which we can see that we have a choice, if we’re aware enough, to use language in different ways to affect every single one of these components.

> I’m going to ask all of you to stand up right now, and stretch, because your arousal and alertness levels are in need of support. Really be in your bodies, because this is a very mental approach. This is a not full “in-beingness,” this is a not emotional, this is a not spiritual take on this, this is a cognitive framework for thinking later about these things that do include the emotional, the spiritual, the energetic realm. So everyone just shake a little. And imagine that you’re rooting down, like tree roots, into the ground, because that’s what we need to do for this very mental kind of work. Just feel that sustenance coming up from the earth, into your body, so that you can be fully present. Okay. Have a seat.

> The second part of this equation is that perception generates thoughts, and then those generate decisions and actions. Please be cognizant of the fact that at every step of the way, language is impacting us. The decisions we make are affected if someone makes a really good verbal argument. If someone manipulates the language in such a way that we don’t remember certain parts of the information. If someone removes context. The media is spectacular at just removing parts of the context which will determine the basis on which we make decisions. So again, what I personally feel is crucial here is that the language that we use determines the conceptual framework that we are addressing to this.

> Say before every newscast they went into something like our previous speaker talked about, and reminded us that there is this larger entity or space that we are embedded in, and that we want to make wise, fair and deeper heart decisions about the future, rather than “That’s going to cost me $2.00 extra.” We’re not being reminded of context. So language is only being used at all these levels by -- I guess I’ll say this -- those who would manipulate us. So it is important that we begin to become aware of how language is being used to direct our perceptions and expectations, to direct our belief structures and our actions and decision making. We need, to use a word that one of my mentors uses, to macroscope back and look at the big picture, and see how all of these things are coming together, and how we are being directed.

> Okay. Now what does this say about science? I’ve already spoken about how science divides things into disciplines, but because people don’t flow across the scientific boundaries, concepts that are found or engaged with in one area are never brought into other areas. Network theory is a big thing right now, and people have finally started talking about how everything is all networked together. They haven’t started talking about how we’re all connected yet, but they are talking about networks. There’s a fundamental problem with how we view networks. Networks are considered to be composed of nodes, which are entities. For instance, you’re all nodes in the network of this conference, and then the connections between you are considered to be flows. Well, there’s an inherent problem with that, because you might be an entity, but you’re not a static entity. You yourself are composed of a set of flows. So even the language of networks, which is being discussed as kind of a savior of integrative science, is already using a static English perspective, rather than the concept that everything is moving, everything is a process. In the brain this is very clear, because they’ll talk about neurons and the connections between them, and how these connections are changing over time. But the neurons themselves are changing over time. And the distinction we have built into computers of hardware and software is not a distinction in the brain. The hardware is the software.

> But do you write a paper about this entire thing? How do you correct the thinking of an entire realm? It’s only through people using the language differently and pointing out the inconsistencies, and understanding the basis of the problems within their own language. And, might I add, looking at other languages for deeper conceptualization that is more accurate in the area of discussion.

> If we think about why, again, it’s important for us to do this, and we think back to how language evolved throughout the animal kingdom through to humans, we can see that it might be time for humans to have a language that truly addresses our evolutionary fitness for the future. That would mean we need a more encompassing perspective that is built on language. So if we had tribes in South America, the North American continent, Africa and Asia, and these different tribes evolved under different conditions and so did their language, then the culture, which had specific priorities, also determined how the language would be shaped and structured. Well, it’s time now for us to understand that every single one of these different languages is an aperture onto different realms of being. Imagine if there were a circle of people right here, looking at an abstract, modern sculpture, and the people sitting here have one particular view of it, and the people sitting over there have another view of it, and you’re actually arguing, because you’re saying you have the correct view of this thing. Instead, we should be combining our viewpoints around the circle, because that would give us the most accurate representation and the most concrete ability to connect with this structure that’s in the middle.

> So what’s in the middle now is our future, how the planet works, how reality functions, how our brain works and how we can interact with each other. There are different views on all of these things, from all the tribes, all the cultures, and all the languages. It’s time for us to integrate these things together.

> Let me just say in conclusion that specific languages give us specific windows into realms of thought or being. Either we all need to learn many languages and then converse in all those languages, or we can begin a process of acknowledging that different cultures and languages hold different conceptual frameworks that are sorely needed by everyone on the planet, and begin to compile and make connections among these conceptual frameworks. This is important, because we are missing the very ability to use language as an implement of reasoning in the tool-use sense of the word. You can see that by the actions we are taking. We’re not making good choices. In other words, the tools we are using are not appropriate for the task, and it’s time for us to now expand our tool kit to include and acknowledge the contributions of all the other languages on this planet. We especially need to humbly request that they donate to the global mind, so that we could all share the concepts that they have which have kept them in balance and have kept them from despoiling their parts of the planet.

> To relate this to science, if science’s role is to understand, then science, too, has to come to grips with this. Science needs to understand that its language is stifling its thinking, and especially, I would say, for women, who are wanting to convey through language things that are more non-linear, more inter-relational, more interactive and far larger in scope than a tiny aperture. If it has to fit through this tiny window, and if it doesn’t fit through there, it’s not science, then we’re in big trouble. You’re not going to see the big picture by looking at it through a tiny window.

> I don’t know how to language this last point, but I’m going to say it anyway. I just read it last night in this book on Einstein, so I can’t quite connect this for you, but I wanted to bring this up as a point of discussion. I feel in my non-language centers that it’s important. It turns out that the Hopi called Einstein “The Great Relative,” which is a wonderful name. There’s something really important there, because on the one hand, they’re acknowledging his contribution to speaking of everything as relative, and on the other hand, they’re acknowledging his connection in the framework directly to them, as in “all my relations.” It seems to me that the science we are looking for acknowledges both of those things -- all of our relations, all of our connections in the framework of reality, and the relativity that results from the fact that each one of us occupies a unique and individual place in that network.

> Thank you.