3 - Why don’t primates have God? Language and the abstraction of thought

Summary

“Eat your lasagna!”

In 2010 I was invited to participate in a joint seminar for Israeli and American researchers. During the opening dinner, as the only social scientist in the group, I was seated near an old professor of linguistics from the hosting university, who was almost immediately proud to introduce herself as one of Chomsky’s students.

After positioning herself as a direct descendant of the guru, she asked about my field of expertise. I humorously apologized for not having one but expressed my long-lasting interest in issues of language and thought. “Of course,” she said. “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis regarding the influence of language on thought.” I explained that neither Sapir not Whorf ever presented such a “hypothesis” and never ever presented any simple causal link between “language” and “thought.” “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “This hypothesis has been experimentally refuted.” I tried to explain that the “hypothesis” is really a theoretical assumption and to support my argument made the mistake of bringing to my help several (dead) soviet colleagues such as Lev Vygotsky and Valentine Volosinov.