The idea of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world.
In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. Their most paradigmatic forms are judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and deliberation. But other mental processes, like considering an idea, memory, or imagination, are also often included. These processes can happen internally independent of the sensory organs, unlike perception. But when understood in the widest sense, any mental event may be understood as a form of thinking, including perception and unconscious mental processes. In a slightly different sense, the term thought refers not to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes.
A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences. The concept is also referred to as a Gedankenexperiment within the work of Ernst Mach and includes thoughts about what may have occurred if a different course of action were taken as opposed to what did in fact occur. The importance of this ability is that it allows us to imagine what may occur in the future, as well as the implication of alternate courses of action.
Jerome Seymour Bruner was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a BA in 1937 from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1941. He taught and did research at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships.
Counterfactual conditionals are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with indicatives, which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood.
Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a dependent clause called the antecedent, which expresses the condition, and a main clause called the consequent expressing the result.
Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people's native languages will affect their thought process and therefore people will have different thought processes based on their mother tongues.
John Edward Sexton is an American legal scholar. He is the Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law at New York University where he teaches at the law school and NYU's undergraduate colleges. Sexton served as the fifteenth president of NYU, from 2002 to 2015. During his time as president, NYU's stature rose dramatically into the ranks of the world's top universities, and it became the world's first global network university. Sexton has been called a "transformational" figure in higher education and was named by Time Magazine as one of the United States' 10 best college presidents.
Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award, and an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist. She is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. She previously served on the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Stanford.
James J. Jenkins is an American psychologist who played a significant role in the development of cognitive psychology.
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by a group of New Yorkers led by Albert Gallatin as a non-denominational all-male institution near City Hall based on a curriculum focused on a secular education. The university moved in 1833 and has maintained its main campus in Greenwich Village surrounding Washington Square Park. Since then, the university has added an engineering school in Brooklyn's MetroTech Center and graduate schools throughout Manhattan. NYU has become the largest private university in the United States by enrollment, with a total of 51,848 enrolled students, including 26,733 undergraduate students and 25,115 graduate students in 2019. It is one of the most applied-to schools in the country and admissions are considered selective.
Dana Ward is a professor emeritus of Political Studies at Pitzer College, where he founded and maintains the Anarchy Archives and where he taught from 1982 through 2012. He was the Executive Director of The International Society of Political Psychology from July 1998 to the Fall of 2004. Dana Ward received his BA from University of California, Berkeley, an MA in political science from The University of Chicago, and a double PhD in political science and psychology from Yale University. Ward also served on the Psychology faculty at the Claremont Graduate University. Ward taught at St. Joseph's University during Fall 1981 through Spring 1982, at Ankara University in 1986 on a Fulbright Fellowship, at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, from the fall of 1990 through the spring of 1992, and at Miyazaki International College, Miyazaki, Japan, from January 1995 through January 1997.
Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development, the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.
Glenn David McNeill is an American psychologist and writer specializing in scientific research into psycholinguistics and especially the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that accompany discourse.
John A. Lucy is an American linguist and psychologist. His work primarily concerns the relations between language and cognition, especially the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. He is the William Benton Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development and the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Lucy has worked extensively with the Yucatec Maya language, specializing in the system of noun classification.
New York University Abu Dhabi is a degree granting, portal campus of New York University serving as a private, liberal arts college, located in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
New York University Shanghai is the third degree granting campus of New York University (NYU) and China's first Sino-US research university located in Shanghai, China. Together with New York University in New York City and New York University Abu Dhabi in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, the portal campus is part of NYU's Global Network University.
Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American psycholinguist, cognitive scientist, and psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Marian is the principal investigator of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. She received her PhD in psychology from Cornell University, and master's degrees from Emory University and from Cornell University. Marian studies language, cognition, the brain, and the consequences of knowing more than one language for linguistic, cognitive, and neural architectures.
