Linguistic determinism: the state of the debate

This formal online debate managed by The Economist is probably the best 'all in one place' guide to the debate about linguistic determinism, taking in some of the most significant recent research Economist Debates: Language: Statements. The shame is that, for a debate, the proposition under scrutiny is actually one with some degree of variance which means that the more interesting areas of debate don't contribute to the voting properly. This is because it is difficult to disagree with at least a weak understanding of the proposition and to rustle up some debate the 'counsel' for the prosecution (so to speak) has to define the proposition in a fairly extreme way.

The proposition under debate is "This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think." and of course it's hard not to agree. The real issue is how trivial or portentious the statement might be. The 'against' arguer admits that, strictly speaking, we have to agree with the statement "Mark Liberman says once again that for him, at the very least, weak versions of "language shapes thought" are true,".

The final summary paragraph 'against' the proposition probably sums it for me: "Boroditsky's experiments are striking and persuasive, but they are a long way from Whorf and Elgin's vision of a qualitative, profound, powerful change in perspective associated simply with a change in language. Profound changes in perspective are certainly available, but the price is higher than a language course" In other words, no matter how hard you tried, it would be impossible to make Orwell's Newspeak actually work to control thought in a population: influence yes, perhaps even make unexamined defaults in uncontentious areas of thought, but as soon as we start to think consciously about something, we start to use thought to shape language and the reflexivity contributes to cultural and linguistic change in that ever-continuing conversation that is culture.