Thanks for your responses everybody.
In general how does language influence thinking, and the other way around?
Just a couple of points that may be relevant
Pirsig (p427) says that the Hindi don't distinguish ice from snow and
psychology doesn't distinguish lunatics from mystics is they don't distinguish
patterned and unpatterned reality.
I think concept acquistion helps cut out a patterns out of an unpatterned
reality. This is seen in a lot of research with experts vs novices. The
controversy is whether the experts are seeing differently (perception changing
due to more concepts). There have been some studies with things like reading
of x-rays.
In psychology there is definite evidence that language influences thought but
an extreme hypothesis is the Whorfian hypothesis of relativity which states
that because Eskimos have many words for snow and English does not, English
speakers fail to make distinctions. Thus perception is altered due to the
language.
Although Rosch hs shown that using color chips with cultures that have few
words for colors vs English that contrary to Whorfian hypothesis the
perception of color was ok (memory matching task) even if they did not have
words to distinguish the colors.
It was also interesting that in looking at the cultures the color word used
were in this universal pattern- 2 words it would be white, black 3 words
red added to the other two 4 or 5 words yellow and green added
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