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TheOtherDave comments on The Design Space of Minds-In-General - Less Wrong
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Thanks for the clarification.
I was mainly addressing the topic Komponisto set up:
You see that just seems to be what this whole Sapir-Whorf debate is about. For one, I don't think there would be anything to talk about if it was simply asserting that 'language occasionally influences thought, like a rose sometimes would'. Since language somehow seems so concomitant (if not actually integral) to thought this seems to show that we are somehow severely constrained/organized by the language we speak. So apologies if i'm getting this all wrong, but I just don't think it is fair for you to say 'of course I agree that other things influences thought'. You seem to be ignoring the obvious implication of language being so intricately tied up with thought.
We do have a substantial disagreement in that you seem to think that even though language is one of the many influences of thought, it's impact is especially significant since language is somehow intimately dependent on thought.
I can simultaneously agree that language can influence thought and that speaking different languages has little influence on thought. This is because I think most of the time other factors, culture being the most obvious one, screens off language as an explanation for differing thought patterns among people who speak different languages. This simply means that the seeming influence of language on thought is actually the influence of culture on thought, and in turn of thought on language, and then of language on thought again.
I mentioned the expressiveness of language because I wanted to show how it can seem like it is language affecting thought, when it is simply channeling the influences of other factors, which it can easily do because it is expressive.
I'll try to summarize my position:
If you somehow managed to change the language a person speaks without changing anything else, you will not see a systematic effect on his thought patterns. This is because he would soon adapt the language for his use, based on his existent thoughts (most of which are not even remotely determined by language). The effect of language on thought is an illusion, it is actually his/his culture's other thoughts giving rise to the language which seem to then independently have an effect on his thought.
The phenomenon of language influencing thought, is more helpfully thought of as thought influencing thought.
For an English speaker, I expect that a picture of a rose will increase (albeit minimally) their speed/accuracy in a tachistoscopic word-recognition test when given the word "columns."
For a Chinese speaker, I don't expect the same effect for the Chinese translation of "columns."
I expect this difference because priming effects on speed/accuracy of tachistoscopic word-recognition tasks based on lexical associations are well-documented, and because for an English-speaker, the picture of a rose is associated with the word "rose," which is associated with the word "rows," which is associated with the word "columns," and because I know of no equivalent association-chain for a Chinese-speaker.
Of course, how long it takes to identify "columns" (or its translation) as a word isn't the kind of thing people usually care about when they talk about differences in thought. It's a trivial example, agreed.
I mention it not because I think it's hugely important, but because it is concrete. That is, it is a demonstrable difference in the implicit associations among thoughts that can't easily be attributed to some vague channeling of the influences of unspecified and unmeasurable differences between their cultures.
Sure, it's possible to come up with such an explanation after the fact, but I'd be pretty skeptical of that sort of "explanation". It's far more likely due to the differences between languages that caused me to predict it in the first place.
One could reply that, sure, differences in languages can create trivial influences in associations among thoughts, but not significant ones, and it's "just obvious" that significant influences are what this whole Sapir-Whorf discussion is about.
I would accept that.