The future: The way
ahead of us or the way up?
Language affects (but does not determine) the way we
think about the world around us. We have seen this in my last blog, where I
introduced an example from the interesting studies by Lera Boroditsky in this
field. Other studies corroborate this view. However, the influence is not universal.
So, it seems that the language we speak has no effect on the way we see
colours. Does it also affect the way we see time? An investigation by
Boroditsky makes clear that it is likely the case. At least, that is the result
of a study with English and Mandarin speaking test persons. English has other
spatial terms for referring to past and future than Mandarin Chinese. English
uses horizontal terms like ahead and behind while Mandarin uses vertical terms
like up and down. According to this study by Boroditsky (and now I quote from her
summary) “Mandarin speakers tended to think about time vertically even when
they were thinking for English (Mandarin speakers were faster to confirm that
March comes earlier than April if they had just seen a vertical array of
objects than if they had just seen a horizontal array, and the reverse was true
for English speakers).” However, the effect of language on thought is not
determinate and can alter under the influence of external factors like having
learned another language. So it is no surprise that another investigation by
Boroditsky showed “that the extent to which Mandarin–English bilinguals think
about time vertically is related to how old they were when they first began to
learn English.” The effect works also in the other direction, for “[i]n another
experiment”, so Boroditsky, “native English speakers were taught to talk about
time using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin. On a subsequent
test, this group of English speakers showed the same bias to think about time
vertically as was observed with Mandarin speakers.”
But why then the difference between the case of time
and the case of colour, since for colours language does not affect the way we
see them? Boroditsky suggests – and I
think it’s plausible, although much research has yet to be done in this field –
that the difference between time and colour is that colour experiences happen
already before a newborn has learned a language while abstract concepts like
“time” develop only after the language acquisition. All this brings her to the
idea that once there “one’s native language plays an important role in shaping
habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time)”. Which should
explain that colour perception is more or less universal while abstract ideas
like time are is more or less language-bound, at least initially.
So far, so good, and, as said, all this is very
plausible in my opinion, and it agrees with my view. But it made me think a bit
about the idea of time. I should have consulted Henri Bergson and other
philosophers (and psychologists) for saying something reasonable about this
(and in order to avoid telling something as if it were new, while others may have
said it many times before). However, we can see time quite momentaneous, as is
actually done by Boroditsky in her studies: we stand here now on the road from
the past to the future (or maybe a Mandarin speaker would say on the mountain
between the valley and the top) with much time behind us (down to us) and much
time ahead of us (up). And so life goes in a certain and significant sense, at
least for an individual. But in another sense time is recurrent. The seasons
and how we live through them are a case in point (and now the question occurs
to me what the difference is between my experiencing the seasons, living in
Northwestern Europe in a region with a clear seasonal cycle, and the
experiencing by a person living in a region of the world like the tropics where
this cycle is very different). Another instance of the recurrence of time is
the way we produce our society and so our history as conceived by the
sociologist Anthony Giddens: By what we do, so by our actions, we produce our
social systems and social structure, which we later encounter as the conditions
that make new actions possible and that give them an embedment. These visions
of time make that it is much wider than merely a linguistic phenomenon (and I
think that no one interested in the language-thought relation will deny this).
But besides that, this recurrent cycle, or rather spiral, is also the way a
language is produced and reproduced. Does this mean that the influence of time
on the way a language produces its time categories is at least as big as the
influence of language on our view of time? In general: does this mean that the
influence of thinking on language may be at least as big as the influence of
language on thinking?
Source: Lera Boroditsky, “Does Language Shape
Thought?: Mandarin and English
Speakers’ Conceptions of Time”, on http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/mandarin.pdf
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