Edge asked prominent scholars a great question, What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
Lera Boroditsky, in Cognitive Psychology at Stanford, called her post, “Do our languages shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the very way we see the world?” (And just for the record, I got turned onto this great collection at Edge by kerim’s post, Rethinking Language and Culture, over at Savage Minds, so please check what kerim has to say!)
Here’s the opening Boroditsky provides us:
“I used to think that languages and cultures shape the ways we think. I suspected they shaped the ways we reason and interpret information. But I didn’t think languages could shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the way we actually see the world. That part of cognition seemed too low-level, too hard-wired, too constrained by the constants of physics and physiology to be affected by language.”
