TY  - JOUR
U1  - Zeitschriftenartikel, wissenschaftlich - begutachtet (reviewed)
A1  - Zinken, Jörg
T1  - The metaphor of ‘linguistic relativity’
JF  - History and Philosophy of Psychology
N2  - ‘Linguistic relativity’ has become a major keyword in debates on the psychological significance of language diversity. In this context, the term ‘relativity’ was originally taken on loan from Einstein’s then-recent theories by Edward Sapir (1924) and Benjamin L. Whorf (1940). The present paper assesses how far the idea of linguistic relativity does analogically build on relevant insights in modern physics, and fails to find any substantial analogies. The term was used rhetorically by Sapir and Whorf, and has since been incorporated into a cognitivist research programme that seeks to answer whether ‘language influences thought’. Contemporary research on ‘linguistic relativity’ has developed into a distinct way of studying language diversity, which shares a lot with the universalistic cognitivist framework it opposes, but little with relational approaches in science.
KW  - Sapir-Whorf-Hypothese
KW  - Sprache
KW  - Denken
KW  - Sprachliches Relativitätsprinzip
KW  - Sprachdeterminismus
Y1  - 2008
U6  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-36494
UN  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-36494
VL  - 10
IS  - 2
SP  - 1
EP  - 10
ER  -