Linguistic Relativity: What do Hopi and Jedi have in common?

“We see and hear and otherwise experience largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation." This idea, phrased by Edward Sapir, was the basis for a chapter in Benjamin Whorf's 1956 book Language, Thought, and Reality. Sapir and Whorf became fathers of this idea of linguistic relativity. A definition can be found in Wikipedia under a search for linguistic relativity. The linguistic relativity principle (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.

In his book, Whorf explores reasons for this interpretation in a series of examples related to fire. Whorf spent many years as a fire inspection and prevention expert for an insurance company and was often lead to determine the cause of fires. He shows in many examples how things being "off" the fire and gas drums that are "empty" influence the perception and interpretation of a situation.

Another interesting part of the chapter is a discussion of the Native American Hopi language and how their language gives them different understandings of time, space, relationships, and other things. One fascinating example is a description of the interaction of Hopi thought. Whorf explains that in English, we tend to form "mental surrogates" of actual objects. Our thoughts then interact with the mental surrogate instead of the actual object. He states: “…this may be so only because we have our own linguistic basis for a theory that formless items like ‘matter’ are things in themselves, malleable only by similar things, by more matter, and hence insulated from the powers of life and thought.”

But this is not so in Hopi... or Jedi for that matter.In contrast, the Hopi believe that positive thoughts can affect a plant positively and negative thoughts, negatively. They also employ “overt” participants in activities whose job is to assist the covert participants with positive thought and energetic emotion in hope of influencing a positive outcome. Thus Hopi thought interacts directly with the actual object--a belief, or interpretation that Whorf argues is a gift their language gives them.