ABSTRACT
Ordinarily, language is taken for granted. Its fluent and easy use leads to the assumption that it is a transparent medium for the transmission of thought. Because it offers no apparent obstacle to our customary flow of ideas, one assumes that it is a vehicle equally fitted to convey any beliefs. Scientifically, it is assumed to be of interest to linguists and perhaps to psychologists interested in child development or aphasia, but that is all. Such a conception of language has been challenged by a number of linguists and anthropologists. Edward Sapir, more than twenty years ago, maintained that:
The relation between language and experience is often misunderstood. Language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of the various items of experience which seem relevant to the individual, as is so often naively assumed, but is also a self-contained, creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience largely-acquired without its help but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience.
From Paul Henle (Ed.), Language, Thought, and Culture. Copyright © 1958 by the University of Michigan Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author. Paul Henle was Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan at the time of his death in 1962.
