Mad Scientists, Aliens, and the Nazi Party: What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and Why Should You Care? Part III
Amanda McHugh
Part III: If We Know It’s Not Proven, Why Do We Keep Acting Like It Is?
The other day, while pretending that I didn’t have a billion things to do, I decided to scroll through Twitter. I saw a tweet from the official QI account - normally a fairly reliable source of trivia, and saw this:
Anyone with half a linguistics education could tell you that this isn’t something you can state as fact, and although there are studies which favour this conclusion, there are just as many (if not more) studies that contradict one or both of the assertions made in this tweet. Even those who don’t know anything about linguistics but have a basic scientific vocabulary could tell you that the full name of this proposition, the Critical Period Hypothesis, shows that this is a proposed explanation that needs testing - a hypothesis, not a concrete fact.
The fact that we simply don’t know if something is the case is brushed off all over the place, in linguistics and beyond. Over the past two weeks, we’ve been looking in detail at the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and how it got mishandled and passed off as fact, which had implications in science, culture, and politics. But this is something that occurs everywhere. Maybe you’ve heard of Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee “who learned sign language”. A lot of what this monkey did was in fact just arm-waving, and the evidence that any sign language was actually learned is a lot more dubious than it is generally purported to be. Most articles on the matter do admit that the experiment did not succeed, but this is often conveniently overlooked by those who sum up the study for some click-bait.
We’re all guilty of it at times: sometimes it’s easier just to say “did you know that the language you speak changes the way you see the world?”, than it is to go into the details of which theories have been established, and how certain pieces of evidence can support, counter, or even falsify the proposition. Falsification is the process by which a theory or hypothesis can be contradicted with evidence. Note that I did not use the word ‘prove’. This is an important thing in discussions of science, and we need to pay attention to it.
In short, proof (in a scientific sense) does not exist. It does exist, for example, in law, where it refers to the spoken or written evidence used in a trial. In common parlance, it means a very much similar thing. One thing to note about proof in these contexts is that this kind of proof can be debated. This option is not open to those in science. Our kind of proof doesn’t exist outside of mathematics, where it refers to an unambiguous and computationally checkable explanation. That is, a mathematical statement can be proven if all the parts are necessarily true (i.e., true by their nature). Scientific proof does not exist, as the objects of study are not true by their nature, and what we look at instead are behaviours and phenomena which vary depending on what you are looking at, and how you are looking at it. You can give evidence for or against something, and a theory can be falsified and need alteration to account for new conflicting information, but it cannot be proven or disproven.
But why is this important? Because evidence against something is rarely a falsification, which is what people tend to believe when they hear ‘disprove’. Most of the time, evidence against a theory is no more than that, and the theory is still logically viable to ascribe to. The issue with starting to talk about proving and disproving things also makes the bold assumption that only one piece of evidence is needed to make a theory convincing, or indeed take it down. For instance, it is not just the fact that the sun rises and sets that shows us the Earth is round; images from space, the movement of constellations, and time differences all help demonstrate it. We can’t just rely on one of these facts alone. Can we necessarily prove the Earth is round? It sounds weird, but we can’t, even if it seems incontrovertible. The evidence is indeed overwhelmingly strong, and it seems daft to dispute it, but at the end of the day it cannot be proven.
Once we start talking about science in the media, and in politics, you can see why this becomes an issue. From the infamous headlines that always seem to go along the lines of “Something You Love Causes Some Horrible Disease,” to politicians claiming that mask-wearing doesn’t work because so-and-so’s paper said so, the consequences of being lazy about scientific method in discussion are far-reaching. We’ve already seen it through the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis chronicles, both in less harmful contexts (engineers claiming indigenous peoples can intuitively understand Einstein), and in far worse situations that resulted in genocide and cultural erasure.
In linguistics and beyond, therefore, we need to stop pretending that scientific studies ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ anything, or that one fact can topple an entire way of thinking. Instead, we need to be more transparent with people, using phrases such as “studies suggest that” or “there seems to be a link between,” and trying to make it as clear as possible that evidence is not proof. Of course, people will still use ‘proof’ in casual terms, and will take conclusions out of context to justify their points, but if we keep aiming to educate rather than use academic language without explanation, that’s at least one step in the right direction. Whether it is learning from our mistakes through what happened to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, or trying to explain the impact of studies that are currently being done on COVID-19, we should actively move towards bridging the gap between academia and the rest of the world.