[mandmandam]

Seems as if one guy wrote a book where he took down a straw man version of Sapir Whorf, and now a bunch of people who never fully grokked the idea are convinced it's wrong. I bet they're monolingual.

Some people don't have good detection for bad logic and rhetoric, and yet are easily convinced they understand things they haven't fully understood. See: crypto, politics, economists, law, etc.

[kortilla]

“People who disagree are stupid and are just attacking a strawman”

Clever

[mistermann]

I wonder how many will fall for the trick you just pulled (intentionally or not), and the degree to which it deviates from their stance on Whorfism (not much I bet).

It is so fascinating how Normative Westerners describe "reality".

[HKH2]

You are talking about strawmanning. Do you not see the irony?

[mandmandam]

Not really, no. The book in question has many, many reviews asserting that the author created a strawman of Sapir-Whorf to 'take down', that he doesn't really understand the hypothesis in the first place, and that the author struggles to even write well or do basic logic.

> It feels as though this book were written in a weekend, one man's simmering grudge against his own imagination of pop-culture's neo-Whorfian enthusiasms.

> It was very frustrating for me to get through the book as I had very high expectations for it. I had some problems with the tone (his use of rhetoric detracting from actual credible claims), but mostly with the lack of evidence to support his claims. He evokes intuition, but that made the argument very unscientific and uncredible. In the end, McWhorter's argument did not conflict with many proponents of the idea of linguistic relativity, and his actual argument against the strict interpretation of Sapir-Whorf is essentially a straw man.

> He trots out a bunch of thought experiments to support his arguments, but these are always things he's made up and have no empirical backing beyond that they feel right -- and in many cases they feel right because the alternative would undermine certain assumptions that are the basis for modern liberal societies. For instance, Chinese is less grammatically complex than many other languages, therefore the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would indicate that their cultural world-view is also less complex. [! wtf?]

> Saw McWhorter give a talk, and thought this would be interesting. It isn’t. He’s an embarrassingly poor thinker, and this is a useless contribution to the language question.

> In short, the guy is kind of a poor thinker, and the book is an embarrassing example of the worst kind of academic sophistry. Two stars only because it might provoke some discussion.

> A dismally argued little book.

> This author raises belaboring a point to an art form that I don't think I'd ever imagined.

> Do you love horses? If so then I recommend avoiding this book, in which the author beats a dead one for 100+ pages.

Etc.

Again, all the people in this thread asserting that 'Sapir Whorf is debunked' are referring to this one book, by this one author, who plainly has misinterpreted the essence of the hypothesis and seems to have some kind of grudge about it for whatever reason.