Editing Linguistic determinism (section)

=== Pirahã ===
Similar to the claims that Hopi prevents its speakers from thinking about time, some linguists allege that the [[Pirahã language]] spoken by natives in South American Amazonia prevents its speakers from thinking about quantity and numbers.<ref name="Frank, Michael C. 2008, pp. 819">Frank, Michael C., et al. "Number as a Cognitive Technology: Evidence from Pirahã Language and Cognition." Cognition, vol. 108, no. 3, 2008, pp. 819–824., {{doi|10.1016/j.cognition.2008.04.007}}.</ref><ref>Everett, Caleb, and Keren Madora. "Quantity Recognition Among Speakers of an Anumeric Language." Cognitive Science, vol. 36, no. 1, Mar. 2011, pp. 130–141., {{doi|10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01209.x}}.</ref> The speakers of Pirahã are also, for the most part, incapable of math.{{cn|date=August 2024}}

Peter Gordon, a psychologist from Columbia University, studied the speakers of the Pirahã language. He has conducted many experiments on a small representative number of these speakers. Gordon highlights eight experiments involving seven Pirahã speakers. Six of the experiments were all related in that the speakers were instructed to match groups of items to the correct number displayed elsewhere. The other two experiments had them recall how many items had been placed into a container, and lastly differentiate between various containers by the number of symbols that were pictured on the outside. Gordon found that the speakers of Pirahã could distinguish between the numbers one, two, and three relatively accurately, but any quantity larger than that was essentially indistinguishable to them. He also observed that the more the amount represented by the number increased, the poorer the subjects performed. Gordon concluded, in direct contrast to Deutscher, that speakers of Pirahã are restricted to thinking about numbers through symbols or other representations. These speakers think of items as small, larger, or many.<ref>Margolis, Eric. "Linguistic Determinism and the Innate Basis of Number." https://www.margolisphilosophy.com/linguistic-determinism-and-the-innate-basis-of-number.html {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191203075250/https://www.margolisphilosophy.com/linguistic-determinism-and-the-innate-basis-of-number.html |date=2019-12-03 }}.</ref> The speakers did not demonstrate an ability to learn numbers; after being taught in the Portuguese language for eight months, not one individual could count to ten.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bower |first1=Bruce |title=The pirahá challenge: An Amazonian tribe takes grammar to a strange place |journal=Science News |date=2005 |volume=168 |issue=24 |pages=376–377 |doi= 10.2307/4017032 |jstor=4017032 }}</ref>

[[Daniel Everett]], a linguist who also studied the Pirahã, claimed that the Pirahã language also lacks recursion or nesting – the term which describes the ability of a finite set of grammatical rules to create an infinite combination of expressions and was previously thought to be a feature of all languages.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Vries |first1=Meinou de |last2=Christiansen |first2=Morten |last3=Petersson |first3=Karl Magnus |date=2011-06-27 |title=Learning Recursion: Multiple Nested and Crossed Dependencies |url=https://bioling.psychopen.eu/index.php/bioling/article/view/8825 |journal=Biolinguistics |language=en |volume=5 |issue=1–2 |pages=010–035 |doi=10.5964/bioling.8825 |issn=1450-3417 |oclc=1136601797 |access-date=2024-02-13 |archive-date=2023-10-18 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231018132739/https://bioling.psychopen.eu/index.php/bioling/article/view/8825 |url-status=live |hdl=11858/00-001M-0000-0012-CDE2-E |hdl-access=free }}</ref> This argument includes the possibility that the thoughts of the speakers are influenced by their language in various ways as well. Whether or not Pirahã lacks recursion remains a topic of intense debate and linguistic determinism has been widely criticized for its absolutism and refuted by linguists.<ref>Evans, Nicholas, and Stephen C. Levinson. "The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 32, no. 5, 2009, pp. 429–448., {{doi|10.1017/s0140525x0999094x}}.</ref>

One such argument comes from Michael Frank et al. who continued Daniel Everett's research and ran further experiments on the Pirahã published in "Numbers as a cognitive technology," and found that Everett was wrong, the Pirahã did not have words for "one," or "two," but instead had words for "small," "somewhat larger," and "many."

For example, one may perceive different colors even while missing a particular word for each shade, like New Guinea aborigines can distinguish between the colors green and blue even though they have only one lexical entry to describe both colors.<ref name="Masharov, Mikhail 2006">Masharov, Mikhail (2006). "Linguistic relativity: does language help or hinder perception?" Current Biology, {{ISSN|0960-9822}}, Vol: 16, Issue: 8, Page: R289-91</ref> In communities where language does not exist to describe color, it does not mean the concept is void – rather the community may have a description or unique phrase to determine the concept. Everett describes his research into the Pirahã tribe who use language to describe color concepts in a different way to English speakers: "[...] each word for color in Pirahã was actually a phrase. For example, biísai did not mean simply 'red'. It was a phrase that meant 'it is like blood'."<ref>Everett, D. (2013). Language, Culture and Thinking. London: Profile Books.</ref>

Thus, in its strong version 'Whorfian hypothesis' of linguistic determination of cognition has been widely refuted. In its weaker form, however, the proposal that language influences thinking has frequently been discussed and studied.<ref name="Masharov, Mikhail 2006" />