LSAT 155, Section 3, RC Passage 4, Language and Thoughts

RC Passage 4 Explanation (Comparative)

Paragraph Summaries

Passage A

1. Whorf tricked people to believe mother tongues restrict people’s thinking. There is no evidence to support his claims.
2. His mistake was assuming mother tongues prevents us from thinking certain thoughts. In reality, language is what we think.
3. Different grammatical genders for the same object in different languages can cause the language speakers to develop different perceptions of that object’s characteristics.

Passage B

1. Studies investigating the role of language in the development of numerical reasoning showed that though the test subjects might not have true number words, they possess innate concepts of numbers.
2. This studies support a non-Whorfian, language-dependent view of number concepts where numbers aren’t related to knowing number words, suggesting the concept of numbers isn’t created by language. The author ends with multiple possible hypotheses about the relationship between the concept of numbers and number words.

Analysis

How are these two passages related? Passage 1 says Whorfism is incorrect and from there, launches onto a tangent about how grammatical genders can shape the speakers’ thoughts/perceptions of objects around them.

The second passage discusses the relationship between the concept of numbers and a person’s having number words. The author ends up admitting that the study was indeterminate since it could support a Whorfian, non-Whorfian, or a weaker Whorfian hypothesis.

For the purposes of this passage, we can take “Whorfian” to mean that learning the language/words creates the concept of numbers. “Non-Whorfian” would then mean that the concept exists independently from the words, but the words refer to the concept.