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Re: [xmca] Re: NYTimes.com: Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Greg--

Good to have someone in the know here. Do you have any pdf's of one of
John's papers, just so that
people could get access to what the issue of tossing out all that work is
about?
mike

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Gregory Allan Thompson <
gathomps@uchicago.edu> wrote:

> My two cents (as a student of John Lucy): it was unfortunate how Deutscher
> threw Whorf under the bus (so to speak) but maybe this was just his way of
> pulling in NYT readers who are fans of Steven Pinker and who hear the name
> Whorf and chuckle to themselves in a high and mighty manner and then move on
> to the next piece (and I suspect that many of the NYT reader-ship are Steven
> Pinker fans).
>
> As to the substance of the article, I thought he explained Haviland and
> Levinson's work fairly well even if he left out a lot of other folks' work.
> It's a good start, I'd say.
>
> And I certainly find John Lucy's approach of actually reading Whorf and
> taking him at his word to be a more thoughtful approach (nowhere in Whorf's
> writing do the words "prison cell of thought" appear!). But I suspect that
> Deutscher will probably open up the minds of more folks (esp. the
> Pinker-tons) by his approach.
>
> -greg
>
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