Are different languages different worlds?
Theory of Knowledge Essay
IB TOK Paper: Do people who speak different languages live in different worlds?
Would it be reasonable to claim that a person who speaks language A lives in another world than does one who speaks language B, merely because their languages are not the same? Obviously, every man lives in his own world since we all perceive the world differently (and the world must here be considered to be what we perceive it to be). There is a number of factors that affect our perception of the world, most notably our senses, our memories and the culture to which be belong. Is it perhaps also so that the language we happen to speak is also such a factor (apart from the role it plays in culture)?
Now, we perceive the world through our senses, and process the acquired images inside the brain together with our memories and beliefs, to create impressions that we (often, but not always) interpret and respond to. Where in this model would language fit in, if it also plays a part in this procedure, as suggested? Either in the processing of input (acting as a filter to what we can observe), or in the interpretation of it (being a filter to what we can possibly know, and therefore also to what we can observe). Both would qualify as factors in the production of our image of the world. So if language is an essential part of our understanding, it most certainly makes us live in different worlds.
Many people have argued that this is the case, most notably the two American linguists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, fathers of the Sapir/Whorf-hypothesis. Basically, their hypothesis is that people who speak different languages must be considered to live in different worlds, since our understanding of the world is indeed dependant on language. Their main arguments are related to how we encode information in the brain. Language, Whorf says, is the universal set of knowledge into which we must first translate what we observe before we can interpret and understand it. In other words, it is the words themselves together with their definitions, that carry the concepts of knowledge. I can not know neither what the word "car" means nor what it refers to, if I have not been previously taught what it is, they argue. And there is no way to get around the problem by...