Linguistic Determinism

Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought. Determinism itself refers to the viewpoint that all events are caused by previous events, and linguistic determinism can be used broadly to refer to a number of specific views.

For example, those who follow analytic philosophy from Ludwig Wittgenstein onward might accept the proposition that, as Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." (proposition 5.6), "The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world." (proposition 5.632) and "About what one can not speak, one must remain silent." (proposition 7). That is, the words we possess determine the things that we can know. If we have an experience, we are confined not just in our communication of it, but also in our knowledge of it, by the words we possess.

From an entirely different starting point, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis argues that individuals experience the world based on the grammatical structures they habitually use. For example, speakers of different languages may see different numbers of bands in a rainbow. Since rainbows are actually a continuum of color, there are no empirical stripes or bands, and yet people see as many bands as their language possesses primary color words. (See Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.) Although neither Edward Sapir nor his student Benjamin Lee Whorf ever wrote a "hypothesis" of this nature, writings such as Whorf's The Relation of Thought and Behavior to Language (1956) make arguments based on a version of linguistic determinism.

A separate angle on linguistic determinism maintains that language is the only thing that is ever known. The objective world is entirely removed by the presence of language. It is perceived, but human life is determined by having language and by the language's own internal demands.