From Marko Beljac
Alison Motluk fails to fully appreciate the cost of language determining thought: if it did, we would lose our objective scientific world view (30 November, p 34). For instance, Motluk says a leading researcher, Dan Slobin, believes that almost everything we know about our world comes through language, with different languages having different world views. Accepting the indeterminacy of translation proposed by the logician Willard Quine, this makes it certain that objective science is impossible. Does Slobin’s theory itself reflect his English? What would a speaker of Chinese think?
Consider one aspect of what we know about the world, namely time, which the article claims is influenced by our particular language. What then of relativity? Did the conception of time developed by Einstein stem from the German language?
Melbourne, Australia
