The immediate sources of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’

Abstract

Summary A scholarly consensus traces the roots of the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ to German language theory of the late 18th to early 19th century, which connects the ‘inner form’ of a language with the potential for cultural achievement of the nation that speaks it. This paper attempts to complexify that genealogy by exploring more immediate sources of the idea that one’s native language determines individual and cultural patterns of thought. In the version of this idea held by Herder and Humboldt, called here the ‘magic key’ view, language is seen as embodying the national mind and unfolding in line with the Romantic (Hegelian) theory of history. But there is another version, here dubbed ‘metaphysical garbage’, which envisions language developing within an evolutionary view of history and introducing obstacles to logical thought. This view was a commonplace of Cambridge analytical philosophy (Whitehead & Russell) and Viennese logical positivism (Carnap). A key Cambridge-Vienna link was C. K. Ogden, whose series included books by the leaders of both groups, and whose own book The Meaning of Meaning (with I. A. Richards, 1923) – the subtitle of which begins The influence of language on thought – synthesizes many of their positions. Sapir’s positive review of this book marks a turning point from his view of language as a cultural product (as in Language, 1921) to a sort of template around which the rest of culture is structured, as in his “The Status of Linguistics as a Science” (1929). This paper, like others of Sapir’s writings from 1923 on, takes up the rhetoric of metaphysical garbage almost exclusively. Whorf, drawn by Sapir to structuralism from originally mystical interests in language, likewise takes up the ‘garbage’ line, interweaving it with ‘magic key’ only in the two years between Sapir’s death and his own. Other influences on Whorf s views are examined, including Korzybski’s General Semantics, to which he has intriguing connections.