Editing Linguistic relativity (section)

=== Steven Pinker ===
Currently many believers of the universalist school of thought still oppose linguistic relativity. For example, Pinker argues in ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' that thought is independent of language, that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural" language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, termed "mentalese". Pinker attacks what he terms "Whorf's radical position", declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make".{{sfn|Pinker|1994|p=60}}

Pinker and other universalists have been accused by relativists of misrepresenting Whorf's ideas and committing the [[Strawman fallacy]].{{sfn|Casasanto|2008|p=}}{{sfn|Lucy|1992a|p=}}{{sfn|Lakoff|1987|p=}}