Edward Sapir (1884-1936) explained his stance carefully at one point, employing modifiers to rule out the idea that language is the only effect on mind. If we take this frequently mentioned sentence to reflect Sapir's point of view, we might call it the moderate hypotheses.
Human beings do not exist in the objective world alone, nor in the realm of social action as commonly understood, but are very much at the mercy of the specific language that has become their society's medium of expression. It is a fallacy to believe that one adjusts to reality primarily without the use of language, and that language is only an accidental technique of solving certain communication or reflection problems: The reality is that the'real world' is created to a significant part subconsciously on the group's linguistic habits...
The universes in which various cultures exist are unique worlds, not simply the same world with different titles. It's worth noting that the italicized sentences qualify the basic notion that language impacts cognition. Sapir's careful word choice, such as "language habits" where he might have used "language structure" or a more precise phrase, leaves little mistake regarding the "Sapir hypothesis" for the reader of this section. The global system of cultural beliefs, or Weltanschauung, of a civilization has a significant impact on an individual's inner Weltanschauung. At this point, one can infer that the Sapir hypothesis is just a careful repetition of Humboldt's theory in more current anthropological terms, with a focus on language usage patterns rather than the structure of the language in issue.
As a result, we may credit Whorf for going back on Humboldt's limb and implying that language and thinking are one and the same, and that thought without language is impossible. However, we do not need to look very far. As can be seen, Sapir believes that thought is impossible without language:
Even people who read and think without using sound imagery at all are, at the end of the day, reliant on it. They are just dealing with the visual symbols' circulating medium, money, as a handy alternative for the economic products and services provided by the underlying auditory symbols. However, Sapir claims that language does not change mind in the same way that Humboldt claimed. Because language and cognition are not strictly coterminous, the process is a little more subtle. At its most basic level of symbolic expression, language can be nothing more than an outward expression of mind. To put it another way, language is largely a pre-rational function. It modestly builds up to the thought that is latent in, and can be read into, its classifications and forms; it is not, as is commonly but mistakenly imagined, the final label applied to the completed thinking.
The following appears to be Sapir's attempt to tackle the difficulty that Humboldt was unable to fully resolve, namely, the problem of the source of language in its current structured and "structuring" form.
We can wonder, if language isn't the result of human thought, then what is? It's a "pre-rational function," according to Sapir. "The writer, for one, is strongly of the view that the feeling harbored by so many that they can think, or even reason without language is an illusion," he asserts unequivocally a little farther down the same page in Language. "Thought... is barely attainable in any sustained sense without the symbolic structuring supplied by language," Sapir argues at another point. As a result, we can see that, for both Sapir and Humboldt, language is not the product of human cognition.
According to Sapir, language and mind are nearly identical but not exactly. The question is, how was language generated in the first placeJiiLis a "pre-rational function"? The same challenge confronted Sapir as it did Humboldt. That is, he ascribed immense power to language on the one hand, but he could not credit the invention of language to God on the other. Humboldt came up with a solution to the problem by positing a nation's collective "mind." After that, he equated Geist to language.
In a strikingly similar method, Sapir handles the same problem. He does not speak of a nation's Geist, but he does speak of language as a "completely constituted functional system within man's 'psychic' or'spiritual' constitution." The "psychic" or "spiritual" constitution has a remarkable resemblance to Humboldt's Geist. If language can be said to be "localized" in the brain, it is only in the broad and somewhat useless sense that all aspects of consciousness, all human interest and activity, are "in the brain." As a result, we have no choice but to embrace language as a fully functional system within man's "psychic" or "spiritual" makeup.
We can't characterize it solely in psychophysical terms, no matter how important the psychophysical foundation is to its functioning in the individual. Sapir is referring to the fact that language is both a shared system among members of a culture (Saussure's langue) and a system internalized by an individual and adhered to when creating speech in this text (parole). Sapir, on the other hand, claims that language internalization does not take place in the brain. Because admitting the identity of mind and body would have meant letting go of part of Sapir's faith in the ability of language to shape thought.
He wouldn't have been able to account for the origins of language if it hadn't been for human cognition. He utilized the fact that a community's language is not represented alone in the brain of one individual as evidence for the presence of an extra-physical force capable of moulding mind in the above remark.
As a result, I agree with Sapir that langue, the common language of a whole speech community, is not contained within a single brain. Those norms that the particular speaker follows while producing speech, on the other hand, are now considered the rules of his dialect (or idiolect) and must be encoded in the brain in some way. The fact that most of the norms of an individual's idiolect are also rules of the community's language might explain Sapir's perplexity in the above passage.
Sapir has argued for the existence of language as a "spiritual," non-physical reality by conflating the language of a community with the language skills of a single individual member of the community. "We cannot characterize it... in psychophysical terms alone," he claims. I argue that a theory of language can explain language as an abstraction of which "an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech-community" has knowledge; and that this knowledge (the speaker's competence as opposed to his performance or actual use of language in real situations), like all knowledge, has a neurological representation of some sort.
In Sapir's terms, I "define" language competence "in psychophysical terms". Thus, language competency (knowledge of rules) is knowledge of rules, the majority of which are also followed by all other members of the community, and language usage (performance) is rule-following conduct. It's only fair to remind out that the ambiguities in Sapir's previous quote were just recently explained. For example, Ryle demonstrated in 1949 that referring to "mind" as an entity on par with "body" is a category error (a logical type error), just as referring to "team spirit" as an entity on par with team members is.
Furthermore, Chomsky has only lately clarified the langue parole difference, distinguishing a theory of language competence (a grammar) from a performance model, which would define how the grammar is put to use by the speaker. We now assume that some internalized (learned and/or innate) rules of the langue (which rules may or may not be those written by the grammarian) are shared, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the degree of overlap in their idiolects, by those speakers who are able, more or less effectively, to communicate in that given language, and are used in the production of grammatical utterances, on the one hand (parole).
Another issue with condensing Sapir's, Humboldt's, and Whorl's perspectives is that they mix up the characteristics of collective behavior (cultural expressions) with individual conduct. Indeed, Sapir's reasoning above might be taken as an example of his failure to distinguish between the common system (langue) of the group and the individual's system (dialect or idiolect).
The (Whorfian) hypothesis asserts four separate correlations:
- linguistic codifiability (as of colors in Brown's and Lenneberg's experiments) with large group behavior,
- linguistic codifiability with individual behavior,
- linguistic structure with group behavior, and
- linguistic structure with individual behavior, according to Fishman. These contrasts assist to explain why evaluating Sapir's assertions is difficult and why today's equally renowned non-biased empiricists get what appear to be directly contradictory findings.
Result
We owe it to Sapir to formulate the cautious viewpoint, which will be shown to be backed by empirical data. However, the contemporary literature's misunderstanding over whose stance the Whorf hypothesis reflects may also be seen in Sapir's publications. His philosophical perspective oscillated between the cautious assumption that language shapes one's perception of the universe and the radical attitude that language and mind are synonymous. His claim that language is a "spiritual" system may be interpreted as an attempt to disguise from himself the awareness that unless language is extra-physical and "pre-rational," it cannot be claimed to determine individual cognition.
He would have been obliged, like Humboldt, to weaken his Weltanschauung theory. The fact that he lived far into the twentieth century, when paradox was no longer venerated, made it more difficult for him to hide his philosophical system's fundamental contradictions, yet the longevity of mind-body dualism has allowed Sapir's inconsistencies to go undiscovered until now.