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by truthexposer 3359 days ago
No, he has opinions on language, not knowledge of linguistics. He is a science fiction writer. It's an actual academic discipline, you know, not just people harumphing in armchairs.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which underlies Arrival, has been debunked for years in academia, and the movie, if detached from that hypothesis, is more of a thought experiment on the effect of the linearity of time on human thought than a thought experiment on anything related to language itself.
3 comments
yourapostasy 3359 days ago
> The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis...has been debunked for years in academia...

If even the weak form Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (in restricted contexts) is debunked, then I'd like to read up on it. Where can I look into that because a Google by this layperson doesn't turn up anything on it? Thanks in advance.

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truthexposer 3359 days ago
the weak form isn't debunked, but the hypothesis as a whole is debunked to a degree of being common sense, of course psychology, sociology, and anthropology may argue for stronger forms to advance their own theories, but most theories from any discipline that studies this sort of thing would agree that the influence cognition and language have on each other is not one-directional, nor are the influences very direct, and the influence that they do display on each other may be caused by some other phenomenon.

tell the eskimo seeing X different kinds of snow to any linguist and they will roll their eyes, debating whether or not to explain why the example is probably not only incorrect, but fabricated for the umpteenth time.

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yourapostasy 3359 days ago
Thank you for the concise explanation. I'm curious about the weak form because our own field's "Blub Paradox" seems to loosely allude to the weak form (though there are arguments against drawing such an analogy [1]). If even the weak form in limited contexts is discredited, then that is one less possible explanation for the Blub Paradox (and alas, one less possible set of remedies to correct the paradox). I suspect that the weak form is a poorly-understood expression of a cognitive mechanism (perhaps with application to AGI?) we don't clearly grasp yet; some irony there.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61157

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optimuspaul 3359 days ago
That's a pretty arrogant statement. Can a science fiction writer not have knowledge of linguistics?
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truthexposer 3359 days ago
no, but I doubt that if I ask him what X-bar theory is, that he'll have any clue what I'm talking about, and that he would even think I'm talking about a theory of generative syntax.
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optimuspaul 3355 days ago
you make a lot of assumptions.
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coldtea 3359 days ago
>The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which underlies Arrival, has been debunked for years in academia

Well the "academia" has been debunked for even longer -- especially when it comes to soft sciences, so that doesn't say much.

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