Conceptual relativism is a familiar but slippery idea. Benjamin Whorf formulated one version of it as he studied the grammar of languages of Native American communities in the Southwest in the 1920s (Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf). Essentially Whorf believed that he had discovered genuinely important differences between the grammar and conceptual schemes associated with Navajo language and English that imply that Navajo speakers understand and represent the world radically differently from English speakers.

For example, Whorf believes that the grammatical categories — noun, verb, preposition — are language-specific rather than universal, and that they create a structure through which the language speaker organizes the world around him or her. A language with nouns and verbs implies organizing the world around things doing a variety of actions, things bearing relations to each other, and so forth.

Here are a few examples of Whorf’s view in Language, Thought, and Reality.

The classes of nouns based actually or ostensibly upon shape, in various American languages, may be either overt or covert. In Navaho they are covert. Some terms belong to the round (or roundish) class, others to the long-object class, others fall into classes not dependent on shape. No overt mark designates the class in every sentence. The class mark as in English gender is a reactance; not a pronoun, however, but a choice between certain verb stems that go definitely with one class and no other, although there are very many verb stems indifferent to this distinction. I doubt that such distinctions, at least in Navaho, are simply linguistic recognitions of nonlinguistic, objective differences that would be the same for all observers, any more than the English genders are; they seem rather to be covert grammatical categories. Thus one must learn as a part of learning Navaho that ‘sorrow’ belongs in the “round” class. (91)

And here is a reflection on Hopi grammar:

In the earlier stages of work on the Hopi language, I had the pleasant feeling of being in familiar linguistic territory. Here, wondrous to relate, was an exotic language cut very much on the pattern of Indo-European: a language with clearly distinct nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with voices, aspects, tense-moods, and no other categories, no gender-like classes based on shape of objects, no pronouns referring to tribal status, presence, absence, visibility, or invisibility.

But, in course of time, I found it was not all such plain sailing. The sentences I made up and submitted to my Hopi informant were usually wrong. At first the language seemed merely to be irregular. Later I found it was quite regular, in terms of its own patterns. After long study and continual scrapping of my preconceived ideas, the true patterning emerged at last. I found the experience highly illuminating, not only in regard to Hopi but as bearing on the whole subject of grammatical categories and concepts. It happens that Hopi categories are just enough like Indo-European ones to give at first a deceptive impression of identity marred with distressing irregularities, and just enough different to afford, after they have been correctly determined, a new viewpoint toward the, on the whole, similar distinctions made in many modern and ancient Indo-European tongues. It was to me almost as enlightening to see English from the entirely new angle necessitated in order to translate it into Hopi as it was to discover the meanings of the Hopi forms themselves. This was notably true for the four types of verbal category herein discussed. (112)

Whorf makes the plausible point (to some readers, anyway) that the world as experienced through these distinct grammatical structures is a different world from that experienced through the grammatical structures of French or Sanskrit. (Steven Pinker emphatically does not think that there are these differences in mentality across language communities; his The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.) takes issue with Whorf.)

All of this is somewhat esoteric when it requires us to contemplate differences across languages very different from our own. But don’t we see the same thing more prosaically when we consider alternative scientific theories? Classical physics presupposed a very different conceptual scheme in terms of which to understand the physical world than the scheme presented by quantum mechanics (Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist). And it seems plausible that sociologists of contemporary society have significant underlying conceptual disagreements, depending on whether they bring “class”, “status”, or “participant in a labor market” forward as the basic organizing concept of their analysis. What is the intellectual cost of simply acknowledging this extent of conceptual relativism?