Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer best known for proposing the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He believed that the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. Whorf saw this idea, named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, as having implications similar to those of Einstein's principle of physical relativity. However, the concept originated from 19th-century philosophy and thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Wilhelm Wundt.
The idea of linguistic relativity, known also as the Whorf hypothesis, the Sapir–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 influence their perceptions of the world.
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality or the understanding of time in terms of money.
Cognitive science is the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence . Practically every formal introduction to cognitive science stresses that it is a highly interdisciplinary research area in which psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, and biology are its principal specialized or applied branches. Therefore, we may distinguish cognitive studies of either human or animal brains, the mind and the brain.
Ethnolinguistics is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language and the cultural behavior of the people who speak that language.
The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), sometimes known as thought ordered mental expression (TOME), is a view in linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, forwarded by American philosopher Jerry Fodor. It describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure. On this view, simple concepts combine in systematic ways to build thoughts. In its most basic form, the theory states that thought, like language, has syntax.
The study of how language influences thought, and vice-versa, has a long history in a variety of fields. There are two bodies of thought forming around this debate. One body of thought stems from linguistics and is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. There is a strong and a weak version of the hypothesis which argue for more or less influence of language on thought. The strong version, linguistic determinism, argues that without language there is and can be no thought, while the weak version, linguistic relativity, supports the idea that there are some influences from language on thought. And on the opposing side, there are 'language of thought' theories (LOTH) which believe that public language is inessential to private thought. LOTH theories address the debate of whether thought is possible without language which is related to the question of whether language evolved for thought. These ideas are difficult to study because it proves challenging to parse the effects of culture versus thought versus language in all academic fields.
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.
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher, and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It was vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others.
In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.
Fictive motion is the metaphorical motion of an object or abstraction through space. Fictive motion has become a subject of study in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. In fictive motion sentences, a motion verb applies to a subject that is not literally capable of movement in the physical world, as in the sentence, "The fence runs along the perimeter of the house." Fictive motion is so called because it is attributed to material states, objects, or abstract concepts, that cannot (sensibly) be said to move themselves through physical space. Fictive motion sentences are pervasive in English and other languages.
The Hopi time controversy is the academic debate about how the Hopi language grammaticizes the concept of time, and about whether the differences between the ways the English and Hopi languages describe time are an example of linguistic relativity or not. In popular discourse the debate is often framed as a question about whether the Hopi have a concept of time.
Elisabeth Camp is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. Camp's work has focused on forms of thought and speech that do not fit standard propositional models. She has written extensively about figurative speech such as sarcasm and metaphor, arguing that these forms of speech force listeners to reconsider their standard methods of delineating the difference between what is meant and what is said.
The question whether the use of language influences spatial cognition is closely related to theories of linguistic relativity—also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—which states that the structure of a language affects cognitive processes of the speaker. Debates about this topic are mainly focused on the extent to which language influences spatial cognition or if it does at all. Research also concerns differences between perspectives on spatial relations across cultures, what these imply, and the exploration of potentially partaking cognitive mechanisms.
A mental timeline is a mental representation of time that is spatial in nature. The mental timeline is similar to the mental number line where numbers are perceived increasing left to right.
Asifa Majid is a psychologist, linguist and cognitive scientist who is professor of language, communication and cultural cognition at the University of Oxford, UK. She is the 2024 recipient of the Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building, awarded by the Cognitive Science Society. In 2015 she won the Ammodo KNAW Award for fundamental research. In 2024 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
Metaphorical framing is a particular type of framing that attempts to influence decision-making by mapping characteristics of one concept in terms of another. The purpose of metaphorical framing is to convey an abstract or complex idea in easier-to-comprehend terms by mapping characteristics of an abstract or complex source onto characteristics of a simpler or concrete target. Metaphorical framing is based on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work on conceptual metaphors, which holds that human cognition is metaphorically conceptualized. Metaphorical framing has been used in political rhetoric to influence political decision-making.
Seana Coulson is a cognitive scientist known for her research on the neurobiology of language and studies of how meaning is constructed in human language, including experimental pragmatics, concepts, semantics, and metaphors. She is a professor in the Cognitive Science department at University of California, San Diego, where her Brain and Cognition Laboratory focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of language and reasoning.
