Sapir–Whorf.

I’ve just been learning about the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the theory that the language we speak influences, and in its stronger form determines, the way we think, perceive, and categorise the world.

In Guugu Yimithirr, an indigenous language from Far North Queensland, spatial description relies heavily on cardinal direction rather than egocentric left and right. The cup is to the north. The person is to the west. You cannot form an ordinary spatial sentence without knowing which way you are facing.

Speakers end up keeping a running compass in their heads, able to point true north in unfamiliar places, indoors, with no obvious landmarks, which most English speakers cannot do. The grammar makes orientation part of ordinary speech, so the world has to be noticed differently.

The idea that language shapes thought has come up a few times recently, first in a recent Small Talk episode, and then again in Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, which I’m reading at the moment. Papert makes a related point, but extends it beyond language into tools and culture.

“In a typical experiment in combinatorial thinking, children are asked to form all the possible combinations (or “families”) of beads of assorted colors. It really is quite remarkable that most children are unable to do this systematically and accurately until they are in the fifth or sixth grades. Why should this be? … I think that a more likely explanation is provided by looking at the nature of the culture. The task of making the families of beads can be looked at as constructing and executing a program … in which two loops are nested: Fix a first color and run through all the possible second colors, then repeat until all possible first colors have been run through. For a child in a computer culture, it would be as concrete as matching up knives and forks at the dinner table. … Our culture is relatively poor in models of systematic procedures.”

Papert’s real distinction is between concrete and formal thinking. The bead task looks formal, an abstract exercise in combinatorics, which is why it seems to need an older child. For a child raised around computers it is concrete, because the culture has already handed them a model. You reason by manipulating something familiar rather than holding the whole abstraction in your head and building it from nothing. What we call formal thinking is often concrete thinking that has not yet found the right model to make it so.

Language is not separate from modelling. It is one of our oldest and most powerful models, a shared symbolic structure for cutting reality into things we can notice, remember, compare, and communicate.

Papert’s argument is that computers extend this. They do not simply make tasks faster. At their best, they give us new models to think with, ones that are dynamic, procedural, and manipulable.

Language shapes thought because it gives us a model of meaning.

Computing shapes thought because it gives us models we can run.