Concept
Linguistic determinism
Overview
Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people's native languages will affect their thought process and therefore people will have different thought processes based on their mother tongues.
Linguistic determinism is the strong form of linguistic relativism (popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis), which argues that individuals experience the world based on the structure of the language they habitually use. Since the 20th century, linguistic determinism has largely been discredited by studies and abandoned within linguistics, cognitive science, and related fields.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In this stage it is a resultant from previous separate association and apperception processes. Then follows in the second stage of expression in speech, an analysis of that total idea into its parts, in which these parts are always put into close relations with each other. Such relations are called by grammarians subject and predicate, noun and adjective, verb and adverb, &c. The grammatical meaning of these…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
States what Linguistic determinism is.
_Compulsion_ cannot be demonstrated in things: all that the rule proves is this, that one and the same phenomenon is not another phenomenon. Owing to the very fact that we fancied the existence of subjects "_agents_" in things, the notion arose that all phenomena are the _consequence_ of a _compulsory force_ exercised over the subject--exercised by whom? once more by an "agent." The concept "Cause and Effect" is a…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power
States what Linguistic determinism is; the author is tied to Linguistic determinism in the knowledge graph.
This most general manifestation, out of which and by which alone we understand all Becoming and all Willing and for which we will retain the name "Will" has now too in language its own symbolic sphere: and in truth this sphere is equally fundamental to the language, as that manifestation is fundamental to all other conceptions. All degrees of pleasure and displeasure--expressions of _one_ primal cause unfathomable…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays Collected Works, Volume Two
The author is tied to Linguistic determinism in the knowledge graph.
Related ideas
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- George Orwell
- Opposite
- Mayan languages
- Classification
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Perception
- Rhetoric
- Science fiction
- Linguistic relativity
- Memory
- Neo-Marxism
- Michel Foucault
- Determinism
- Literary theory
- Aztecs
- Jacques Derrida
- General semantics
- Episteme
- Alfred Korzybski
- Edward Sapir
- Standard Average European
- Toki Pona
- New historicism
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