Category — Graphic Design

About a year ago Robert Fischer and I got into a heated debate about the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis and whether or not it had merit.

For those of you who aren’t familiar the hypothesis: in short, it asserts a cultures vocabulary has a strong impact on how people within that culture perceive things in their life. Or more simply, as I remember Robert arguing it: if your culture doesn’t have a word for it, you can’t perceive it.

Both because I like playing the Devil’s advocate and because I am fundamentally a person whose experience of life tends to be more sensory than linguistic anyway, I argued that this hypothesis couldn’t be true. I know there have been times that I have struggled for appropriate words to describe a knowing or feeling I have, and whether or not I could come up with them at the moment it didn’t change the level of complexity I felt at the time.

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