Re: keith rhodes - grammar and thinking

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>Well, unfortunately I haven't any evidence but Wittgenstein's famous
>expression:
>
>                 "the limits of my world are the limits of my language"
>
>Don't you think he was right?  
>
>Annalisa


This is the Sapir-Whorf (sorry for spelling) theory , that language 
precedes and determines thought, and has been all but thrown away by the 
work of Noam Chomsky and others who study the brain and language.  
Indeed, the idea that our thoughts are determined by our names for them 
seems very plausible; I believed it myself before I read Pinsky's 
"Language Instinct"--or most of it--a book on the Chomskyan theory.  The 
problem with the Sapir-Whorf idea is that the ancient Greeks or Romans, 
I can't remember which, didn't have a word for the color brown.  Did 
that mean that they didn't see the color, because they couldn't name it?  
Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Brendan


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