Saturday 5 March 2011

Language and thought



Jill Hohenstein's talk last Wednesday demonstrated how psychologists have been attempting to answer a question that is also much-discussed amongst philosophers: what is the relationship between language and thought?

As an experimental psychologist, her work (and the work she cites) involves looking at speakers of interestingly-different languages and seeing whether the differences in language relate to differences in the performance of various non-linguistic tasks.

One example she gave was that of directions. Our language provides us with different ways of thinking about spatial relationships: in absolute terms and in relative terms. In absolute terms, I could say that the main school is South of my current location in Gwyer; in relative terms, I could say that it is straight ahead of me. However, some languages do not provide both of these options: some only allow for the description of absolute spatial relationships.

In order to test whether these differences in languages affected how people thought about spatial relationships, speakers of both languages were given a task where they had to look at an array of objects, then turn around 180 degrees and organise another set of objects “in the same way”. The idea was that the speakers of the “absolute” language should put the objects in the same absolute locations (i.e., if a red circle was at the northern end of the first array they would put a red circle at the northern end of their array), whereas the speakers of languages like English would be able to put the objects either in the same absolute locations or in the same relative locations (i.e., if red circle was on their right of the first array they would put a red circle at the right-hand end of their array).

Professor Hohenstein reported that there had been mixed results from studies such as these, but that there seemed to be some effect of language on response, as predicted. This provided evidence for the view that language does, to some extent, affect the way that we actually think rather than just constraining the ways in which we are able to express our thoughts.

In philosophy, the viewpoint that language structures our thought is known as conceptual relativism, or as the idea that different people could have alternative conceptual schemes. A conceptual scheme is a language, a system of categories that allows us to think and talk about the world and make claims about it. So the claim of conceptual relativism is the claim that there could exist languages that cannot be translated into each other because they carve up the world into such different concepts.

If this were the case, then there would be different “truths” expressable in different languages – true statements could be made in one language that could not be made in another. An interesting paradox is that it is impossible to give an actual example of this relativism of truth claims, because any example of an imaginary untranslatable language would have to be given in our language and thus would not be truly untranslatable. This demonstrates that it is impossible to move outside of our own conceptual scheme and imagine an alternative one.

But not being able to imagine an alternative conceptual scheme does not mean that such a thing is impossible; and we can provide examples which point towards what untranslatable truth claims might look like.

For example, if a group of language speakers had just one word (and one concept) for orange and yellow, then they would be able to say truthfully that “this rose is the same colour as that satsuma”, which cannot be directly translated into English (the indirect, truth-maintaining translation would be something like “this rose is red-or-orange and that satsuma is also red-or-orange”, which is a bit of a mouthful but nevertheless true).

And a small-scale example of real conceptual relativism comes from mathematics: apparently mathematical truths can be expressed in the grammar of Reimannian geometry that cannot be expressed in the grammar of classical, Euclidean geometry.

The studies cited by Professor Hohenstein also point towards the possibility that a radically different language – perhaps one used by creatures with completely different sensory apparatus to us – could cause its users to think about the world in radically different ways to us.

There is some debate in philosophy as to whether the idea of alternative conceptual schemes – languages which cannot be translated into English – makes sense at all, but I think that the insights provided by experimental psychologists suggest that it does, even if such things cannot be imagined.