Christopher Culver wrote:
Robin Becker <ro...@reportlab.com> writes:
well allegedly, "the medium is the message" so we also need to take
account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I
don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they
can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards
continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many
physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may
literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world
because our languages fall short.
This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among
linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain
human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of
expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient
lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution.
This is the old Lenneberg-Chomsky Universalist hypothesis, which has
fallen out of favor among cognitive scientists and others as various
researchers have done actual experiments to determine how and when
language does and does not influence perception and thought. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
