ANT 103 Test 3 Linguistic Relativity and Human Developement

He had the idea of "Volkgeisten", the folk people are important in forming a nation's identity; the same language is the same nation

German, PhD in Physics, went to arctic to study ice and ended up studying natives and their worldview.

Wrote on Humbolt then became student of Boas, influenced Whorf. Do the thought categories of a languaged people affect their worldview?

Built ideas on shoulders of giants.

He passed on belief that Native American languages were more complex than Latin. He saw each language as a set of grammatical categories exercising an unconscious influence on perception.

each language thus imposes a unique way of categorizing the world on its speakers.

He extended Boas and Sapir's line of research on the influence of "obligatory grammatical categories" on habitual thought based on the language spoken

His relativism: no one believes in determinism; relativism asserts that language shapes consciousness; liberation from habitual ruts lies in learning more languages

"The everyday ability to attribute mental states to other people and thereby to interpret, explain, and predict their behavior"

affected in deaf children raised to lip read and speak.

As in Ildefonso, he lacked a community and a means of communion between minds. This is a lack of...?

Desjarlais' argument: All humans have some kind of _____, but not everyone has _____. (Some "struggle along")

Something all people may share as being a participant of a certain culture.

The idea that people's ideas and actions are completely determined by themselves, apart from society or culture. (Folk theory - would mean Ildefonso would have grown up fine on his own)

If one cannot reflect on what they have experienced, then it is as if they did not experience anything at all.

He said, "Experience is not an existential given but rather a historical possibility predicted on a certain way of being in the world."

a deep level of interpretation

experience is defined in part by being narratible and becomes experience during reflection; reflections are narratible

ordinary life calls attention to the ideas that truth lies within ourselves

He said, "That people can understand one another and themselves is because they share a certain form, pattern, or way of life"

How we understand ourselves and others

argued that infants are first egocentric then gradually learn to join the group

argued that a child is first immersed in, and learns, social collaborative forms of behavior.

He said, "Egocentric speech emerges when the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behavior to the sphere of inner-personal psychic function."

Vygotsky's student; concluded that language is pivotal to and organizes our cognition, our "inner life".

If the sociocentric precedes the egocentric then there is no such thing as _____ outside of embodiment in signs

What organizes experience?

What first gives experience its form and direction?

to raise a child as a member of society; gradually and ever more completely baptize the child into cultural life and knowledge

is about doing something to someone, being formed to fit into society; learning; making infants into fully formed, functional members of society.

During socialization as an infant one is _____ and _____ trained at the same time.

"The process of acquiring language is deeply affected by the process of becoming a competent member of society." What does this mean about language ....?

it is realized to a large extent through language, by acquiring knowledge of its function, social distribution, and interpretations in and across socially defined situations.

When communities socialize children to and through the use of language

knowledge of how to do things (also how to do things with words)

knowledge of who people are (social roles, maps of who-is-who)

knowledge of taxonomies (i.e. speech acts)

feeling-knowledge, conventional expectations of what to feel, and the "feelings" themselves to some extent

Japanese: empathy - feeling with, or feeling the same feelings as, another person; not feeling sorry for, or sympathizing with

Mother's with panic dosorders had different speech patterns; their emotions overruled logical thought and influenced their narrative style

Structuring of text

is considered to still be a hypothesis; most don't think it is a hypothesis because the independent and dependent variables are not easily defined (can't test language with language)

Test the influence of language on thought by comparing humans with languaged apes and wild apes; non-languaged children with languaged children

Test the influence of language on thought by examining obligatory gramatical structures.

He said, "To imagine a language is to imagine a [socially shared] form of life"

He said (in relation to Bakhtin) that expression organizes experience.

He argued, children at the first stage of development are completely egocentric and only later do they become sociocentric

He argued, egocentric speech emerges when the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behavior to the sphere of inner-personal psychic function.

They all agree, the grammatical categories of a particular language represent the source of its influence on perception and thought.

He said, "It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached."

that how people USE written text (i.e., how they learn the script - orthography), and how they actually write and read in that script varies a lot.

Scribner and Cole, case study of Vai people: what they did discover was that each of the specific literacies of the Vai was associated with particular sets of cognitive skills, though attributing these differences to the use of a particular script alone was impossible, as each type of literacy was embedded in a set of very different social practices" What way of testing the influence of language on thought is this?

normal children generally develop this ability somewhere around the age of four

Deaf children whose parents do not sign to them are significantly delayed in developing what?

Theory of mind relates to what way of testing the influence of language on thought?

means that the lesson being taught is cultural but happens to be delivered in language

means the lesson is (socio)linguistic (it is about language use or practice)

He said, "The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world."

"Weltanschauung"
He proposed that the people who were the most powerful in the world (i.e. global powers) had the best view and thus the best language.

believed that tribal languages were equally able to communicate the same ideas as any other language (all languages are equal). He also began the method that ethnographers learn the language of the people they are studying.

He said, "It does not seem likely that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture, but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned by the morphological traits of the language"

He declared that all languages are grammatically different, some very much so, and that no perfect translation could ever be made between languages.

He said, "No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached."

He argued that our world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions that our mind has to organize into meaning. Our minds do this using our native language system (the linguistic system of our minds). We break it all apart and assign meaning(using linguistic symbols) to each part; mostly because we have a tacit agreement from our linguistic group to do it in this way which is codified in our pattern of language.

Used polysemia to display the difference in reality based on language.
His point was that while English speakers may be able to understand how a Hopi speaker thinks, they are not actually able to think in that way.