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Full Idea
Language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order.
Gist of Idea
Language arranges sensory experience to form a world-order
Source
Benjamin Lee Whorf (Punctual and segmentive Hopi verbs [1936], p.55)
Book Ref
Whorf,Benjamin Lee: 'Language Thought and Reality', ed/tr. Carroll,John B. [MIT 1979], 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.
3916 | Hopi consistently prefers verbs and events to nouns and things [Whorf] |
3914 | Language arranges sensory experience to form a world-order [Whorf] |
1634 | Two things are relative - the background theory, and translating the object theory into the background theory [Quine] |
4573 | If it is claimed that language correlates with culture, we must be able to identify the two independently [Cooper,DE] |
4575 | A person's language doesn't prove their concepts, but how are concepts deduced apart from language? [Cooper,DE] |
16525 | Our sortal concepts fix what we find in experience [Wiggins] |
8088 | People still say the Hopi have no time concepts, despite Whorf's later denial [Devlin] |