ABSTRACT
The linguistic relativity hypothesis, which asserted the influence of language on thought, is thought to be largely incorrect. The traditional view of the relationship between language and thought, which can be traced back to Aristotle, is that thought is more fundamental than language and that languages develop in order to express the kinds of thought that people have. The link between categorization and language is of the utmost importance because language enables us to give names to categories, to express the essential attributes of categories to form concepts, and to describe relationships between concepts. Parallel distributed processing models show much more of the flexibility of human thinking, but do not readily account for the speed at which concepts can be learned and modified. In a wider context, analogical reasoning can facilitate problem solving when people bring their experience of similar problems to bear on a new one.
