Ah yes, the Sapir/Whorf thesis is to blame for racism.

Do these people hear themselves speak? Or do they just vomit out words and expect to be taken seriously?

Why is incarceration the only solution to crime you're proposing? And what about minimum sentencing laws? Maggots in prison food? The 13th amendment prohibiting slavery except when you've been convicted? The socio-economic consequences disproportionally affecting blacks leading to more crime? The historic violence perpetrated against blacks for which they've never been compensated?

I agree with you that the police not doing their job is not going to solve anything. But the police is not there to solve social issues. That's not their role and yet they get most of the money in most US cities. If your only tool is a hammer, there's a very limited amount of problems you can reasonably fix and you'll make most problems worse.

Well actually, if you agree with the thesis, the answer is yes. If language predates thought, then there must be differences between different racial cultures defined by different language traditions.

For example, in Western thought, two negatives cancel each other out to make a positive, as per Aristotle and mathematics. But in African American communities, multiple negatives emphasize instead, e.g., I ain't not want nothing to do with it <-> I aint want nothing to do with it <-> I want nothing to do with it.

So, African Americans aren't Western?

Western THOUGHT, lol

In the 1970s, they observed the different speech patterns for African Americans and deduced, from the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, that people who learn to use double negatives to increase emphasis, rather than to cancel each other out, are naturally handicapped in mathematics and science.

That made the anti-racists very, very angry indeed. The anti-racists said, African Americans ONLY did not perform so well in mathematics and science as others because of racial prejudice.

Sorry but if you think the bloody Sapir/Whorf thesis is to blame for racism then you've abdicated your right to be taken seriously. Please go back to Facebook.

So Koreans are suicidal because they speak Korean? The Dutch are tolerant for speaking Dutch? Hmmm... I suspect the hypothesis is bullshit.

Of course not its not to *blaime,* but it does provide a philosophical reason why people of different racial cultures might actually be naturally handicapped with respect to each other's traditional disciplines.

One can also deduce, from the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis, in exactly the same way, why Western music is heavily metric, but African-American music, like jazz, reggae, and blues, leans on syncopation instead.

The problem remains for the anti-racists that no one has yet been able to define a way to disprove the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis, although obviously there are long debates on the topic, probably in these forums too.

This is a dumb discussion.

↪ernestm So Koreans are suicidal because they speak Korean? The Dutch are tolerant for speaking Dutch? Hmmm... I suspect the hypothesis is bullshit. — Benkei

I don't know if anyone has tried to demonstrate how that could be true, and I was in Oxford in the 1980s, so my own education far predates any discussion that has taken place on that topic, sorry.

↪ernestm This is a dumb discussion — StreetlightX

It mnight appear dumb to you, but it has been a big problem for pre-collegiate educators, particularly those with a Masters in Education who are required to define shool tests for college aptitude. A very big problem.

They can all fall into a well and drown then.

if they are french, un deux tres...cat sank. Lol. Have a nice evening, nice to see you here )

One can also deduce, from the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis, in exactly the same way, why Western music is heavily metric, but African-American music, like jazz, reggae, and blues, leans on syncopation instead. — ernestm

Uh no, you can't because it's not true. The earliest Western music didn't have metrics (early Greek dances, gregorian chants). After the introduction of meters, Western music has been heavily syncopated since Bach and Händel. Waltzes swing just as much as Jazz does, just differently.

Please don't feed these stupid discussions about music and language. These are ivory tower bullshit that only people with no experience or understanding of racism can think are the centre of gravity of racial issues. And not, say, being murdered by cops, incarcerated at extraordinary rates, being denied public infrastructure, having education gutted, and so on. It's a white persons view of race, informed by the only points of encounter they've ever had with it: in books and fifth-hand stories.

Uh no, you can't because it's not true. — Benkei

They say it 'swings' a different way. The problem is, linguistics has become a soft science, which is partly why Chomsky abandoned it. There is no way to prove or disprove anything, one just modifies the arguments to fit the real world, and it is subject to the same criticisms as string theory in subatomic science, but on the other hand, it still provides predictive models, so it cant be denied absolutely either.

Again an assumption I don't share. I can hypothesise vending machines have trained monkeys that give you change. Highly predictive of what happens when you put in your money.

The Sapir Whorf hypothesis, aside from not being testable, has another problem. It's been established for quite some time now that socio-economic background and educational level of the parents pretty much predict academic achievement. So if a certain group of people, from a certain socio-economic background, that widely use ebonics and also test poorly on mathematic tests exists, it is quite frankly very ludicrous to say that their mathematics performance is caused by their language use.

Ockham's razor man.

Also, I'd like to add, if we'd all stopped using black-white distinction immediately. How does that even address past and current injustices? And how are you going to fix those injustices if you can no longer understand why those injustices came about because you don't know how to speak about them anymore?

It's been established for quite some time now that socio-economic background and educational level of the parents pretty much predict academic achievement. — Benkei

Thats exactly what the anti-racists demanded that science decide was true, and one could argue about it forever if one wants, because neither theory can ever actually disprove the other, as for all social sciences it remains a matter of opinion. The problem is, the decision as to which theory was 'right' was decided by the anti-racists for sociological reasons. It was not decided so because it's actually true, which is why, whatever you might want to argue publicly, there are now spatial tests in IQ scores. Those were included to level the playing field by linguistic theorists, not the people you are endorsing, and the anti-racists are still very annoyed about it, because they actually do level the playing field a bit, which is not what they wanted to be true at all.

It levels the playing field because spatial tests don't require familiarity with mathematical rules. Something that has been quite widely communicated as the reason at least in the Netherlands. I have no clue why you would conclude this has anything to do with Sapir Whorf.

And the assertion that no quantitative research is done in sociology is also an outdated notion. There have been plenty of controlled, twin tests, where twins grew up in different environments that prove the environment determines educational and criminal outcomes.

I'm not sure why you're so hell bent on defending a bad hypothesis. Do you want to suggest blacks cause poverty, crime and being bad at maths for speaking a certain way?

I'm not sure why... — Benkei

Have little think about that, and you might come up with a hypothesis.

Also, I'd like to add, if we'd all stopped using black-white distinction immediately. How does that even address past and current injustices? And how are you going to fix those injustices if you can no longer understand why those past injustices came about because you don't know how to speak about them anymore? — Benkei

Introducing the concept of 'social justice' is a very popular attack on Sapir/Whorf, but really it has nothing to do with the argument of whether language predates thought. The problem you have is that you now need to modify your theory of "socio-economic background and educational level of the parents" to explain why African Americans outperform Caucasians on spatial tests. If they are disadvantaged for the reason you say, then they should perform equally poorly as on other tests.

I'm sure you could add some bells and whistles for that, and the theory survives.

But then you are stuck with another problem, and that is Occam's razor. The fact is, linguists predicted African Americans would do better on spatial tests than cacuasions, directly from the tiny handful of facts I stated on it so far, and it turned out they were right. So Sapir/Whorf does work. Most inconveniently so, but that's the fact of it.

Uhuh. So animals don't think. And my baby only magically starts to think when he develops a language. The stupidity of the hypothesis is so clear it's difficult to understand why you can take it seriously.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2939725/

So animals don't think. And my baby only magically starts to think when he develops a language. The stupidity of the hypothesis is so clear it's difficult to understand why you can take it seriously. — Benkei

The argument is to do with syntax and semantic of different languages, and I am not going to try to restate what Whorf wrote so elegantly. If you have particular issues with anything he writes in the link I provided, I'd be glad to discuss that with you.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/44763816/WHORF-An-American-Indian-Model-of-the-Universe

Criminal justice
63. Evidence suggests that an individual’s ethnic group is not significantly associated with an increased or a reduced likelihood of offending.61 However, at every point in the criminal justice system certain minority groups experience harsher outcomes.
64. Black people make up between 2–3% of the population. However, they constituted 15% of those who were stopped by the police in 2008/09. Other ethnic minority groups were also over‐represented.
65. Further, between 2006/07 and 2009/10, the proportions of Stop and Searches for the Black and Asian groups increased (from 22% and 9% to 33% and 16% respectively).62
66. Gypsies and Travellers have experienced blanket raids of their sites on the basis of unfounded allegations by local communities. The police have power to remove and destroy vehicles if directions are not followed and this means that most leave voluntarily when served notice, but then lack access to legal processes to challenge the direction. This means that Travellers are often forced out of their homes by default.63
67. Across England and Wales as a whole, there were more arrests per 1,000 population for each of the Black and Minority Ethnic groups (except for Chinese or Other) than for people of White ethnicity. There were 84 arrests per 1,000 population for the Black group compared with 26 arrests per 1,000 population for the White group, 29 per 1,000 for the Asian group and 59 per 1,000 for those from a Mixed ethnic background. Per 1,000 population, Black persons were arrested 3.3 times more than White people, and those from the Mixed ethnic group 2.3 times more.64 This data is best understood as evidence of whom the police suspect of committing crime. 65
68. A higher percentage of those in the Black and Minority Ethnic groups were sentenced to immediate custody for indictable offences than in the White group in 2010 (White 23%, Black 27%, Asian 29% and Other 42%). In 2010, the highest average custodial sentence length for those given determinate sentences for indictable offences was recorded for the Black ethnic group, at 20.8 months, followed by the Asian and Other groups with averages of 19.9 months and 19.7 months respectively. The lowest average custodial sentence length was recorded for the White group at 14.9 months.

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/judicial-college/ETBB_Ethnicity__finalised_.pdf

Look what that language gone and done; look what them antiracists made happen.

You haven't explained why speaking Korean causes you to be suicidal yet. So let's leave it at that, shall we. Nor have you answered why you're so stuck on a hypothesis nobody takes seriously any more.

I'm sorry Unen! I won't talk about racism against blacks ever again! I now see the error of my ways!

That wasn't the hypothesis I came to. :grin:

the problem is, such statistics can also be interpreted to substantiate the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis, because, African Americans simply have a different concept of justice than Caucasians due to their linguistic heritage, which does not define boundaries of property ownership like Caucasians naturally do, for example.

The dispute between Arabic nomadic tribes and Isreali settlers is much the same in nature. In fact, if one looks to Israel, one can see all attempts to exercise Western Justice there have obviously resulted in the Israelis always winning, for pretty much exactly the same reason as there are problems here, and therefore a great deal of violence, just as there is here.