display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
3 ideas
3914 | Language arranges sensory experience to form a world-order [Whorf] |
Full Idea: Language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order. | |
From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (Punctual and segmentive Hopi verbs [1936], p.55) | |
A reaction: This is only true to a limited degree. See Davidson's 'On the very idea of a conceptual scheme'. All humans share a world-order, to some extent. |
16525 | Our sortal concepts fix what we find in experience [Wiggins] |
Full Idea: What sortal concepts we can bring to bear upon experience determines what we can find there. | |
From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 5.6) | |
A reaction: Wiggins would wince at being classed among linguistic relativists of the Sapir-Whorf type, but that's where I'm putting this idea. Wiggins is a realist, who knows there are things out there our concepts miss. He compares it to a fishing net. He's wrong. |
3916 | Hopi consistently prefers verbs and events to nouns and things [Whorf] |
Full Idea: Hopi, with its preference for verbs, as contrasted to our own liking for nouns, perpetually turns our propositions about things into propositions about events. | |
From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.63) | |
A reaction: This should provoke careful thought about ontology - without concluding that it is entirely relative to language. |