The Problem With Whorfian Economics: An Ecolinguistic View
Does the language we speak influence how we think, feel and act towards the natural world?
“Few ideas generate as much interest and controversy as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, the proposal that the particular language we speak influences the way we think about reality. The reasons are obvious: If valid it would have widespread implications for understanding psychological and cultural life, for the conduct of research itself, and for public policy.”
– John A. Lucy (1997), Linguistic Relativity. Annual Review of Anthropology, 26(1), p. 291.
An interesting thread on Twitter popped up last year on the topic of ‘linguistic relativity’ from Tom Pepinsky, a political scientist at Cornell. In a nutshell, linguistic relativity is the idea that the language(s) we speak influences how we think. It suggests that our everyday experience of reality — our worldview — is influenced in either big or small ways by the language we speak. It’s…
