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Ideas of Benjamin Lee Whorf, by Text

[American, 1897 - 1941, Born in Winthrop. Anthropologist, who did fieldwork with Hopi Indians to study their language. Died at Wethersfield.]

1936	An American Indian model of the Universe

p.246	p.246	3917	Scientific thought is essentially a specialised part of Indo-European languages
			Full Idea: What we call "scientific thought" is a specialisation of the western Indo-European type of language.
			From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.246)
			A reaction: This is the beginnings of an absurd extreme relativist view of science, based on a confusion about meaning and thought.

p.57	p.57	3915	The Hopi have no concept of time as something flowing from past to future
			Full Idea: A Hopi has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past.
			From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.57)
			A reaction: If true, this would not so much support relativism of language as the view that that conception of time is actually false.

p.63	p.63	3916	Hopi consistently prefers verbs and events to nouns and things
			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.

1936	Punctual and segmentive Hopi verbs

p.55	p.55	3914	Language arranges sensory experience to form a world-order
			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.