Linguistic Determinism in "钱锺书神话的破灭(1)——外语篇"



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送交者: Bruin 于 2005-1-09, 18:02:59:

In "钱锺书神话的破灭(1)——外语篇" by 沅湘 on January 8th, 2005, the author used the following reasoning in his article and called in "common sense":

"当你使用语言时,语言也同样在使用或者说影响着你,影响你说话的口音,影响你遣词造句的方式和速度,影响你对他人或者说读者和整个客观世界的看法和态度,甚至影响你的思维方式"

"...语言对人的这种强大的反作用力为语言的规范作用,因为它规范我们使用语言和思维的方式"

Although this kind of Linguistic Determinism (that language shapes and limits world view) might have been endorsed by early philosophers such as Marx and Cavell and was eventually adopted by 20th Century Linguist Benjamin Whorf in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of Linguistic Relativism, under close scrutiny one would see that the concept is actually based upon classical circular reasoning: the only evidence that the language one speaks causes he to view the world differently is the difference in the structure (and/or diction) of the languages themselves.

The new concept, first suggested by 20th Century Linguist Noam Chomsky and have been widely accepted by modern scholars, is the separation of language and thought.

As Steven Pinker, author of "Language Instinct" put it:

"Once you begin to look at language not as the ineffable essence of human uniqueness but as a biological adaptation to communicate information, it is no longer tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not."*

In conclusion, although 沅湘's reasoning seems, to most of non-hardcore linguists, self-evident and his writing well-intentioned, it was actually based on false assumptions and was largely misleading in nature.


*See "Linguistic Relativism and Korean" (2003) for the argument in detail
http://www.emptybottle.org/glass/2003/04/linguistic_relativism_and_korean.php





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