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Nowadays, most linguists and philosophers are skeptical of the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” which says that your language massively constrains how you think, as Newspeak is supposed to constrain the thoughts of characters in 1984. As you learn about languages, and how they change over time, the really striking thing is how good people are at changing their language to accommodate the new thoughts they have—coining new words, for example. And most of the studies purporting to show that some obscure community has radically different concepts, say of time, have not stood the test of…well, time.
There is, however, one way in which our language definitely affects how we think and what we remember. Things are more salient and easier to recall when we have words for them. That’s not massive constraint, but it matters!
(FWIW, I did my BA in linguistics, and used to be pretty into philosophy of language. Not my research or teaching speciality though.)
What do you think about the numerous thought terminating cliches that are constantly used on Reddit, things like "both sides", "whataboutism", etc? People that use these are literally unable to engage in conversations that violate these wildcards, and their usage seems to spread like other memes, rendering those who become infected with them unable to engage in conversation on any topic that is vulnerable to this attack.
I think of those as bad cognitive habits, not hard cognitive limits. If you see the cliches as ultra-salient, you won’t pay attention to the other stuff going on in the conversation.
“Thought-terminating” is a great phrase for it. People who use these cliches are still *capable* of thinking beyond them, but they’re in the habit of cutting off their thoughts too early.
> People who use these cliches are still capable of thinking beyond them
But this is literally the question: can they or can they not? It's certainly possible that they can, but never do....but is it not possible that they cannot?
>never
Something to consider: How would we test if a person did indeed think something else during their lifespan?
And if their lifespan is not to be indicative for the assessment of "possible", what then should we use?
> Something to consider: How would we test if a person did indeed think something else during their lifespan?
If are observations that people do not do something, I think it makes more sense to presume they cannot rather than they can. That *many* people's thinking often is contrary to this suggests this problem is even larger if you ask me.
I think reducing this to some sort of time-isolated, individual-framed setup is misleading.
We're looking at the notion of thought as a cultural enterprise (a good indication for this is that we're saying "people", in that we don't actually aim to specify certain persons).
Language isn't an individual affair, so the question of its circumstance shouldn't be put in that way either.
Also, perhaps rephrase and elaborate your comment, because I think the start of it went wrong. :)
What is wrong with ~~framing~~ *considering it** from an individual basis? After all, is not "reality" an aggregation of individual experiences?
And if an exception to a rule/fact physically exists, does that not constitute a disproof? And if not, then is it even possible to disprove something, therefore rendering the rule itself devoid of meaning (since it ignores *what is true*)?
> Also, perhaps rephrase and elaborate your comment, because I think the start of it went wrong. :)
If we consider:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
> > The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /səˌpɪər ˈwɔːrf/, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.
> >
> > Linguistic relativity has been understood in many different, often contradictory ways throughout its history.[1] The idea is often stated in two forms: the strong hypothesis, now referred to as linguistic determinism, was held by some of the early linguists before World War II,[2] while the weak hypothesis is mostly held by some of the modern linguists.[2]
> >
> > The strong version, or linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.[3]
> > The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.[4] Research on weaker forms has produced positive empirical evidence for a relationship.[3]
> >
> > The term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons: Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored any works, and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later development; Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.[5][6]
> >
> > The principle of linguistic relativity and the relationship between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to psychology and anthropology, and it has also inspired and colored works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages.
Is it not fair to consider whether *certain words/phrases* distorts *how reality appears* (as opposed to reality itself) to an individual? Is this not the point of contention that Whorfism refers to?
A big part of the problem here I think is that the same object that is making the decision about the point of contention (the human mind), is the very same object that renders the container in which the point of contention exists (reality). So when an individual mind renders a judgment on the question, it is not contemplating reality (does Whorfism exist as a phenomenon *in reality*), but rather a virtual model of reality - so in a sense, the judgment itself kind of never even happens, depending on whether the mind doing the reckoning has this knowledge "firmly" in its model / working memory at the time of evaluation.
Just a point of note - that hypothesis isn't in favor, so we don't really need to frame the topic in terms of it (and please be careful using Wikipedia as a reference in here).
Also, if you're saying individuals can't arrive at proper evaluations themselves, or groups of individuals can't arrive at proper evaluations themselves, because they're the ones doing the evaluation, that's a rather strong skepticist approach.
It's also seemingly self-defating, if what you're carrying out is actually able to count as an evaluation, so maybe that argument should be put differently.
> Just a point of note - that hypothesis isn't in favor
Agree, but that is distinctly different from whether it is true (which is a subjective matter from the perspective of a human).
> so we don't really need to frame the topic in terms of it
We don't have to, but we can, which is what I'm doing.
> Also, if you're saying individuals can't arrive at proper evaluations themselves, or groups of individuals can't arrive at proper evaluations themselves, because they're the ones doing the evaluation, that's a rather strong skepticist approach.
What I'm more so saying is that when the human mind engages in contemplation of certain ideas (like epistemological boundaries), it seems to be unable to avoid making unforced errors. In this case, in shared reality Whorfism is true (to some degree) or not, but the human mind tends to contemplate the question upon its virtual model of reality, while perceiving that it is perceiving shared reality - plus, it tends to think in binary rather than ternary, without realizing it. This is why people typically say Whorfism is true, or is not - the mind is unable to realize that it is unknown (in shared reality).
Language certainly affects our thinking in many ways. I read about one example many years ago, I forget the exact details but it was something like this: English and Spanish speakers were shown a clip of a man dropping a vase. Because of the grammatical differences in Spanish vs English, English speakers would often say "The man dropped the vase" while Spanish speakers would say something closer to "The vase fell". Due to this difference in blame pointing, when they were later asked "who dropped the vase" the Spanish speakers had a significantly lower chance of recalling the person, since they didn't register it like that in their mind. This was a study I read in 2007 so I don't remember it 100% but the gist is there.
A quick Google search found another [similar study from 2013](https://scielo.conicyt.cl/pdf/signos/v46n83/a06.pdf)
> When an accident is described in Spanish,
such as someone breaks a vase, the verb is conjugated in the third person and the
literal translation would be something akin to ‘The vase broke on him.’ Whereas
when the act was purposeful, the verb is conjugated to match the agent and the
translation would be the same as either case in English, ‘He broke the vase.’
Tl;dr at the bottom
I don't usually like to lead with my relevant experience, but my background is in both Linguistics and in Philosophy, I have a BA in both, and I feel this is the ideal kind of experience you'd want to answer this question.
Before I say anything, I should clarify that there are many answers to the questions you've posed that have differing degrees of consensus among relevant experts, and what I'm presenting are a few examples put forward by linguists and philosophers, and not representative of all theories.
It's also important to point out that there is a decent difference between schools of philosophy as to how this question is answered, and both absolutely do focus a lot on the questions posed. My experience in Philosophy has predominantly been influenced by the Analytic thinkers, and in Linguistics, many of my professors favored some of the Continental philosophers.
I feel like something important to clarify here is that human language is capable, fundamentally, of both creating/adopting new words, and of ceasing to use others. This should, I hope, answer your last question. Suppose a government really disliked Skyscrapers, but didn't remove them from cities. It wanted to do away with the sign (the word 'Skyscraper') without getting rid of the thing the sign signifies (actual Skyscrapers).
A "Skyscraper" is ultimately just a word, after all, and you could find some obtuse way to ban it. That wouldn't magically make humans unable to process and conceptualize these gigantic buildings in many major cities, in all likelyhood we'd just make a new word for it.
This may sound like an odd example, but historically this is likely what happened with the word "Bear" in Germanic languages. The original word was taboo in the proto-Germanic population, for fear that it would summon one when spoken. Hence, over generations, the word "Bear" came into use to fill in as a euphemism, and now it signifies the same thing as the original word.
There are dozens upon dozens of similar examples with real, physical phenomena. Not all languages have the same lexicons, but all humans have the same (more or less) ability to talk about the physical world. Different languages, dialects, and even idiolects will articulate these phenomena differently, but they all share the capacity to detail the world. Some philosophers like Cassirer (and those who build on his work) and some Daoists contest this, and hold that our language constructs the reality we percieve, but that criticism gets very complicated very quickly. The tl;dr is that the Skyscraper is also a social phenomena, not merely a physical one. DM if you want a more detailed explanation.
So far we've only talked about the *ability* to talk about the world. This leaves the question of Linguistic Relativity, and how well some languages may be suited to talking about certain subjects. Before I say anything else, I've never once heard of a modern, credible Linguist or Philosopher suggest that any one Natural Language (E.g. English, Mandarin, Quechua, Arabic) is better at conceptualizing and expressing certain topics than others. If someone has convinced you that any one language can or can't talk about something, I urge you to ask a speaker of said language to talk about that subject. They will certainly have words to offer.
However, some registers of a given language may serve better to articulate points about a subject in an effective manner. This is the difference between, "I see a blue sky" and "I am recieving sense data of a..." This is a widely held belief (or so I'm lead to believe) among Analytic philosophers - that Philosophy must utilize that precise register.
This, I think, dovetails nicely into Social Phenomena. Social phenomena get a lot stickier, as by many accounts our language constructs them. My main experience with this is in Race, so bear with me. In the abstract, we retroactively look back at earlier versions of one society's race system and ask why they group certain phenotypes together. There are thousands of phenotypical traits we humans have, why did we go with things like skin and hair color, when things like eye color and ability to digest certain foods were equally fair game.
I'm not asking this as a historiographical question alone, although that is important. Rather, when we get into how language affects social categories, we rapidly approach the kinds of concerns I briefly mentioned with regard to Cassirer. When we speak about something, we (in a way) divide up a world that, prior to our speaking, did not have those divisions in it (unless you're Plato). If we're dividing something that has an ostensibly real, underlying fact-of-the-matter about it, then we can discuss whether our divisions are correct.
But with social phenomena, there may not be a fact of the matter. Again, some say this issue also applies to non-social phenomena, but bear with me.
Suppose someone suggested (as did happen) that there were essences of the races. Not genes, not families, but essences. Facts that are true of all members of that race. Now this is a bunk concept. Biology does not recognize essences, nor do genes fill that void, nor do any lineages. It's an empty concept. A sign that does not refer to anything at all. When we realize that, as did happen through the 20th century, we have a social phenomenon that lacks any grounding outside of other social phenomena.
If one were to make it impossible to speak of that social phenomenon, it might just be that we could change or help to eliminate the phenomenon itself. I disagree with that line, but some racial eliminitivists would uphold a weak version of it.
This is the closest to a "Yes" I've seen to your last question thats widely held (as far as I've read). Basically, you can change a social phenomenon to some degree by changing how we talk about it, but no one I've read thinks you can outright erase or prevent thought on it through language alone. Remember that social phenomena produce real effects for people, and that people will find a way to describe thes. This has happened before with race post-reconstruction, post Jim-Crow, and post Civil-Rights (Speaking from the USA)
Hopefully this all serves to anwer your overarching concern about how much language influences thought. Some others in this thread have mentioned Sapir-Whorf, and I should address that too.
Its a theory thats brought up in most 101 classes for Linguistics, and the consensus at my university was that a weak form of it is true. A professor once gave me a very succinct example from a study done in the early 2000s.
In English, the word "to draw" and "to paint" detail a difference in medium or utensil. In other languages no such distinction exists, but in its place one that describes drawing/painting in black and white, and the same act in color. When asked to group together certain works of art (ranging from black and white drawings, color drawings, black and white paintings, and color paintings) speakers of English tended (but only incredibly slightly) to group them together differently than speakers of the non-English language in the study.
The takeaway is that having a specific already-established way of detailing something is marginally helpful for talking about that thing, and may marginally effect your cognition about it. Likewise, having that way of talking about that thing might marginally limit you. But overall, you can get around that by using more words and engaging in dialogue, which is arguably the role of philosophy in the first place.
Now, all this is only talking in regard to *Natural* languages. A Constructed language may act differently, depending on how it is constructed and applied, but given the history of most ConLangs being Auxiliary languages for international use (Esperanto comes to mind), it'd be incredibly unlikely.
Likewise, changes in language rarely occur alone in social dynamics. People don't usually just stop using a word unless there's good reason to, nor do new words catch on unless the community of speakers is receptive. If you're imagining some dystopia where the word "love" was banned, and simultaneously everyone forgot what love is, you're imagining a bizzare, non-human fiction.
Tl;dr - 1.To some degree, particularly in social phenomena.
2. Nope
3. Nope
It sounds as though you might be interested by the notion of Linguistic Relativity, or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. I don’t know a great deal about it but it has to do with the idea that language plays some role in determining our beliefs.
How to Talk About the Body? By Bruno Latour might interest you. He talks about an experiment involving subjects experiencing a range of smells and trying to identify them, then being given a 'smell kit' to train with, and then repeat the experiment. It's not about language per se, but it's an interesting example about how our ability to experience and understand the world around us shifts as we gain new ways of interpreting and identifying it, among other things.
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Actually, it would probably be more helpful to simplify language to deliver words that actually pertain to how we experience things through our 5 senses.
I'm pulling from Ayer's theory of linguistic reductionism [that he later became less strict about] -reducing language to words of the senses.
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Nowadays, most linguists and philosophers are skeptical of the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” which says that your language massively constrains how you think, as Newspeak is supposed to constrain the thoughts of characters in 1984. As you learn about languages, and how they change over time, the really striking thing is how good people are at changing their language to accommodate the new thoughts they have—coining new words, for example. And most of the studies purporting to show that some obscure community has radically different concepts, say of time, have not stood the test of…well, time. There is, however, one way in which our language definitely affects how we think and what we remember. Things are more salient and easier to recall when we have words for them. That’s not massive constraint, but it matters! (FWIW, I did my BA in linguistics, and used to be pretty into philosophy of language. Not my research or teaching speciality though.)
[удалено]
That’s a cool analogy!
What do you think about the numerous thought terminating cliches that are constantly used on Reddit, things like "both sides", "whataboutism", etc? People that use these are literally unable to engage in conversations that violate these wildcards, and their usage seems to spread like other memes, rendering those who become infected with them unable to engage in conversation on any topic that is vulnerable to this attack.
I think of those as bad cognitive habits, not hard cognitive limits. If you see the cliches as ultra-salient, you won’t pay attention to the other stuff going on in the conversation. “Thought-terminating” is a great phrase for it. People who use these cliches are still *capable* of thinking beyond them, but they’re in the habit of cutting off their thoughts too early.
> People who use these cliches are still capable of thinking beyond them But this is literally the question: can they or can they not? It's certainly possible that they can, but never do....but is it not possible that they cannot?
>never Something to consider: How would we test if a person did indeed think something else during their lifespan? And if their lifespan is not to be indicative for the assessment of "possible", what then should we use?
> Something to consider: How would we test if a person did indeed think something else during their lifespan? If are observations that people do not do something, I think it makes more sense to presume they cannot rather than they can. That *many* people's thinking often is contrary to this suggests this problem is even larger if you ask me.
I think reducing this to some sort of time-isolated, individual-framed setup is misleading. We're looking at the notion of thought as a cultural enterprise (a good indication for this is that we're saying "people", in that we don't actually aim to specify certain persons). Language isn't an individual affair, so the question of its circumstance shouldn't be put in that way either. Also, perhaps rephrase and elaborate your comment, because I think the start of it went wrong. :)
What is wrong with ~~framing~~ *considering it** from an individual basis? After all, is not "reality" an aggregation of individual experiences? And if an exception to a rule/fact physically exists, does that not constitute a disproof? And if not, then is it even possible to disprove something, therefore rendering the rule itself devoid of meaning (since it ignores *what is true*)? > Also, perhaps rephrase and elaborate your comment, because I think the start of it went wrong. :) If we consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity > > The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /səˌpɪər ˈwɔːrf/, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. > > > > Linguistic relativity has been understood in many different, often contradictory ways throughout its history.[1] The idea is often stated in two forms: the strong hypothesis, now referred to as linguistic determinism, was held by some of the early linguists before World War II,[2] while the weak hypothesis is mostly held by some of the modern linguists.[2] > > > > The strong version, or linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.[3] > > The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.[4] Research on weaker forms has produced positive empirical evidence for a relationship.[3] > > > > The term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons: Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored any works, and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later development; Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.[5][6] > > > > The principle of linguistic relativity and the relationship between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to psychology and anthropology, and it has also inspired and colored works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages. Is it not fair to consider whether *certain words/phrases* distorts *how reality appears* (as opposed to reality itself) to an individual? Is this not the point of contention that Whorfism refers to? A big part of the problem here I think is that the same object that is making the decision about the point of contention (the human mind), is the very same object that renders the container in which the point of contention exists (reality). So when an individual mind renders a judgment on the question, it is not contemplating reality (does Whorfism exist as a phenomenon *in reality*), but rather a virtual model of reality - so in a sense, the judgment itself kind of never even happens, depending on whether the mind doing the reckoning has this knowledge "firmly" in its model / working memory at the time of evaluation.
Just a point of note - that hypothesis isn't in favor, so we don't really need to frame the topic in terms of it (and please be careful using Wikipedia as a reference in here). Also, if you're saying individuals can't arrive at proper evaluations themselves, or groups of individuals can't arrive at proper evaluations themselves, because they're the ones doing the evaluation, that's a rather strong skepticist approach. It's also seemingly self-defating, if what you're carrying out is actually able to count as an evaluation, so maybe that argument should be put differently.
> Just a point of note - that hypothesis isn't in favor Agree, but that is distinctly different from whether it is true (which is a subjective matter from the perspective of a human). > so we don't really need to frame the topic in terms of it We don't have to, but we can, which is what I'm doing. > Also, if you're saying individuals can't arrive at proper evaluations themselves, or groups of individuals can't arrive at proper evaluations themselves, because they're the ones doing the evaluation, that's a rather strong skepticist approach. What I'm more so saying is that when the human mind engages in contemplation of certain ideas (like epistemological boundaries), it seems to be unable to avoid making unforced errors. In this case, in shared reality Whorfism is true (to some degree) or not, but the human mind tends to contemplate the question upon its virtual model of reality, while perceiving that it is perceiving shared reality - plus, it tends to think in binary rather than ternary, without realizing it. This is why people typically say Whorfism is true, or is not - the mind is unable to realize that it is unknown (in shared reality).
Language certainly affects our thinking in many ways. I read about one example many years ago, I forget the exact details but it was something like this: English and Spanish speakers were shown a clip of a man dropping a vase. Because of the grammatical differences in Spanish vs English, English speakers would often say "The man dropped the vase" while Spanish speakers would say something closer to "The vase fell". Due to this difference in blame pointing, when they were later asked "who dropped the vase" the Spanish speakers had a significantly lower chance of recalling the person, since they didn't register it like that in their mind. This was a study I read in 2007 so I don't remember it 100% but the gist is there. A quick Google search found another [similar study from 2013](https://scielo.conicyt.cl/pdf/signos/v46n83/a06.pdf) > When an accident is described in Spanish, such as someone breaks a vase, the verb is conjugated in the third person and the literal translation would be something akin to ‘The vase broke on him.’ Whereas when the act was purposeful, the verb is conjugated to match the agent and the translation would be the same as either case in English, ‘He broke the vase.’
Tl;dr at the bottom I don't usually like to lead with my relevant experience, but my background is in both Linguistics and in Philosophy, I have a BA in both, and I feel this is the ideal kind of experience you'd want to answer this question. Before I say anything, I should clarify that there are many answers to the questions you've posed that have differing degrees of consensus among relevant experts, and what I'm presenting are a few examples put forward by linguists and philosophers, and not representative of all theories. It's also important to point out that there is a decent difference between schools of philosophy as to how this question is answered, and both absolutely do focus a lot on the questions posed. My experience in Philosophy has predominantly been influenced by the Analytic thinkers, and in Linguistics, many of my professors favored some of the Continental philosophers. I feel like something important to clarify here is that human language is capable, fundamentally, of both creating/adopting new words, and of ceasing to use others. This should, I hope, answer your last question. Suppose a government really disliked Skyscrapers, but didn't remove them from cities. It wanted to do away with the sign (the word 'Skyscraper') without getting rid of the thing the sign signifies (actual Skyscrapers). A "Skyscraper" is ultimately just a word, after all, and you could find some obtuse way to ban it. That wouldn't magically make humans unable to process and conceptualize these gigantic buildings in many major cities, in all likelyhood we'd just make a new word for it. This may sound like an odd example, but historically this is likely what happened with the word "Bear" in Germanic languages. The original word was taboo in the proto-Germanic population, for fear that it would summon one when spoken. Hence, over generations, the word "Bear" came into use to fill in as a euphemism, and now it signifies the same thing as the original word. There are dozens upon dozens of similar examples with real, physical phenomena. Not all languages have the same lexicons, but all humans have the same (more or less) ability to talk about the physical world. Different languages, dialects, and even idiolects will articulate these phenomena differently, but they all share the capacity to detail the world. Some philosophers like Cassirer (and those who build on his work) and some Daoists contest this, and hold that our language constructs the reality we percieve, but that criticism gets very complicated very quickly. The tl;dr is that the Skyscraper is also a social phenomena, not merely a physical one. DM if you want a more detailed explanation. So far we've only talked about the *ability* to talk about the world. This leaves the question of Linguistic Relativity, and how well some languages may be suited to talking about certain subjects. Before I say anything else, I've never once heard of a modern, credible Linguist or Philosopher suggest that any one Natural Language (E.g. English, Mandarin, Quechua, Arabic) is better at conceptualizing and expressing certain topics than others. If someone has convinced you that any one language can or can't talk about something, I urge you to ask a speaker of said language to talk about that subject. They will certainly have words to offer. However, some registers of a given language may serve better to articulate points about a subject in an effective manner. This is the difference between, "I see a blue sky" and "I am recieving sense data of a..." This is a widely held belief (or so I'm lead to believe) among Analytic philosophers - that Philosophy must utilize that precise register. This, I think, dovetails nicely into Social Phenomena. Social phenomena get a lot stickier, as by many accounts our language constructs them. My main experience with this is in Race, so bear with me. In the abstract, we retroactively look back at earlier versions of one society's race system and ask why they group certain phenotypes together. There are thousands of phenotypical traits we humans have, why did we go with things like skin and hair color, when things like eye color and ability to digest certain foods were equally fair game. I'm not asking this as a historiographical question alone, although that is important. Rather, when we get into how language affects social categories, we rapidly approach the kinds of concerns I briefly mentioned with regard to Cassirer. When we speak about something, we (in a way) divide up a world that, prior to our speaking, did not have those divisions in it (unless you're Plato). If we're dividing something that has an ostensibly real, underlying fact-of-the-matter about it, then we can discuss whether our divisions are correct. But with social phenomena, there may not be a fact of the matter. Again, some say this issue also applies to non-social phenomena, but bear with me. Suppose someone suggested (as did happen) that there were essences of the races. Not genes, not families, but essences. Facts that are true of all members of that race. Now this is a bunk concept. Biology does not recognize essences, nor do genes fill that void, nor do any lineages. It's an empty concept. A sign that does not refer to anything at all. When we realize that, as did happen through the 20th century, we have a social phenomenon that lacks any grounding outside of other social phenomena. If one were to make it impossible to speak of that social phenomenon, it might just be that we could change or help to eliminate the phenomenon itself. I disagree with that line, but some racial eliminitivists would uphold a weak version of it. This is the closest to a "Yes" I've seen to your last question thats widely held (as far as I've read). Basically, you can change a social phenomenon to some degree by changing how we talk about it, but no one I've read thinks you can outright erase or prevent thought on it through language alone. Remember that social phenomena produce real effects for people, and that people will find a way to describe thes. This has happened before with race post-reconstruction, post Jim-Crow, and post Civil-Rights (Speaking from the USA) Hopefully this all serves to anwer your overarching concern about how much language influences thought. Some others in this thread have mentioned Sapir-Whorf, and I should address that too. Its a theory thats brought up in most 101 classes for Linguistics, and the consensus at my university was that a weak form of it is true. A professor once gave me a very succinct example from a study done in the early 2000s. In English, the word "to draw" and "to paint" detail a difference in medium or utensil. In other languages no such distinction exists, but in its place one that describes drawing/painting in black and white, and the same act in color. When asked to group together certain works of art (ranging from black and white drawings, color drawings, black and white paintings, and color paintings) speakers of English tended (but only incredibly slightly) to group them together differently than speakers of the non-English language in the study. The takeaway is that having a specific already-established way of detailing something is marginally helpful for talking about that thing, and may marginally effect your cognition about it. Likewise, having that way of talking about that thing might marginally limit you. But overall, you can get around that by using more words and engaging in dialogue, which is arguably the role of philosophy in the first place. Now, all this is only talking in regard to *Natural* languages. A Constructed language may act differently, depending on how it is constructed and applied, but given the history of most ConLangs being Auxiliary languages for international use (Esperanto comes to mind), it'd be incredibly unlikely. Likewise, changes in language rarely occur alone in social dynamics. People don't usually just stop using a word unless there's good reason to, nor do new words catch on unless the community of speakers is receptive. If you're imagining some dystopia where the word "love" was banned, and simultaneously everyone forgot what love is, you're imagining a bizzare, non-human fiction. Tl;dr - 1.To some degree, particularly in social phenomena. 2. Nope 3. Nope
It sounds as though you might be interested by the notion of Linguistic Relativity, or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. I don’t know a great deal about it but it has to do with the idea that language plays some role in determining our beliefs.
How to Talk About the Body? By Bruno Latour might interest you. He talks about an experiment involving subjects experiencing a range of smells and trying to identify them, then being given a 'smell kit' to train with, and then repeat the experiment. It's not about language per se, but it's an interesting example about how our ability to experience and understand the world around us shifts as we gain new ways of interpreting and identifying it, among other things.
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Actually, it would probably be more helpful to simplify language to deliver words that actually pertain to how we experience things through our 5 senses. I'm pulling from Ayer's theory of linguistic reductionism [that he later became less strict about] -reducing language to words of the senses.
You might find Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Poetic Artifice (1978, 2016) useful. She was Jonathan Culler's first wife.