this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Linguistics
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This seems intuitively correct to me. I like it because it extends in a more general way which includes mathematics and pretty much any learned skill. I was certainly not able to think about statistical problems effectively before I learned the language of statistics, for example. I mean, you certainly could, but the effort required would be incomparably large.
People continue learning for their entire lives. They learn what they practice. They practice with the tools they have available. They choose what to practice based at least in part on those tools. The tools inform the questions they ask as well as the answers they reach. Like the old saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It seems to me like denying the "weak" Sapir-Whorf hypothesis basically means denying the influence of culture and circumstance on development, which is...uh...a bit outdated, to say the least.